A major achievement - John Elwes is a stylish and eloquent Zoroastre and Gregory Reinhart makes a formidable Abramane with a commanding vocal presence. Rameau's Zoroastre should afford enduring pleasure.

Here once more, but in a new CD format, is Zoroastre, Rameau's penultimate tragedie-lyrique. Readers who bought the earlier CD issue when Deutsche Harmonia Mundi were distributed by EMI (1/88) will not be amused to learn that a new booklet has been prepared for the BMG release; this contains the full text of the opera, legibly printed and now with an English translation. Thanks are due to BMG for repackaging an otherwise excellent product, thus making it accessible to a wider listenership.

Zoroastre was first performed in Paris in 1749 and was, by and large, well received. But the librettist, Cahusac was taken to task by some for relegating the love element in the opera to a secondary place. When it was revived in 1756 Cahusac made shifts of emphasis within the plot and it is this version as it first appeared, rather than that which involved yet further small changes later in the season, which is performed here. The libretto deals with the conflict between Good and Evil or Light and Darkness central to Zoroastrianism. Oromases, King of the Genies, represents the former and has Zoroastre as his high priest, while Abramane, high priest of the Temple of Darkness represents the latter. The chief protagonists in the drama are Zoroastre and Abramane who vie for power, glory and love; their characters are skilfully and often strikingly portrayed by Rameau, whose score is richly endowed with bold dashes of colour.

I very much liked this performance when it was first issued on LP in 1984 and feel much the same about it now. John Elwes is a stylish and eloquent Zoroastre and Gregory Reinhart makes a formidable Abramane with clear diction and a resonant, commanding vocal presence. His "Osons achever de grands crimes" (Act 3 scene 2) with its syncopated accompaniment and characteristically effective bassoon writing, is especially noteworthy. As I have remarked in previous reviews, the three principal female roles are sung well though I should have liked greater aural contrasts between them. Agnes Mellon as the innocent Cephie is a particularly happy piece of casting, though Mieke van der Sluis as the jealous Erinice is rather less so. Her voice is a warmly alluring one but seems ill-suited to the darker shades of this character. Greta de Reyghere brings warmth and clarity to the role of Amelite though she does not entirely succeed in conveying the danger and unpleasantness of her predicament.

La Petite Bande is on its liveliest form and Sigiswald Kuijken's direction reveals an insight into and affection for Rameau's music. In spite of some reservations, this is a major achievement and the work one that should not be omitted from any serious opera or baroque enthusiast's library. The recorded sound is excellent and as I have already indicated, the discs are now accompanied by an informative and helpful booklet. Rameau's Zoroastre should afford enduring pleasure.

-- Gramophone [6/1991]

LASSUS: MUSICA DEI DONUM, LAUD

This disc is also available as part of a 4-CD set (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 26617).

C.P.E. BACH: ORGAN CONCERTOS &

Imaginative, technically commanding playing of rarely heard works by a fascinating, slightly wayward composer.

Like his contemporary Clementi, Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) was one of a new breed of itinerant composer-virtuosos, feted in salons and palaces from London to St Petersburg. He was also something of a chancer, reputedly implicated in a plot to assassinate Catherine the Great, escaping in the nick of time to England from revolutionary Paris, where he was a favourite of Marie Antoinette, and a decade later, in 1799, abandoning his young wife in London and fleeing to the Continent to avoid his creditors, foremost among them Lorenzo da Ponte.

All four sonatas here date from Dussek's London years, the most outwardly stable period of a notoriously erratic life, when he was befriended by Haydn and the piano-maker John Broadwood. Op. 31 No. 3, published in 1795 but probably written two or three years earlier, is the most formal and impersonal of the four, and the slenderest both in scale and thematic invention. Most attractive is the finale, with its pastoral melody over a drone bass (shades here, as in the finales of Op. 35 Nos. 1 and 2, of the folk music of Dussek's native Bohemia) and Haydnish boisterousness.

