Mozart Nachtmusique/Erich Hoperich Gran Partita, K.361; etc.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This release from La Compagnia del Madrigale contains a collection of religious compositions by Claudio Monteverdi. These pieces are sung in a unique polyphonic style, prepared especially for La Compagnia del Madrigale. Marco Bizzarini provides the booklet essay for this album, and shows his deep understanding of the interplay of music and words in Italian compositions during Monteverdi’s time.

This recording from La Venexiana unchains those passions stirred originally with the arrival of one of the most dazzling masterworks of Baroque musical theatre: Il Nerone, ossia L'incoronazione di Poppea. For a long time attributed only to the exceptional talents of Claudio Monteverdi (1567- 1643), today this opera is considered additionally to be the result of the combined contributions of various composers over a period of time, among them being Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676), Benedetto Ferrari (c.1603-1681), and Francesco Sacrati (1605-1650). Following on directly from a recent La Venexiana staged production, Glossa and the ensemble of Claudio Cavina present here a highly-charged reading of the art of Monteverdi and his heritage, as transmitted by him and through composers after him - an art which created, enlivened and ultimately completely changed the musical world of their times.

With Isbé, a pastorale héroïque by Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville, György Vashegyi has revived another overlooked dramatic work from the French Baroque – much as he did with Rameau’s Les Fêtes de Polymnie – for another release on the Glossa label. In his native Budapest, Vashegyi has been developing his interpretations of Baroque music with his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir for nearly three decades now, and for this recording he has assembled a magnificent team of vocal soloists, well-versed in the idiom of eighteenth- century French opera: Thomas Dolié assumes the important role of Adamas, the Chief Druid, who is besotted by Isbé, and yet is also provided with modern Enlightenment thinking (the opera was premièred in 1742).The title role has been taken by the British soprano Katherine Watson, while Isbé’s other suitor, Coridon, is sung by tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen. Despite being somewhat over-shadowed in his lifetime by his older and more prolific contemporary, Jean- Philippe Rameau, Mondonville was already a successful composer of instrumental music and some ambitious grands motets before he composed Isbé, and his operatic vision was remarkably well-advanced in terms of structure, orchestration and melodic invention; he was clearly also aware of the advances made by Antonio Vivaldi in orchestral music.

Atalanta Fugiens is considered by many to be the most beautiful and the most thought-provoking emblem book of all time, with an author in Michael Maier (1568-1622) who was a celebrated alchemist and physician at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In the final eight years of an eventful and much-travelled life, Maier created a series of illustrated alchemist works, among which Atalanta Fugiens is undoubtedly the most important. Part of the fascination which this work has aroused stems from its tripartite nature: from a visual perspective with all its engraved emblems, as a musical work comprising fifty compositions,identified as 'fugues', which run through the publication and accompanying the images, and as a purely textual activity in the form of a volume of epigrams and alchemic commentaries. Additionally, Atalanta Fugiens provides part of the backdrop to an understanding of the spiritual Rosicrucian movement which flourished during the first decades of the 17th century, especially in the German principalities. The musical pieces, of an extremely antiquated nature even for that time, consist of canons in two parts above a cantus firmus; Michael Noone and his Ensemble Plus Ultra perform them in their entirety and in the order in which they appear in the book. What emerges through the centuries across this book is a hypnotic disc, one that is unclassifiable yet extraordinarily evocative.

and satisfying experience, so the opportunity to hear his interpretations of Mendelssohn's Italian and Scottish Symphonies with his Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century as part of The Grand Tour series is indeed an enticing one. Conductor and orchestra are both strongly in harmony with the evolving nature of the Romantic spirit of the 19th century. Here, Felix Mendelssohn is a composer who has long fascinated Brüggen and on the new recording the legendary conductor marvellously captures the emotional torrents experienced by Mendelssohn when reflecting on his own Grand Tour, which took in both the blazing sun of Rome and also the mists of the Scottish Highlands. Opting to perform the original 1833 version of the Italian Symphony (as at its first performance in London), Brüggen sets out to paint a stronger contrast with the later completed Symphony No 3, brilliantly reflecting the composer's wildly fluctuating moods at the time.

