Placing the spotlight on an unfairly neglected figure from the late Baroque, Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello, this recording is being reissued from 2002 on Harmonia Mundi and 2011 on Glossa. Brescianello was an Italian who worked extensively in the German courts. His concertos and sinfonians included here reflect the composer's mastery of music from his own country and of the French orchestral language as practiced by the German composers of his time.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the city of Évora was one of the most important center of Portuguese polyphony. The so-called "Portuguese school" developed at the city's Gothic cathedral, from which many important musicians emerged who also worked in Spain and in the colonies of the New World. The cathedral archives, which contain numerous musical treasures, bear eloquent witness to this. Rogerio Gonçalves and A Corte Musical have recorded a selection of sacred and secular villancicos from this source on album. A colourful instrumental accompaniment, including Spanish harp and guitar, strings and percussion, forms the foundation on which the four singers present this stirring music. The Villancico was originally a polyphonic Spanish song with a secular subject, but it was soon adopted into the Christian liturgy and frequently used on high feasts or other religious holidays. The Évora archives contain villancicos with Spanish but also with Portuguese texts, which is a rarity. The alternation between vocal and instrumental music and the contrast between secular and sacred works shows very well the cultural versatility, individuality and expressivity of Portuguese music of the (early) Baroque.

The so-called Di Martinelli Collection is preserved in the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and contains a total of sixty-five manuscripts and thirty-two prints, including a remarkable manuscript with thirty-two late 17th-century violin sonatas from which the works on the present recording are taken. Collected in the manuscript are challenging pieces of various origins, whereby three regional focal points can be ascertained: composers of Flemish-Netherlandish descent (Petersen, Goor), composers from South-German/Habsburg regions (Albicastro, Schmelzer, Pez, Wentzely, Finger and erroneously Biber) and several Italian composers (Cailò, Lonati, Capellini). All of the musicians on the present recording studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and represent a new generation in the field of historical musical practice, a generation which combines high technical mastery with curiosity for the historical fundamentals and joy in experimentation. Eva Saladin, Swiss-Dutch descent, is meanwhile one of the most renowned representatives of her generation on the baroque violin. The basso continuo team joining her for this project (Johannes Keller, Sebastian Wienand and Daniel Rosin) includes the use of two harpsichords, a practice that shows off fascinating possibilities in terms of sound and harmonic and figurative elaboration.

The conductor György Vashegyi and his ensembles, the Orfeo Orchestra and the Purcell Choir, are fluent in various fields of baroque and classical music, with a particular predilection for French baroque opera. But one of their favourite lines of work is Lutheran sacred music, and a good example of this is this beautiful work, Wer ist der, so von Edom kömmt (“Who is this that comes from Edom?”), a period pasticcio with pieces by various composers. Graun (a composer at the court of Frederick II who was greatly admired by his contemporary colleagues), rubs shoulders here with Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as with a mysterious unknown, who wrote several of the most impressive passages in the work. In fact, this is a Passion Oratorio, a reflection on the events related to the martyrdom of Christ based on freely chosen texts without following a precise Gospel and without summoning the usual characters of the drama into an imaginary setting. The originality of this patchwork also lies in the distribution of the text where – contrary to many passions of the time – the events of the last days of Jesus’ life are told by chorales that float in the meditative atmosphere of the recitatives, arias and choruses. These chorales are especially impressive in the second part: the density of the writing, the unique dramatic harmonies, the arrangement of the voices are of such an exceptional quality that their author could definitely be Johann Sebastian Bach himself... whom the author of the essay included in the libretto, Gergely Fazekas, also points to as the possible compiler of this masterpiece.

With her version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Leila Schayegh continues her exploration of the violin repertory, always combining musical insight, virtuosic brilliance and historical understanding. Over the last years, the Swiss musician and professor in the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis has become one of the leading violinists of her generation. On this dazzling new exhibition, Schayegh –who plays a late-17th-century Andrea Guarneri instrument– is joined by the fine and colourful ensemble Musica Fiorita, directed by Daniela Dolci. The opera composer Vivaldi is omnipresent in all of the four concertos, also thanks to the use of elements of Baroque theatre: the sounds of wind machines or bird whistles contribute to making this a delightful, fascinating and “different” version of one of the most recorded works of all times.

