Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards!

This programme marks the eagerly awaited return of Véronique Gens to Baroque music and Lully, in which she made a name for herself at the start of her career. It presents airs from Atys, Persée, Alceste, Proserpine, Le Triomphe de l’Amour and other works by Louis XIV’s famous composer, but also several by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Médée), Henry Desmarets and Pascal Collasse. Whether well known, rare or in some cases even unpublished, all of them present roles for powerful women whose love is unrequited: dark passions, bitter laments, jealousy, vengeance, the type of dramatic characters that Véronique Gens embodies with all the charisma that has made her reputation. This recording is also the result of an encounter with the youthful ensemble Les Surprises, founded and directed by Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas. Together they conceived this programme, which mingles airs, dances and choruses, in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.

REVIEW:

The voice remains in remarkable condition, as strongly radiant, firm and secure as ever with powerful chest notes. And of course the characteristics that have made her so prized in this repertoire, the perfect shaping of line and outstanding diction, remain, still more finely honed.

– Opera

During the more recent past, finds in libraries have made it clear that Johann Sebastian Bach held his Gotha colleague Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel in high regard. But what was it about Stölzel’s music that made Bach and some of his contemporaries so interested in it? As in the text of the famous Brockes-Passion, which was set to music by Telemann and Handel and then later by Stölzel, what is involved here is not a biblical text expanded by arias but a free poetic composition based on the Passion. While the Evangelist, like a live reporter, documents Jesus’s last hours, the “Faithful Soul” and the “Christian Church” act from the perspective of knowledge of how events will turn out. The oratorio is divided into twenty-two “Reflections” concentrating the perspectives of the three allegorical figures on particular moments in the action. This impressive music beyond doubt will have a very individual effect on each and every hearer – as was also the case with Bach, who some years later once again took the manuscripts from his music library and used the aria of the thirteenth meditation, “Dein Kreuz, o Bräutigam meiner Seele,” as the basis for his own aria “Bekennen will ich seinen Namen” (BWV 200).

The ‘Yiruma phenomenon’, which has seen hundreds of millions of album and track sales, stands on the foundations of the South Korean composer and pianist’s 20-year career, which includes film music and sell-out tours throughout Asia, Europe and the US. Performed by the award-winning virtuoso Giacomo Scinardo, this programme features pieces from a variety of Yiruma’s albums and soundtracks. These include the global hit River Flown in You, and capture the essence of a style that conveys peace and serenity to the listener, from a composer who has declared that he wants his music ‘to be the energy that makes people want to live a better life’.

Following a highly personal and splendidly reviewed Brahms recording, Fabian Müller follows up with Passionato, an album centering not on a single composer, but on a "central masterwork of Western piano music": Beethoven's "Appassionata". Radiating from this hub, Müller weaves a programme that shows why he is regarded as one of Germany's most promising young pianists. It stands to reason that he is not the first pianist to apply his energies to this great work laid out on the grand scale, and Fabian Müller is well aware of this. "Each generation is entitled to rediscover these pieces for itself. Apart from that, it is simply not possible to play a piece the same way twice. So even if I know my favourite performances back to front, mine will still be the 'Appassionata' of Fabian Müller." This is the starting-point of his new album, geographically as well as musically. Having grown up between the Beethovenhaus and Schumannhaus in Bonn, he sees "much more of the Rhinelander than the Viennese" in Beethoven, flanking the Appassionata with Schumann's G minor Sonata - a work of extremes. When Schumann requires the artist to play "as fast as possible" in the first movement, then "even faster" in the coda, Müller has his own personal answer: "It is more a feeling that is too strong to be expressed in a 'normal' manner. Drop everything and play for your life. That is the key. A feeling that something is flooding out of you."

Indian classical music has certain modes and ragas dedicated to the seasons, which have been explored by many generations of musicians. In accordance with the Indian calendar, spring runs from mid-February to mid-April, and is known as Vasant (or Basant). The festival Holi celebrates spring’s arrival. In this album, Baluji captures the rapture of spring, expressing seasonal feelings of renewal and hope through the subtle nuances of the chosen ragas. He celebrates his mastery of the sitar with wonderful sensitivity and dexterity. There are also some thrilling moments enthused by the distinctive tabla playing of Sukhvinder Singh “Pinky”, with his vivacious renditions of 1relas and 2chakradas. Baluji cannot see the colors of flowers but he has heard their voices, and they sing out through this joyous album – Voice of Flowers.