Mendelssohn Orchestra of the 18th Century/Frans Bruggen A Midsummer Night's Dream

La Compagnia del Madrigale’s subtle, yet powerful advocacy of great Italian madrigals from around the turn of the seventeenth century continues with a further exploration of music by Luca Marenzio – his Quinto Libro di Madrigali a sei voci from 1591 –, a composer considered as one of the most complete of his time, capable of dominating the entire range of emotional expressions: joy, pain, sensuality, the evocation of Nature, and so on. Previous recordings on Glossa, including Carlo Gesualdo’s Sesto Libro and the recent award-winning Primo Libro by Marenzio, have demonstrated an uncommon response to the genre by this Italian ensemble: a fresh approach to each miniature it essays, combined with a wide-ranging awareness of the repertory; years of experience in other groups such as La Venexiana and Concerto Italiano have proved invaluable.

Marenzio’s Quinto Libro was dedicated to an Italian nobleman, Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, on the occasion of his marriage to Flavia Peretti; a “wedding album” full of the latest musical and poetical techniques – the Canzon de’ baci, with words by Guarini, for example, is a marvel of its kind. However, below the surface polish of elegant and stylized Late Renaissance vocal music lurks a dramatic tale, conjured up by Marco Bizzarini in his booklet essay, of crimes of honour and passion, hired assassins and feuds between powerful aristocratic families...
The vividness of La Compagnia del Madrigal’s rendition of Marenzio’s madrigals is captured by – and presented with – all the continuing hallmarks of Glossa’s production values.

Raphaëlla Smits, the Belgium grande dame of the guitar, has spent decades making memorable recordings, many of them for the Accent label. • This recital, containing pieces by the blind, Argentinean by way of Spain Antonio Jiménez Manjón (1866-1919), appeared in 1999, and did admirable justice to a composer whose name – despite the high quality of his melodiousness music – has not figured frequently on recordings. • The Vicente Arias (1833-1914) guitar of 1899 used for this recital came from the collection of Narciso Yepes in Madrid, Spain. • A total of about two dozen Arias instruments are known to exist.

Having moved forward in time if not in terms of original place of production - by following the Poppea of Monteverdi with the Artemisia of Francesco Cavalli - Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana now return to the end of the 16th century, for what is a fresh, new and distinctively Italian take on what was, for a long time, "secret" music: that composed by Luzzasco Luzzaschi when he was serving the ducal court of Alfonso II of Ferrara. Alfonso had brought together "singing ladies", the Concerto delle Dame, virtuoso performers on instruments as well as with the voice, to delight and entertain the duke's wife as well as privileged members of the court (rival courts apparently sent composer-"emissaries" to find out what was going on!). Kept under lock and key the music written for the Dame by Luzzaschi and others was only released and published on the Duke's death. No less a musician searching after theoretical supports for composition as was the case with Claudio Monteverdi, was greatly impressed, when he was deliberating over the seconda pratica, with Luzzaschi's modern handling of the madrigal form. In Emanuela Galli, Roberta Mameli (the Artemia in Cavalli's Artemisia) and Francesca Cassinari, Claudio Cavina has assembled a superb modern-day trio of singers ready to bring out all the subtleties and nuances of music and words in a further display of La Venexiana's magisterial control of Italian music as it shifts gears from the Renaissance to the Baroque.

Classical Music

As a guide to the music of Luigi Boccherini written in Spain there is no one better today than Emilio Moreno; this string player, director and scholar knows in a profound way how music composed across the map of 18th century Europe can live and breathe. For a new GLOSSA release Moreno is once again focusing on an important aspect of Boccherini's output from the more than 35 years he spent working within that late 18th century Spanish mixture of a severe tradition, a vibrant popular culture and an openness to culture trends coursing throughout the Europe of Haydn and Mozart. Joined by the talent of Dutch keyboard player Arthur Schoonderwoerd, Moreno leads La Real Cámara (with regular partners violist Antonio Clares and cellist Mercedes Ruiz) in six piano quartets transcribed from Boccherini's Op 26 two-movement quartettini of 1778, and published some years later. Moreno takes us back to the Age of Enlightenment, to the cultured court of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (the brother of the Spanish king) in Arenas de San Pedro - a royal residence outside Madrid but also near Ávila, and clearly within the scope of the European postal service - and to those substantial demands for chamber music of all confi gurations which the Font family quartet and Boccherini (a noted cellist himself) were adept at performing with technical assurance and artistry. Here, fortepiano joins violin, viola and basse obligé coming together in elegant, witty and graceful chamber music, in scores touched by those popular Spanish motifs cheerfully incorporated by Boccherini.