Just once in a while?a long while?a disc will come along to make one curse the all-too-easy use of superlatives to which our fatuous age is devoted. We curse their misuse because it deprives us of the ability to describe that which is truly exemplary, rare cases where the use of a word such as ?great? is not just an idle, meaningless throwaway. This is just such a recording, and if, for reasons I?ll come to later, overall it falls minimally short of the ultimate accolade, I can say without hesitation that Paolo Pandolfo is an extraordinary master who has here produced some of the greatest viol-playing I?ve ever heard. Why? Quite simply because he combines innate musicianship with a flawless technique that allows him to explore a quite extraordinary range of sonority and nuance that are in my experience unequalled among his fellow gambists. Throughout the 28 tracks on this CD, there is not one moment of ugliness, not the faintest suspicion of less than perfect intonation, while the sheer lyrical beauty Pandolfo draws from his instrument is at times breathtaking. But, for the moment, enough of panegyrics. Regular readers will know well enough that this writer is no hero worshipper of artists, rather one who views them as a conduit through which to attempt to seek the truth about music.


The truth about the mysterious Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe himself is, to say the least, somewhat elusive. Despite considerable scholarly activity, no biographical facts have yet emerged about a figure who was celebrated by both contemporary and successor as not only the greatest gambist of his day, but also the founder of an advanced school of performers that found its greatest exponent in Sainte-Colombe?s pupil, Marin Marais. But Monsieur was controversial as well as celebrated, unwittingly finding himself at the center of an angry polemical argument in which he took no part. At the heart of this debate was a central issue. Was the gamba primarily a lyrical instrument whose performers should above all seek closely to emulate the human voice, or was it rather an instrument that should follow in the footsteps of the lute and theorbo and express itself through harmony?


This divergence of opinion is brilliantly examined, using contemporary sources, in the long booklet essay by Pierre Jaquier, which shows how much Sainte-Colombe was, above all, revered for his ability to play in a manner that could draw comparison with the finest singers. Much of his music reflects this love of cantabile, a piece such as the second Sarabande from the G-Major pieces (the suites are, of course, Pandolfo?s own choice arranged by key), which has all the melodic distinction and simplicity of an air by Michel Lambert. This, interestingly, is one of the few pieces in which the manuscript (the Panmure MS) includes a part for continuo bass, but in an ancillary note, Pandolfo argues that many of the other pieces imply the use of continuo, which has been added in a number of cases where he feels the gamba part includes insufficient harmonic information. This may be so, and in some instances works well, especially given Thomas Boysen?s fine theorbo-playing. Where I do part company with the performers is in the occasional employment of the Baroque guitar to supply the continuo, as in the Chaconne that concludes the Suite in C. Here, and in several other instances, its tangy, percussive character sounds anachronistic beside the gamba, exuberant though the piece may be.


Exuberance is not a quality that those familiar only with the secretive, withdrawn, and hermit-like Sainte-Colombe portrayed in the film Tous les matins du monde will associate with the composer, but, as Pandolfo justly observes, that is an image contradicted by much of the music. True, we do from time to time meet a wistful, introverted composer, as in the D-Minor Sarabande, where the gambist draws us into an intimate web of sound, while at the same time demanding admiration for some perfectly placed and executed trills. But there is, too, nobility in the shape of the G-Major Allemande, fragile lightness and courtly elegance (the G-Major Minuet), and the evocation of a distant folk dance heard in an idealized, Poussinesque landscape (the Minuet in D), here cleverly succeeded by the downright bucolic in ?Vielle,? with its drone bass.


As already made abundantly clear, these are performances that call for superlatives. The disc is not only a showcase for Pandolfo?s magical, supremely rewarding virtuosity, but, much more important, one that casts fresh and indispensable new light on one of the great instrumental composers of the 17th century. As such, it demands to be added to the collection of everyone who values music-making of peerless quality.


FANFARE: Brian Robins

Today's music lovers associate “L’Orfeo" first and foremost with Claudio Monteverdi's famous opera from 1607, while the version by Luigi Rossi (1597-1653), premiered four decades later, has remained less well-known. Rossi had served as a musician first for the noble families Borghese and Barberini in Florence and Rome, respectively, before he moved to France in 1646, where he became the most respected composer at the court of Cardinal Mazarin. His “L'Orfeo", with a libretto by Francesco Buti, was premiered on 2 March 1647 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. It was one of the first operas ever performed in France. The premiere was magnificently staged, full of magnificent sets and machinery, with over 200 people employed to work on the scenery. The performance lasted about six hours and was a great success for Rossi. Twenty years after the first recording by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, Elena Sartori and her ensemble Allabastrina present now the second recording of this opera. The total playing time is slightly under four hours, almost Wagnerian proportions. Sartori uses exclusively Italian forces (17 solo singers and choristers), with the Baroque experts Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Orfeo) and Emanuela Galli (Euridice) in the main roles.