Anna Lucia Richter returns to PENTATONE after her acclaimed Schubert album Heimweh with Il delirio della passione; a recording full of Monteverdi treasures, from heart-wrenching opera scenes (Lamento d’Arianna, ‘Pur ti miro’ from Poppea and the Prologue of L’orfeo) and religious music (Confitebor) to bucolic songs (Si dolce è il tormento). Richter works together with Ensemble Claudiana and Luca Pianca, one of the most eminent Monteverdi interpreters of our age. They offer a fresh perspective on Monteverdi’s music by penetrating deeply into the original sources. Their interpretation of the famous Lamento d’Arianna, salvaged fragment of the lost score of the opera L’Arianna, is exemplary in that regard. Richter’s passionate delivery is inspired by what precedes in the libretto, while Pianca has composed short, “madrigalistic” instrumental interludes between the solo sections, replacing the choral commentaries, of which only the original texts have survived. Altogether, the pieces on Il delirio della passione demonstrate Monteverdi’s exceptional skill to express the most complex emotions, in music of timeless beauty. Anna Lucia Richter belongs to the most exciting young singers of her generation. Il delirio della passione is the second fruit of her exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, after Heimweh (2018), and her last soprano recording, as she will continue her career as a mezzo-soprano. Luca Pianca and Ensemble Claudiana both make their PENTATONE debut.

REVIEW:

Some purists won’t like Luca Pianca’s approach to unwritten ornamentation, which allows the virtuoso members of the Ensemble Claudiana unbridled freedom, and some may cavil at his imaginative and at times almost cavalier attitude to instrumentation. But there is no doubting the freshness of Pianca’s interpretative stance.

Richter’s bright, clean, focused tone, precise diction and keen sense of drama will be familiar from her performances in an impressively wide-ranging portfolio, stretching from Schubert lieder to Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs, and Idomeneo to Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers.

The heart of her achievement on this recording is undoubtedly the lament from Arianna. With its sure-footed command of the patterns and cadences of the Italian language, this is a powerful reading. It is surely the only serious competition in the catalogue to Cathy Berberian’s classic performance with Nikolaus Harnoncourt from the 1970s.

– Gramophone

Resonating across more than five centuries, expressions of personal piety and prayer fill these works by a quartet of Franco-Flemish composers, all born in the 15th century, and their modern-day colleagues, Estonian Cyrillus Kreek (1889—1962) and British-Norwegian Andrew Smith (b. 1970). For those familiar with the vocal ensemble New York Polyphony and its previous, acclaimed releases on BIS, this exploration of the intersection of ancient and modern music is far from surprising: the group is known for its innovative programming. On And the sun darkened the four members follow Josquin’s celebrated motet Tu pauperum refugium with Andrew Smith’s setting of Psalm 55 – composed for NYP, it is a lament which nevertheless closes with an expression of confidence in God’s justice. Sung in Estonian another biblical psalm is heard in Kreek’s Taaveti laul 22 (‘David’s 22nd Song’), the text ‘My God, why have you forsaken me’ preparing the listener for the work that has given the disc its title. Officium de Cruce by Loyset Compère is a setting of a 14th-century hymn which follows the episodes of the Passion in a continuously flowing musical narrative: from the betrayal of Christ to his death – when the sun darkened – and entombment.

REVIEWS:

The vocal quartet New York Polyphony has excelled with a fine vocal blend and programs of Renaissance and contemporary choral music that often touch on underrepresented repertory. Josquin is present, but only with a single piece, and the focus is on his much less often heard contemporaries and successors, Loyset Compère, Pierre de la Rue, and Adrian Willaert. The one-voice-per-part forces of New York Polyphony may be an obstacle for some, inasmuch as this is not how Josquin was meant to be performed; the group's singing has a madrigalesque quality, and that's not everyone's cup of tea, but this might be the album to check out for those who have been wanting to sample New York Polyphony's work. Another attraction is BIS's sound, captured in Princeton Abbey in New Jersey; it's entirely distinct from that of the big English chapels where most recordings this repertory are made, and it's absorbingly inward.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

The four member, standard setting chamber vocal ensemble New York Polyphony continues to transfix listeners with their pure, dynamically balanced and deeply expressive a cappella singing. It's hard to believe how a group of only four male voices can sound like much more than the sum of its parts. Regardless of which century the members of New York Polyphony happen to explore at any given moment, you can sense their deep respect and understanding of both the text and music at all times. Their perfectly matched voices create a sonic canopy akin to the nave of a gothic cathedral, with audio engineering to match. Guaranteed you will feel the urge to listen to this recording many times over.

– Classical Music Sentinel (Jean-Yves Duperron, 2021)

Winner of the 2020 GRAMMY award for Best Choral Performance and a nominee for Best Contemporary Classical Composition!

Richard Danielpour’s dramatic oratorio The Passion of Yeshua- a work which has evolved over the last 25 years- is an intensely personal telling of the final hours of Christ on Earth. It incorporates texts from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian gospels inspiring extraordinarily beautiful music that stresses the need for human compassion and forgiveness. Danielpour returns to the scale and majesty of Bach in the oratorio, creating choruses that are intense and powerful, and giving both Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene a central place in a work of glowing spirituality. Conductor JoAnn Falletta considers The Passion of Yeshua to be “a classic for all time.”

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REVIEW:

Naxos’ world première recording of The Passion of Yeshua (2017) does full justice to Danielpour’s vision, thanks to the strong involvement and fine vocal talents of half a dozen soloists and the highly committed, knowing and knowledgeable conducting with which JoAnn Falletta shapes the performances of the UCLA Chamber Singers and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra.