Altogether more arresting and individual is the Op. 35 triptych published in 1797, in which Dussek richly exploits the powerful, colourful sonorities of the five-and-a-half-octave Broadwood grand. The first movement of No. 1 in B flat mingles flamboyant virtuosity and explosive rhetoric with a rhapsodic expansiveness and breathtaking harmonic side-slips that foreshadow Schubert. If the opening Allegro of No. 2 is more conventional in its brilliance, there are, again, remote, poetic modulations, and some fiery contrapuntal writing, in the radically reworked recapitulation. But finest of all is the C minor, No. 3, whose initial Allegro molto agitato has been likened to the corresponding movement of Beethoven's Pathètique and hardly suffers from the comparison. There is little here of the discursiveness found in the other two Op. 35 sonatas. The music is tautly controlled and passionately argued, with rich, romantic textures and a poignant, subtle use of chromaticism, above all in the hushed coda. Fine as they are, neither of the later movements quite matches the first: the Adagio alternates between marmoreal solemnity and ornately expressive figuration, while the rondo finale, preceded by a brief, minor-key introduction, plunges into C major with a brash, slightly desperate gaiety.

"Loud, round, sonorous, dramatic, a little vulgar" is how Christopher Clarke describes the 1806 Broadwood restored by him and used by Andreas Staier in this recording. Certainly, the instrument's sonic intensity, with its weighty bass and halo of resonances produced by the deliberately incomplete damping mechanism, is a far cry from the lightness and transparency of contemporary Viennese fortepianos. And as Staier eloquently demonstrates, it is perfectly suited to the drama, virtuoso brilliance and often deep, rich sonorities of these sonatas. Occasionally I felt that Staier was trying to force the instrument to breaking point. But otherwise I have nothing but praise for his imaginative, technically commanding playing, his acute feeling for colour, texture and rubato and the touch of swagger and abandon he brings to Dussek's virtuoso passagework. He is vividly, if a shade closely, caught by the engineers. I hope that Staier will now go on to give us some of the later sonatas by this fascinating, slightly wayward composer, especially the E flat, Op. 44, and the beautiful F sharp minor, Op. 61.

-- Gramophone [2/1995]

A stunning rediscovery. Alessandro di Marchi, one of the leading specialists in historical performance practice, unearths a milestone in German music history.

This live recording of Georg Philipp Telemann's "Flavius ??Bertaridus" at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music has been hailed by critics. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described this world premiere recording under the direction of Alessandro di Marchi - one of the leading specialists in historical performance practice - as "a milestone in German music history."

"Not a single scene or aria would you want to miss," the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote of di Marchi's spectacular interpretation with the orchestra and chorus of the Academia Montis Regalis. The opera tells a story of great relevance: the downfall of a tyrant, not unlike those of modern dictators such as Gaddafi. Full of love, lust and intrigue, this 1729 opera seria can safely be described as baroque soap opera.

"A stunning re-discovery." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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One of the main works performed at Hamburg's Gänsemarkt Opera
Telemann's Flavius Bertaridus, King of the Lombards

Georg Philipp Telemann spent 46 years in Hamburg, and the list of positions he held there makes for impressive reading: he was cantor and director of music at the city's five principal churches, he taught at the Johanneum grammar school, and he was musical director of the Gänsemarkt Opera. "On the side" he found time to compose countless cantatas, pieces for the Admiralty, operas and oratorios. Telemann wrote some 40 stage works for Germany's first public opera house, but not all the scores have survived. Thus Flavius Bertaridus, King of the Lombards is a special document. Announced ahead of time as "a very fine and carefully elaborated opera", it was one of the last attempts to mend the ways of increasingly trivially-minded audiences with a serious libretto and a lavish score. However, the première on 23. November 1729 was apparently no great success. A few weeks earlier, the allegorical figure "the Hamburg opera" sang the following lament in a prologue from Telemann's pen: "For only the applause of clever connoisseurs / And the support of high-ranking patrons / In this world-famous city / That has been my home / For over fifty years / – This alone can / Liberate me / From the deathbed I already lie on!". But even this musical appeal failed to gain a lasting hearing: in 1738 the Gänsemarkt opera house had to close down.