A masterpiece of French music, Charpentiers Te Deum was a song of thanksgiving flourishing with the military fortunes of Louis XIV, king of France, who was leading his country in a protracted war. But, curiously, it was not the triumphant nature of the Te Deum that attracted Herv� Niquet - director of Le Concert Spirituel - to this piece. "I love the intimacy of Charpentier", he says, something which can be found when you look at the performance history of Charpentier's music in some of it's original settings, such as the house of the Duchess of Guise or the Sainte Chapelle, where it is clear that detail, vocal and compositive virtuosity, rather than symphonic magnitude, were to the fore. Charpentier's genius is such, however, that it perfectly express the grandeur and poetry indispensable for works like the Te Deum." This recording by Le Concert Spirituel is a truly original version of this memorable music that achieves an amazingly fine balance between intimacy and symphonic fireworks.

In Jephté by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, György Vashegyi directs – with style and energy – another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opéra alone in the three decades following its première. Montéclair and his librettist Pellegrin were open to preparing revised versions of the opera and it is the third and conclusive edition which has been worked on by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and recorded by Vashegyi and his musicians. The central and demanding role of Iphise here is taken by Chantal Santon Jeffery, who is joined by Tassis Christoyannis as the unfortunate but successful-in-war title character, Judith van Wanroij as the bewildered but resolute mother and Thomas Dolié as the relayer of divine messages, Phinée. There is an imaginative and individual flair to Montéclair’s music, nurtured by his extensive orchestral pit experience at the Paris Opéra – and Jephté is a work of his maturity. As well as the tautness of the third edition, the fruits of all this experience are to be heard here with the Orfeo Orchestra showing its paces in zesty airs, minuets, marches and a chaconne, but also with a musette- tinged pastoral celebration – this last also allows the Purcell Choir opportunities to excel; elsewhere, the choir is called on variously to represent warriors, Israelites, and companions of Iphise.

Fabio Biondi has chosen a selection of delightful virtuoso chamber music pieces by Niccolò Paganini to mark his tenth album for Glossa. Together with his long-term colleague from Europa Galante, the plucked-string specialist Giangiacomo Pinardi (here playing an original romantic guitar from c1825), Biondi delivers one of the most special Glossa albums of recent times. The works, composed between 1804 and c1828, are mainly two-movement sonatas contained in the Centone di sonate collection, although the album also includes the popular Sonata concertata in A major. Recorded in Valencia by the engineer and producer Fabio Framba (another well-known component of Biondi’s recording setups), the booklet of this album includes a highly original essay signed by Pierre Élie Mamou, in which he looks into the Devil/God dichotomy as applied to the figure of Paganini by his own contemporaries. The graphic design for the album takes its inspiration from this idea, for another typically Glossa look, listen and read experience…

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been central to the Orchestra’s musicmaking and the composer made many friends with wind players and wrote abundantly for them. In 1992, a program for a concert given by clarinetist Anton Stadler in Riga in March of 1794 was discovered, where he played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. Amazingly, this programme includes an engraving of the special “Inventions Klarinette”, or basset clarinet, that Stadler had with him to play Mozart’s music. Up until this time, no one knew what the basset clarinet looked like, and it came as a shock to see a long instrument with a bulbous bell on the end. This recording with Eric Hoeprich as soloist was the first time the work appeared played on an instrument as Stadler possessed. Of the various wind instruments, it was the natural horn which proved to be the one most favoured by Mozart in his solo instrumental music. Four concertos and a plentiful quantity of chamber scores in which the horn plays the leading role testify to that. Without doubt all this derived from the friendship between the composer and Joseph Leutgeb, a virtuoso player almost 25 years his senior. Teunis van der Zwart, one of the world’s leading specialists on this instrument today, is the soloist of the Horn Concerto, KV 477. The program of the album is rounded off with the Oboe Concerto KV 314 with Frank de Bruine as soloist.

Paolo Pandolfo is no doubt one of Glossa’s key artists. Still on the label since he joined it in 1995, this recording of a selection of works by Marin Marais was a milestone in his career. Rarely has this repertoire been played with such an energy and attention to detail, with such a magic in all its many special moments. An all-star setup including Thomas Boysen, Mitzi Meyerson and Pedro Estevan tells us about the labyrinth at Versailles, the bells of Paris or a painful surgery. Among the many unforgettable moments are Pandolfo’s reading of the Tombeau pour Marais le Cadet and the Chaconne. Paolo Pandolfo began his research in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music idioms around 1979 together with violinist Enrico Gatti and harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini. In 1982 he became a member of J.Savall’s ensemble Hesperion XX and played with him until 1990 throughout the world, and making dozens of recordings. In 1990, after the huge success of his first recording as a soloist he was nominated as Professor of viola da gamba at his alma mater, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel.

