Classical Music

RAMEAU Les surprises de l’Amour • Sébastien d’Hérin, cond; Amel Brahim-Djelloul ( Adonis ); Virginie Pochon ( Venus, Parthénope ); Caroline Mutel ( Vénus, Amour ); Karine Deshayes ( Diane, Uraine, The Grand Priestess ); Anders Dahlin ( Mercure, Linus, Agathocie ); Pierre-Yves Pruvot ( Apollo ); Jean-Sébastien Bou ( Anacréon ); Les Nouveaux Caractères • GLOSSA 922701 (3 CDs: 146:28 Text and Translation)


The opéra-ballet Les surprises de l’Amour went through several revisions, a practice Rameau regularly engaged in when new productions of his works were mounted (and not infrequently during the middle of runs, as well). It first appeared in 1748, as a prolog followed by what later became its second and first acts. This was for a celebration of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle at Versailles. (Madame de Pompadour, a highly cultured patroness, was supposedly very pleased with the results.) In 1757 the work was overhauled for the Paris Opéra, with its dated prolog jettisoned, the two extent acts inverted, and a third added. Scarcely two months later Rameau replaced the second act, but a year later it was returned—and that is the version we have on this album. All of these revisions were accompanied by other changes to whatever was retained.


Les surprises de l’Amour fits comfortably in to the genre of the mid-18th-century opéra-ballet . It consists of a series of three independent one-act works, united thematically in their Louis XV period obsession with love, and the inevitable French requirement to cloak everything in Greco-Roman garb. In the first act, Adonis, kept in chaste captivity by the huntress/goddess Diana, is kidnapped by Cupid, seduced by Venus, and ultimately chooses the latter over the former goddess. In the second act, the siren Parthenope desires the mortal Linus as a lover, but he’s enraptured with the muse of astronomy, Urania. The latter warns Linus to focus on intellectual pursuits and forget about love, which Parthenope considers dirty pool—so she enchants a lyre which Urania discovers and plays, only to gradually lose all control over her carefully sublimated emotions. Apollo appears to save the day. In the third act, the poet Anacreon, famous since Roman times for his passions embracing both love and wine, decides on love. This causes some temporary problems with Bacchus’s worshipers, as you might guess, but everything turns out all right in the end.


(Parenthetically, it was the distinguished scholar Aubrey de Sélincourt who once wrote that most of Anacreon’s poems express a desire to drink, and that there exists a fragment of one where he writes of having some secret he wished he could have passed along to Sappho, far his elder. Sélincourt suggests it might have been a desire to share a drink with her.)


There was a time when even learned and sensible critics dismissed French Baroque opera en masse for a lack of coherent drama, endless padding, and frivolous subject matter. With repeated productions on stage and records this view has retreated somewhat, though it can still be found in reviews of such works as this opéra-ballet . In brief rebuttal: The drama is often more coherent and better written than in 19th-century opera; the padding isn’t padding when the entertainment form itself deliberately incorporates dance and spectacle as part of the fun; and the librettos, while limited in their breadth, often reveal a psychological perceptiveness worthy of Marivaux. Consider the first of the three parts of this work, “L’Enlèvement d’Adonis.” It isn’t Jupiter’s trick of disguising Adonis to look like a second Cupid and asking Diana to choose the right one that stymies her. It is Adonis’s refusal to speak out and identify himself, which isn’t forbidden. The action of Adonis breaks her will, not those of Jupiter, Cupid, or Venus, and in a silence that speaks more eloquently than all Diana’s fury and despair.


And, being composed by Rameau, wonderful examples of fury and despair, as well as anger, fear, mirth, and, of course, love in many expressive shades, abound. The music ranges in depth from the charming though detached air “Chantez la faveur” of Urania to the surprisingly austere condemnation by Bacchus’s Priestess (with excellent three-part counterpoint), to the powerful, discordant scene for Diana and chorus, “Adonis, Adonis … pourquoi nous fuyez-vous.” Urania’s mad scene, with the muse falling increasingly under the spell of the music on the lyre she herself plays, is another highlight of the work—as is the supple recitative throughout, and the many dances that equal anything Rameau composed for any of his other stage works.