In Flavius Bertaridus Telemann complied with Johann Mattheson's demand that the popular comic characters should be eliminated from operas in the interests of the audience's moral edification. Thus the work has been described as the composer's only surviving opera seria. It was unusual for the citizens' opera house in Hamburg to play a work without popular roles – the theatre was otherwise perfectly happy to put on farces in Low German dialect. But Flavius Bertaridus did nonetheless fulfil typical criteria of the 'Gänsemarkt genre'. An Italian opera of the same name, Flavio Bertarido, had been put on at the bourgeois opera in Venice in 1706, and the libretto by Stefano Ghisi and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo was taken as the basis for the Telemann piece. To ensure that all the different social classes represented in the audience were able to follow the complicated historic plot, Telemann set the recitatives and many of the arias in German, but left arias that had a strong emotional bias in Italian. Cosmopolitan diversity also prevailed in the "mixed taste" of national styles from which Hamburg's composers, and here first and foremost the sophisticated Telemann, adapted the most appealing elements to suit their own purpose: seria coloratura from Italy, cantata German rich in imagery for shorter arias, and blithe dances from French opera. What the composer and scholar Mattheson, himself a native of Hamburg, criticised as "a wretched hotchpotch", was actually an expression of Hanseatic internationalism: with its 70,000 plus inhabitants the second biggest city in the Empire after Vienna, the commercial metropolis on the Elbe was home to merchants from Holland, England and Portugal, and to culture from Venice and Paris.

The self-confidence of the proud north German republic also found expression in the libretti. Flavius Bertaridus, the text of which Telemann wrote himself together with local author Christoph Gottlieb Wend, offers a classic example of the rational (Protestant) regent, a man who believes in communicating with his subjects, emerging victorious over the selfish (Catholic) despot with his love of splendour. At the end, the regent, who has his own emotions under control, triumphs over the dissipation of the despot – a phenomenon as applicable in 7th century Lombardy as it was in Baroque cities. Each type of ruler has a family at his side: Flavius Bertaridus is united with Rodelinda and his son Cunibert, while Grimoaldus tyrannises his wife Flavia and their son Regimbert. With the emphasis on the new topic of the family and the children's roles – most unusual in Italian Baroque opera – Telemann was already adapting to the new age of sentimentalism, which began after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. In contrast to the rational thinking propagated during the era of absolute monarchy, sentimentalism sought for private happiness based on feelings rather than reason. In contrast to his immediate Italian models, Telemann makes unusually frequent use of the chorus – perhaps a gesture of respect towards the democratic-minded Hamburg audience, who were keen to hear the vox populi as well when a monarch was singing.

For the revival of Flavius Bertaridus in Innsbruck and Hamburg, Alessandro De Marchi took a closer look at the elegant variety of Telemann's goûts réunis. The conductor writes: "The Italian arias in Flavius Bertaridus are full of virtuoso coloratura. But Telemann was also fond of French music, and dances like the minuet or the gavotte are found concealed in many of the arias. One special feature is the use of contrapuntal elements throughout. Telemann also enriches the Italian and German references with 'German' counterpoint, but never heavy-handedly. The counterpoint is most evident in the orchestral accompaniment, which is interspersed with genuine motif-work. And for the character of Cunibert, Telemann again has recourse to a specifically German form: to express the boy's sensitive naivety and innocence, he writes short arias for Cunibert in the tradition of a German Baroque song."

A large part of today's practical work on the score consists of understanding the style of the ornamentation. To this end, Alessandro De Marchi enlisted the help of Telemann's own Sonate metodiche, which exist for teaching purposes in two versions: with ornamentation and without. This enabled De Marchi to adopt some models for ornamenting the melodic line directly from the composer himself. The conductor also filled in the notated instrumentation, referring here to the very substantial orchestra at the Gänsemarkt Opera, which featured up to 60 musicians, numerous woodwind and brass players among them. The result is wealth of instrumental colour with recorders and flutes, oboe d’amore and oboe da caccia, bassoons and viols and theorbos, a Baroque harp, trumpets, timpani and not one but two harpsichords! Alessandro De Marchi keeps back one instrumental effect for the scene with the Lombards' guardian spirit, which the producer, Jens-Daniel Herzog, combines with the formerly silent role of the child Regimbert: when this character announces peace, the other-worldly event is symbolised by the magical sound of the chalumeau, the predecessor of the clarinet, which was already known to the Gänsemarkt orchestra.