Machaut’s masterpiece, Messe de Nostre Dame, is presented here in this new recording by Bjorn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix. Guillaume de Machaut is the first-known composer to pen an integral mass cycle. His music was a staple at Reims Cathedral in the fourteenth century. This work is performed by an all-male ensemble.

Gyorgy Vashegyi’s new recording of Rameau’s Dardanus superbly demonstrates the Dijon-born composer’s genius, but also the mastery which Vashegyi – with his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir – has acquired in the music of the Late French Baroque. In conjunction with the preparation of a fresh edition for the Rameau Opera Omnia of the May 1744 version of Dardanus (under the aegis of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles), Vashegyi conducts from a score prepared by the composer (and his librettist Leclerc de La Bruere) following the work’s rejection by Paris Opera audiences in 1739, with the intention of reinforcing the tragedie’s dramatic action. Enacting this new sense of intensity on this Glossa release are Cyrille Dubois in the title role of the warrior besotted with Iphise (Judith Van Wanroij), traumatized by her “guilty love” for the enemy of her dour father, Teucer (Thomas Dolie), who allocates the princess’ marriage hand to a princely ally, Antenor (Tassis Christoyannis). With aid and abetment from Venus (Chantal Santon Jeffrey) and a Magician (Dolie again), Love conquers all. The dazzling array of solo singing featured here is accompanied, by turns, by joyful and mournful, festive and demonic choral interjections, the all couched in an exuberant, florid and decorative orchestral score (which includes the famous Chaconne).

Over the years Glossa has been at the forefront of releasing recordings of late Renaissance madrigals, and the label has had the pleasure of assisting superlative artists in doing so: none more so than the voices of La Venexiana and its director Claudio Cavina. A reflection of such creative richness comes through now in a special limited-edition nine-CD box set, entitled L’arte del madrigale.

The recordings date from the dozen years after La Venexiana’s foundation in 1996, a time of great activity for the ensemble, and which complements the Monteverdi Complete Madrigals Books set, released two years ago. These two impressive box sets demonstrate very effectively why La Venexiana has been so popular with audiences and why it has been fêted by critics also.

It is remarkable to have such musical and expressive guides – and with such interpretative consistency – to take one now through the potent thirty yearperiod in the development of the Italian madrigal from 1586 onwards; a time when the madrigal reached its zenith. Within the nonet of recordings in L’arte del madrigale are to be found complete books of madrigals from composers who reflected the greater textual expressivity of the new seconda prattica – Luzzaschi, Wert and Marenzio – along with the Neapolitan freedoms demonstrated by Gesualdo and D’India. The new box set contains all the booklets for the original recordings (as PDF files) as well as a new essay written by Stefano Russomanno.

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Reviews of selected individual volumes within this set:

D'india: Third Book Of Madrigals:

Renaissance courtiers revelled in suffering: the texts are anguished plaints of rejected lovers, rarely relieved by passion requited. So this is not a disc to hear straight through, any more than d’India’s book was intended for a single performance. Absorb the text, listen several times to its musical illumination, to savour d’India’s wayward harmonies (learnt from Gesualdo), and his synthesis of old counterpoint and, in the last eight madrigals, the new continuo-accompanied style of Monteverdi. La Venexiana’s finely recorded six voices, two theorbos and harpsichord are peerless advocates of this pinnacle of amorous fervour.

– BBC Music Magazine

Gesualdo: Il Quarto Libro Di Madrigali, 1596:


With this release the ensemble La Venexiana and its Glossa label present one of the finest recorded programs of Gesualdo madrigals in the catalog. And, as we hear throughout, these singers, with unflagging musical intensity and knowing sensitivity to the texts--and without the slightest hint of overplaying--give us the sense that we might be experiencing these pieces as their original audiences did, without the pretentiousness or self-conscious formality that ruins so many modern performances of early music.

– ClassicsToday

Luzzaschi - Concerto Delle Dame

Claudio Cavina, who has always done repertoire of this type so well, uses three sopranos and four players from his ensemble with superb results. An exceptionally attractive disc.

– Fanfare