None of the performances are execrable, and a few are exceptional. Amel Brahim-Djelloul stands out in the first section not only for tonal beauty and phrasing, but for an extremely forward enunciation that surpasses that of her colleagues. Anders Dahlin is a sweet rather than powerful haute-contre , and while doing justice to all three roles, is at his best as the love-struck Linus. Finally, Karine Deshayes makes the most of all the dramatic possibilities she receives in three parts, as Diane, Uraine, and the Grand Priestess of Bacchus. Sébastien d’Hérin leads Les Nouveaux Caractères in exciting but disciplined performances. The orchestra never swamps the singers, and the result is one of the best recordings of a Rameau stage work in several years.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal

Focusing on the central notion - one very dear to the troubadours themselves - of "love from afar", this new programme leads the listener through that maze of amorous emotions linked with the sense of absence (be it as a result of the crusades, owing to war, to tournaments, or to paternal bans...); the route chosen here is an unconventional one, traversing differing styles and epochs, with music from villages as well as from the courts, an immersion in the vast world of song and in the company of its earliest masters - the troubadours, the trouvères - and of its ageless servants: the traditional singer-poets from Occitania and from Spain... After four CDs on Glossa dedicated to music of a roundly religious nature, in L'Amor de Lonh Dominique Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois come forward with their first secular programme in a long time, offering excitingly committed interpretations and demonstrating once more why - after more than 30 years of activity - they are still considered the leading exponents of whatever repertories they lay their musical hands on.

There is no question of José Miguel Moreno being anything other than the leading Spanish specialist in historic plucked string instruments. As a concert performer, researcher, builder and collector of instruments and co-founder of the Glossa label, Moreno has, over the last thirty years, been the guiding beacon for a number of succeeding generations of guitarists and lutenists the world over. Glossa was the label for which he recorded two of his now legendary programmes, La Guitarra Española (1536-1836) and La Guitarra Española (1818-1918). These had previously been deleted but we are now bringing them back as a doubledisc set. Moreno plays a range of instruments made either by Lourdes Uncilla or by himself in order to infuse with a new vitality the fundamental repertories in the history of the guitar as bequeathed by the vihuelists Narváez, Milán and Mudarra, then later composed by figures such as Francisco Guerau, Santiago de Murcia and Gaspar Sanz, and subsequently through the romantic scores of Fernando Sor and Johann Kaspar Mertz. Tárrega and Llobet, the great masters of post- Romanticism, close this survey striding with infinite musicality across the most representative compositions of four centuries of the Spanish guitar. This special edition marks, as well, the departure point of a new process of collaboration between José Miguel Moreno and the label which he helped to create, with brand new recordings being planned, which will appear from the autumn of this year onwards.

LA BELLA PIÙ BELLA • Roberta Invernizzi (s); Craig Marchitelli (archlute, thb) • GLOSSA 922902 (77:11 Text and Translation)


ROMANO Strana armonia d’amore. FERRARI Son ruinato, appassionato. PICCININI Toccata V. Aria di Sarabanda. CACCINI Dolcissimo sospiro. Dalla porta d’Oriente. Torna, deh torna. KAPSBERGER Ciaccona. Toccata VI. Ninna nanna. ROSSI La bella più bella. A qual dardo. CARISSIMI Piangete, aure, piangete. STROZZI Udite amanti. Mi fa rider la speranza. CASTALDI Tasteggio soave. MERULA Folle è ben che si crede. D’INDIA Cruda Amarilli. Intenerite voi, lagrime mie. MONTEVERDI Ecco di dolci raggi. Eri già tutta mia. Voglio di vita uscir


My first encounter with soprano Roberta Invernizzi was on a Glossa compilation of Italian Baroque music, made about 12 years ago, that was generally a feature for tenor Pini de Vittorio. If anything, her powers of expression—and her ability to manipulate the voice like an instrument—have only grown better and more assured since then. She is, literally, a jaw-dropping Baroque soprano. Quick turns, vocal slurs, “spotted flute” technique, trills, all are in her vocal arsenal, and she is also an expressive singer with emotion to spare. Indeed, the more I hear her the more I like her; she can vary her timbre, add or subtract vibrato at will, and completely draw you in to the intensity of her interpretations. She is like Nella Anfuso (from her prime, the 1980s) with a more attractive timbre.