The performance of Flavius Bertaridus at the Innsbruck Festival, a co-production with the Hamburg State Opera, presented Telemann's score in a slightly shortened form. One of Flavius's arias was allotted to Onulfus ("Quando mai, spietata sorte") to give his small part more weight. As the overture to Flavius Bertaridus has been lost, another overture from Telemann's pen was substituted for the missing piece: the festive, French-style overture TWV 55 : D 18 has come down to us from the Darmstadt court, but apparently dates from the composer's time in Frankfurt, and was probably used in Hamburg too – precisely this suite is found in a continuo part of an opera performance given at Gänsemarkt in 1719.

The singers in this production were cast in accordance with the allocation of roles in the first performance. The central part of Flavia was tailored to suit the Hamburg primadonna Susanna Kayser, who was also the theatre manager, while Rodelinda was played by another first-class singer, Christina Maria Avoglio, who later went on to sing Handel. In the 1729 production the part of Cunibert was sung not by a child, but by Reinhard Keiser's 17-year-old daughter, while Onulfus was written for a falsetto. As in this new production, the title role was taken at the first performance by a mezzosoprano, the Italian singer Maria Domenica Pollone: the ambivalent vocal sound and spectacular virtuosity of the castrati didn't find favour with opera-goers in the down-to-earth mercantile city of Hamburg.

Kerstin Schüssler-Bach
English translation:
Clive Williams, Hamburg

At the moment, Pachelbel is represented in the catalogue by 'that' canon (of which I see, to my stupefaction, that there are now more than 50 recordings) and by organ music, with scarcely a hint of his vocal works, which in his lifetime were equally prized. Listening to this immensely engaging disc of ten of his motets for double choir from the last two decades of the seventeenth century (recorded for the first time) and a four-part Magnificat, one is grateful indeed that this superb vocal ensemble (with one voice to a part) has made the effort to redress the balance. Almost the first thing to strike one about these motets is their melodic charm: phrases are tossed back and forth antiphonally between the two choirs (the effect greatly enhanced here by widely separated stereo placing), but there is relatively little real polyphony except for an occasional fugato and the interweaving of chorales into the texture in Nun danket alle Gott and Gott ist unser Zuversicht (which incorporates "Ein' feste Burg").

The Johann Christoph introduced here with two five-part funeral motets and an eight-part piece is not, as might have been expected, Pachelbel's pupil, Johann Sebastian's eldest brother, but his uncle (there were, confusingly, no fewer than five Johann Christophs in the family). He too introduces chorales, though against a texture less melodically, more harmonically orientated. His younger brother Johann Michael's eight-part motets are simpler in structure, with less antiphonal treatment: Fürchtet euch nicht (a Christmas motet) includes a lengthy strophic treatment of "Jesu meine Freude".

The singing of the Cantus Cölln is a sheer pleasure to hear—full of vitality, with an ease in often ornate melismas and the purest of tuning and chording, well balanced, sensitively nuanced in dynamics, rhythmically flexible and with exemplary clarity of enunciation: their expressive shaping of words (the freshness of tone with which they invest words like "exultate" or "fröhlich Herz" truly lifts the heart) betokens keen intelligence in their approach and preparation. Enthusiastically recommended.

-- Gramophone [7/1994]

The truthfulness of Staier's playing is seconded by Pregardien's command of line and phrase — a superb recital, faultlessly recorded.