– Infodad.com

This month we are happy to present to you a great Passion oratorio that Johann Sebastian Bach in all likelihood pieced together for his last Passion service. He took a work by Carl Heinrich Graun, a composer whom he admired, and expanded it to produce a magnificent two-part Passion. To it he added compositions of his own authorship and others by his friend Georg Philipp Telemann. The result was a pasticcio, a new work consisting of set pieces. This practice was very common during Bach’s times. Both composers on whose works Bach drew were contemporary stars who did not at all object to this practice, especially since they occasionally operated in precisely the same way. The composer Georg Philipp Telemann saw no reason to complain about the reuse of his works. Although we do have quite a bit of background information about the Passion, the riddle surrounding it is only beginning to be solved. Accordingly, Bach scholarship can only hope that additional sources will be found and prove Johann Sebastian Bach’s authorship once and for all. The work perhaps even offers evidence pointing to one of his lost Passions, and it might even be his last Passion oratorio – which, as the current state of research knowledge sees things – can only have been written during the years following 1733.

Christ Church Cathedral Choir and Stephen Darlington join forces with Soloists from The Sixteen and a stellar group of instrumentalists on this premiere recording. Persecution of the innocent, malevolent authority exerting itself against ideas that threaten and challenge, the power of a peaceful, loving humility in the face of tyranny, the facing-down of fear; all hold profound universal resonance for people of many faiths and those of none. Such is the power of the Passion story and in his new work, Invictus: A Passion, multi-award-winning composer Howard Goodall has found a route directly to people’s hearts, telling the story afresh through his choice of thought-provoking texts combined with heart-rending yet inspiring music. Howard Goodall is a composer of choral music, stage musicals, TV and film scores and a music historian and broadcaster. His choral music has been commissioned to mark many national ceremonies and memorials; his settings of Psalm 23 and Love divine are amongst the most performed of all sacred music. Howard has composed some of the best-known British TV theme tunes of the last 30 years, and his score for the HBO film Into the Storm won him a Primetime EMMY award for Original Dramatic Score in 2009. For the last 25 years he has written and presented his own TV documentary series on the theory and history of music.

Ernst Wilhelm Wolf’s contemporaries called him the “Weimar Wolf,” a fitting label, inasmuch as Weimar’s musical environment greatly influenced the life of this teacher, concertmaster, and organist who advanced to the post of chapel master to Duchess Anna Amalia, a noted patron of the arts. Even though he was a thorn in the flesh for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s prince of poets, he remained true to the court and his duchess over the decades. He even declined with thanks an offer from the King of Prussia, Frederick II, to succeed Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Berlin. However, the fact that Wolf highly valued Bach’s empfindsamer Stil and the style of the Berlin chapel master Carl Heinrich Graun is clearly audible in his works. During recent years Wolf’s instrumental music has attracted increasing attention. Now Michael Alexander Willens has recorded Wolf’s oratorio Jesu, deine Passion will ich jetzt bedenken. In this work, like Graun in his Tod Jesu, the composer, who in 1756 was only a little over twenty, reflects on the Passion of Christ and relives it with deep emotion. An absolute masterpiece from the age of musical sensibility with arias of great melodic appeal that are guaranteed to leave no heart unmoved!

Roland Wilson enjoys great esteem as a trumpeter and a cornett player who performs with his own ensemble, and as a musicologist his name stands for the rediscovery of many an early music rarity. On our new recording we hear two highly interesting works that once were (and today still are) ascribed to George Frideric Handel. Johann Mattheson, who was working on the setting of the same libretto in 1723, wrote a detailed review of this Passion probably first performed in 1704 and published anonymously. Although Mattheson does not mention the “world-famous” man by name, his choice of words repeatedly offers clear references, for example, when he states that the inscription Pilate had put on the cross caused him “new business” (“neue Händel”). Mattheson doubtless knew exactly who the composer was, and everything that he describes is a perfect match for Handel. For me, there is a lot in the score that recalls the mature Handel while sounding very much like a young man who was then in quest of his individual style. The same applies to the chorale cantata “Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder,” a work certainly suggesting an even earlier date of composition. This new recording by the early music specialists of Musica Fiata and an ensemble of soloists brings this wonderful music to life with fantastic tonal homogeneity and balance, technical finesse, and historical knowledge.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion is, along with the St. Matthew Passion, without doubt one of the most important works he ever composed. It established a new tradition for Good Friday vespers in Leipzig, and with sublime skill Bach managed to retain a spirit of church worship while creating an almost operatic narrative that movingly depicts Christ’s trial, death, and ultimate apotheosis. Bach’s numerous revisions always demand a certain amount of scholarly decision-making, and this recording of the St. John Passion uses the final 1749 version that not only draws on and reinforces the best of Bach’s original concept, but incorporates the additional movements of the 1725 version.