It also doesn’t hurt that most of this music is simply wonderful, a cross between classical Baroque and Italian folk or popular music of its time. There isn’t a bad track on the disc, and especially in a piece like Caccini’s Dalla porta d’Oriente, with its infectious tune and foot-stomping rhythm, both Invernizzi and archlutist Marchitelli (who, by the way, is also an excellent musician) get into the music so well that you can’t help but smile. I should point out, for those who don’t know, that the toccatas, chaconne, Tasteggio soave, and Aria di Sarabanda on this disc are instrumentals featuring only Marchitelli’s playing.


What is especially gratifying in listening to Invernizzi is that she lavishes the same focus and energy on each and every song in this collection, no matter how humble or exalted it may be. When the music deepens, for instance in Tarquinio Merula’s eloquent song Folle è ben che si crede or the three Monteverdi pieces that end this disc, so does Invernizzi’s artistry. As I said at the outset of this review, she is just plain stunning from start to finish.


One could go on and on in praise of this magnificent singer. Let me just opine that she is the sine qua non of Baroque sopranos and leave it at that.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

The clarinetist Erich Hoeprich’s ensemble Nachtmusique draws its members from the wind section of the Orchestra of the 18th Century (directed, until his death in August 2014, by Frans Bruggen).

Quite probably the leading specialists today in Harmoniemusik – the genre so fashionable in Vienna and its surrounding area as the 18th c. turned into the nineteenth – these musicians, here operating as a sextet and playing delightfully sounding original instruments, give us an entire disc devoted to the Bohemian composer Franz Krommer (1759-1831), whose music is full of vibrancy and humor.

Every once in a while Paolo Pandolfo likes to slip away from the world of Baroque-era manuscripts brimming with virtuoso compositions for the viola da gamba in order to create a free-form improvisatory programme surrounded by like-minded musical spirits: and so, away from stylistic rules and regulations, Kind of Satie has come into being for Glossa. Subtitled "new music around Erik Satie", Pandolfo embarks on a journey around the eccentricity-laden life of that "transcedent idealist", in the company of his brother Andrea, and with Michelangelo Rinaldi. Andrea Pandolfo, who has worked with Paolo on the Travel notes programme, is a trumpet and flugelhorn player as well as a composer, whilst the multi-instrumentalist Rinaldi acquits himself admirably on this new recording in playing piano, accordion and toy piano. Paolo Pandolfo is to be heard on both his usual and on an electro-acoustic biola da gamba. Satie's musical scores frequently bore marking designed solely for performers, but in some of the pieces included in Kind of Satie these are openly presented for listeners by the Pandolfo brothers. The music for the Trois Sonneries de la Rose+Croix and Sports et Divertissements provide the trio with starting points for their own modern-day musical compositions, as does Baroque music also. The draughtswoman Tinka Volaric provides a series of illustrations created specifically in the context of this innovative project.

It is no real surprise that Josetxu Obregón's La Ritirata has recorded the string quartets of Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga to follow up its earlier Early Baroque programme of Il Spiritillo Brando on Glossa: cellist Obregón's principal teacher has been Anner Bylsma and the two musicians share a deep fascination with the music of an earlier Classical composer in Luigi Boccherini. In this new recording the Bilbao-born Obregón is joined by violinists Hiro Kurosaki and Miren Zeberio, and viola Daniel Lorenzo; the underlying spirit of La Ritirata is of an intensive consideration of musical (and other) sources before attempting fresh interpretations of scores. This is precisely what the musicians have done for this survey of Arriaga's quartet output for Glossa - they have also included the Tema variado en cuarteto, Op 17 - in order to get closer to the sound world of the Spanish composer who left his native Basque Country at the age of 15 to study and compose in Paris in 1821. Five short years of life remained to him before an untimely death ended a hugely promising career.

Two rising stars in today’s firmament of Baroque music performance, Leila Schayegh and Jörg Halubek, join forces to record one of the major challenges in their joint repertory: the six Bach Violin Sonatas, BWV 1014-1019.