This is the third in what is turning out to be a magnificent series of Lieder recordings by this discerning pair (its predecessors were reviewed in 12/92 and 1/94). Their account of Dichterliebe goes straight to the top of my recommendations for the cycle. In a deeply poignant reading, they expose, even more than do the exemplary Schreier and Eschenbach, the wounded pain of the protagonist, and the participation of a fortepiano gives the performance an intimacy that a grand piano cannot match. The simple beauty of the singing in the early songs is rightly countermanded by the darker, more dramatic tone and manner in "Im Rhein" and "Ich grolle nicht", with the top A on "Herzen" piercing, well, to the heart. These in turn give way to the plaintive sorrow of "Und wilssten's die Blumen", the Innigkeit of "Hör ich das Liedchen", the delicately etched line and feeling of "Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen", and the numbed emptiness, so Schreier-like, of "Ich hab im Traum geweinet".

The draining of all passion is summed up in the repeated final line of the penultimate song, "Zerfliesst wie alte Schaum", with the fortepiano's afterthought so translucently played by Staier, whose postlude to the whole cycle, restrained and understated though it is, speaks volumes of the sadness experienced throughout. The truthfulness of the interpretation is seconded by the tenor's command of line and phrase, the player's close rapport with his partner. In short I cannot imagine the work being better enacted.

This intelligently planned programme then offers more Heine in the shape of settings by Mendelssohn and Schubert. The less demanding (for performers and listeners) Mendelssohn group allows an emotional respite between the soulful Schumann and the searing Schubert. Mendelssohn's setting of Allnächtlich im Träume shows him so much less aware of the song's meaning than is Schumann, but in lyrical impulse as in Morgengruss, the ever-welcome Auf Flügeln des Gesanges and Gruss he is a match for anyone, especially when these pieces are sung and played with such alert responses as here by these artists. Their lightness in Neue Liebe, one of the composer's famous scherzos, is exhilarating.

The five towering songs from Schwanengesang call for quite different attributes. At once, in the demanding "Der Atlas", Pregardien and Staier prove equal to the challenge, the anger and defiance arrestingly expressed. That extraordinary pair of anguished songs, "1 hr Bild" and "Die Stadt", are given their full measure of grief (and note the light, diaphanous evocation of the water on the forte-piano in "Die Stadt") with a gentle, rather fast (too fast?) "Das Fischermadchen" in between. Pregardien's silver-voiced sorrowing and communing in "Am Meer" is just right, the verbal accents present but, as throughout, never overdone. And so on to that Everest of a song, "Der Doppelgänger" and a searing performance, with Schreier again as model but never aped, a stark, nerve-tingling interpretation that proves a fitting climax to a superb recital, faultlessly recorded.

-- Gramophone [12/1994]

Includes psalm(s) by Johann Rosenmüller. Ensemble: Cantus Cölln.

IL VIOLINO - BACH, VERACINI, W

Musical scholars like Ralph Kirkpatrick, whose classic book on Scarlatti is here quoted at length (though without acknowledging the source), are understandably fascinated by the inexhaustible diversity brought to basically binary-form movements by this Sicilian-descended, Neapolitan-born genius, who spent exactly half his life in the Iberian peninsula. For music lovers in general, however, the fascination lies in his enormous vitality, his demands for unprecedented keyboard virtuosity and his highly individual use of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and instrumental Hispanicisms that demonstrate how far he had fallen under the spell of Spanish folk-music and folk life.

All these facets are zestfully displayed on this stimulating disc. Apart from genuine Spanish dances—the bulerias of Kk492, the peteneras of 502 and the Andalusian 519 which bubbles from minor to major—there are impressions of street processions (490, 491 with unmistakable sounds of trumpets, horns and drums, and a marching element in 518) and the exciting rattle of castanets or tambourines in the rapid note-reiterations of 141, 119 and 455, and Scarlatti's unique telescoped chords (490 and the even more dissonant 119). His unexpected modulations and side-stepping key-changes are to be heard in several sonatas, and his stamping basses in 502 and 517. And besides the hurtling arpeggios or broken-chord patterns (141, 454) and chains of trills (118, 501) there are the Scarlattian quirks such as the out-of-step octave unisons in 203 or the surprise changes of metre in 502. It is a pity we can't see Staier performing the vertiginous cross-hand leaps in the remarkable 108, as well as in 118 and the exuberant 119, but the sheer breakneck speed at which he plays 517, shooting off like an arrow from a bow, will leave listeners breathless.