The collection’s title, Sei Suonate à Cembalo certato è Violino Solo, reflects the close partnership demanded of the violin and harpsichord players, with Bach moving away from the idea of continuo support for a solo instrument and constantly making new technical demands on the musicians and thereby approaching the concept of the triosonata. Completed by around 1725, most of these richly- characterful works combine the slow-fast-slow- fast sequence of movements found in Italian works and a cantabile tone with elements of German contrapuntal style.

The artistic partnership of Schayegh and Halubek, now in its tenth year, has seen them record chamber music by Jean-Marie Leclair, CPE Bach and Giovanni Mossi but the Bach Violin Sonatas represents their first joint recording for Glossa (Schayegh took part in the recent much-acclaimed recording of Caldara Trio Sonatas, Op 1 with Amandine Beyer for the label, as well as regularly having featured on many of La Risonanza’s Glossa releases). As Schayegh and Habulek mention in their shared booklet essay guiding the listener through the Violin Sonatas (and through the 12 represented keys which are also reflected in the set’s graphic design), they have added two movements from the earlier version of the final Sonata, BWV 1019a as a kind of cheerful and delightful encore.

Damien Guillon, who has been proving himself to be a much-admired interpreter of the more spiritual side of Baroque music, now makes his debut on Glossa both as countertenor soloist and director for a fascinating pairing of Bach and Vivaldi psalm settings: Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden, BWV 1083 and Nisi Dominus, RV 608. Guillon directs his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste (with which he recently made his stage conducting debut in Avignon with Acis and Galatea).

Whilst he was Konzertmeister in Weimar, J.S. Bach was entrusted by his employer with transcribing scores by Vivaldi brought back from Amsterdam, and a fascination ensued with the Venetian composer’s style, especially with that of his concertos. As is pointed out by Stefano Russomanno in his booklet essay for this new recording Vivaldi will have employed the concerto logic also in his sacred vocal works, such as the early Nisi Dominus (Psalm 126) recorded here. It was however a Neapolitan composer from the next generation along in G.B. Pergolesi, whose music Bach turned to as the basis for a setting of Psalm 51, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. The result was a magisterially- rendered reworking – in parody form – of Pergolesi’s theatrical (and catholic) Stabat Mater, adjusted by Bach to accommodate the different demands of the German Protestant text.

The warmth of Guillon’s countertenor finds an ideal match in the soprano Céline Scheen, another fabulous singer of Baroque music, whose vocal agility and purity has been entrancing audiences across Europe in recent years.

Classical Music

Twenty years after the Orchestra of the 18th Century's first engagement on tour with Bach's Mass in B minor - a work which has for so long captivated the inquiring mind and interpretative insights of Frans Brüggen - a new tour was conceived through which to provide a fresh view of the piece. Setting down a recorded view during its tours has always been key to this orchestra's musical expression and last year the opportunity was taken with Bach's masterpiece: the occasion was an exciting concert in the Polish capital of Warsaw - a city and a country with whom director and orchestra have long and treasured memories. A quintet of soloists and the choral forces of Cappella Amsterdam give voice to Brüggen's deep and experienced reading of a work for a recording which Glossa now is releasing, in association with the orchestra's aptly-named organization, The Grand Tour. Accompanying the CD set is a booklet essay from David Vickers which provides a scholarly and eminently-readable account of the social as well as the musical background to the composition of the individual parts of a piece whose unity has provided the world with one of its greatest works of musical art. This new recording is more than a 20th anniversary celebration, reflecting as it does Frans Brüggen's lifelong desire to understand and project the work of this extraordinary composer.

Given his absence in recent years from the studios, it is a pleasure to announce a new recording from that dexterous musical intelligence that is José Miguel Moreno; and so soon too after his album devoted to the music of David Kellner. Again we are in unknown territory - German and Bohemian lute music from around the start of the 18th century - and again with Moreno as a trusty guide playing his self-built 11- course Baroque lute. 1724 marked the date of publication in Frankfurt an der Oder of the Neue Lauten Stücke by one Johann Gottfried Conradi, possibly a scion of a notable German family of composers of the time. 1721 saw the death of the aristocratic Jan Antonín Losy, a Bohemian lutenist greatly admired by his contemporaries (including by that towering figure of the instrument, Silvius Leopold Weiss, who dedicated to Losy a heartfelt Tombeau). The surviving output of both these barely-known figures of the Baroque solo lute music tradition is small but José Miguel Moreno presents three exemplary suites full of improvisatory preludes and characterful dance movements (Courantes, Gigues, Sarabandes, Minuets...), allowing him both to demonstrate how Conradi and Losy had absorbed influences coming from France and Italy but also to evoke the interior rhetoric of the music of these composers in Moreno's inimitable exuberant style.

The Pera Ensemble, the recipient of enthusiastic critical reactions on account of it's "refined mixture of fragrances and flavors" and "a two-way exploration and enrichment of soundscapes", takes it's name from a district of Istanbul which has been a melting pot of cultures and religions for more than two millennia. This diversity is also reflected in the makeup of the group, where well-known specialists in European historical performance rub creative shoulders with leading representatives of Middle Eastern art music. This cultural adventure, directed by Mehmet C. Yesilcay, is set on wresting related early music out from behind closed museum doors in order to stimulate strong sensations and emotions. Offered up on this album is a cultural panoply as presented by Jerusalem. With it the Pera Ensemble brings demonstrations of soundscapes from another time, in which the full exuberance of early Middle Eastern Baroque is mirrored in the care taken over questions regarding sources and instrumentation. Jerusalem, that rendezvous, is the city of peace, despite all the conflicts - and bridges need to be built to span across all the supposed disagreement. Dialogue has always been facilitated by two factors: food and music. Where Eastern cuisine finds plenty of it's creative ideas in spices and exotic ingredients, the Pera Ensemble strives to integrate a parallel philosophy into it's programmes. Piyyutim (in Hebrew, naturally), Eastern timbres, the whole mixed into a Baroque framework in sound. Music from Medieval Spain, Baroque music, Sephardic music, Eastern music. All with a zestful Turkish character.

J. C. BACH 6 Sinfonias, T 285 • Erich Hoeprich (cl); Nachtmusique • GLOSSA GCD 920608 (63:51)


If anyone wonders who might have inspired Mozart to write such wonderful music for clarinet, and indeed for winds in general, an answer is suggested by the works on this disc, published posthumously in 1782, the year of the composer’s death. Johann Christian Bach befriended the eight-year-old Mozart when the latter visited London in 1764–65; although they would only meet in person once more, at Paris in 1778, they maintained a correspondence marked by mutual admiration and respect. Mozart studied the works of “the London Bach” closely, and some musicologists consider Bach, and not Mozart’s father, Leopold, to be the primary formative musical influence on Mozart’s life.


J. C. Bach exercised a profound influence on the nascent art of orchestral instrumentation and was particularly noted for his writings for winds (cf. Stanley Sadie’s groundbreaking article in the April 1956 issue of Music & Letters ). While his compositions were originally grounded in the galante style, Bach was a progressive musical thinker, and these works foreshadow not only Mozart’s wind serenades but also the pieces for wind ensemble of Beethoven. All cast in major keys (three apiece in B? and E?), these sextets are unalloyed delights – endlessly energetic and melodious, rhythmically and melodically inventive, witty and yet also substantial. This music is so infectious that it requires effort not to get up and start dancing around the house as it is playing.


To my knowledge, there have been three previous recordings of these works: a 1967 set with the London Wind Soloists, reissued on Testament; an out-of-print Pye LP with the Camden Wind Ensemble; and a 1991 recording on MDG with the Consortium Classicum. I won’t quibble with anyone who treasures the venerable London set, but I find the blend of period instruments here (natural horns and five-key clarinets and bassoons) slightly superior, and both are preferable to the MDG group. The ensemble’s leader is Eric Hoeprich, one of the world’s most renowned exponents of the Classical-era clarinet. The sound quality is well nigh ideal, and the booklet informative and well illustrated. Enthusiastically recommended.


FANFARE: James A. Altena