He uses a harpsichord of German type with the G in alt called for in 454, 455 and 502, makes a few logically defensible registration changes in some sonatas, and adds occasional discreet ornamentation on repeats (which are fully observed except in five cases). This is a most enjoyable disc, which I would recommend very highly: there are many recordings of Scarlatti, but this is among the best.

-- Lionel Salter, Gramophone [2/1992]

If the listener has never heard a string quartet composed of “authentic” instruments, he might be surprised at the biting clarity these instruments provide, but when all is said and done, the success of a performance depends on the musical and intellectual insights of the performers, and these players play with understanding, clarity, and power.

-- High Performance Review, reviewing the Smithson's recording of Haydn's Op. 54

CHRISTMAS CAROLS GEORG RATZIN

Tracks:
1. ANTONIO VIVALDI - CONCERTO FOR TRANSVERSE FLUTE, 2 VIOLINS, BASSOON & B.C IN G MINOR, RV104
2. ALESSANDRO MARCELLO - CONCERTO FOR OBOE, 2 VIOLINS, VIOLA & CONTINUO IN D MINOR
3. JOHANN JOACHIM QUANTZ - TRIO FOR RECORDER, TRANSVERSE FLUTE & B.C. IN C MAJOR
4. JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH - QUINTET FOR FORTEPIANO, FLUTE, OBOE, VIOLIN & VIOLONCELLO IN D MAJOR OP.22/1
5. JOHAN FRIEDRICH FASCH - QUARTET FOR 2 OBOES, BASSOON & CONTINUO IN D MINOR
6. ANTONIO VIVALDI - CONCERTO FOR SOPRANINO RECORDER, 2 VIOLINS, VIOLA & B.C. IN C MAJOR RV444

There is no shortage of currently available recordings of Bach's motets and there is no clear choice between them, either. Several of the versions have features in common with one another but the differences, by and large, are more significant than the similarities. This new disc from Deutsche Harmonia Mundi features the choir of Augsburg Cathedral. They are made up of boys' and mens' voices and, for the most part, they are impressive; but the boys score over the men in producing a more attractive sound. This choral texture is marred for me by the disagreeably nasal tone produced by one of the tenors. It hardly matters in the passages of full ensemble but in the smaller vocal groups it is projected with uncomfortable assertion. This apart, the quality of the voices is fresh and the standard of intonation commendably high, though ears will react differently to the pitching of some intervals and occasionally the singers fail to find the centre of notes.

In the use of boys' voices this approach is closer to that of the Hanover Boys' Choir and the Hilliard Ensemble (EMI) which, however, also make use of adult male altos. Gardiner (Erato/RCA), Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi), Harnoncourt (Teldec/ASV) and Richard Marlow (Conifer) introduce women's voices to the upper vocal parts with Gardiner and Herreweghe furthermore incorporating adult male altos. No one recording, however, is consistent with another in its choice either of continuo or of instrumental co//a parte support. Marlow depends solely on an organ yet achieves wonderful results with a choir whose sense of pitch is thoroughly secure. Herreweghe and Harnoncourt prefer a more elaborate accompaniment of four-part string texture with different members of the oboe family, bassoon and organ. The Hanover Boys' Choir with the Hilliard Ensemble, on the other hand, opt for cello, violone, organ and lute, a more modest solution; and it comes closer to the present recording— which uses a viola da gamba, violone and organ— than any of the others.

Anyone who already has one or more of the above-mentioned versions need not feel unduly tempted by this new issue; but if your library is so far without a recording of these profound, technically exacting and satisfying pieces then the Augsburg Choir can be recommended. Phrasing is thoughtfully applied and articulation crisp and animated. The approach is entirely different from that of Marlow, whose performance I praised last December and different yet again from the fine version from Harnoncourt, still perhaps, my own favourite. Good recorded sound.

-- Gramophon [10/1989]