How to express emotion through music from which words are absent? This album attempts to give an answer to this question. Through works by Italian composers from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the two members of Seicento Stravagante, David Brutti and Nicola Lamon, demonstrate the extravagant styles of early baroque music. During the decades surrounding 1600, the dominance of the human voice and of texts came to be replaced by the unfettered imagination of the composer/instrumentalists that allowed instruments to ‘speak’ on their own, and not only support a sung text. At first the polyphony of the original vocal piece was simply supplemented with ornaments to compensate for the lack of text, but later, as the borders between vocal and instrumental music became quite fluid, the vocal lines would be transformed into virtuoso instrumental solos. By the third decade of the seventeenth century, composers and performers were developing a new and independent instrumental style, which allowed them to freely mix intricate polyphony, dance-like passages and emotionally charged musical phrases. Brutti perform this selection of works, published between 1584 and 1650, on three different types of cornetto, while Lamon alternates between a copy of a harpsichord from 1681 and no less than two historic organs, from 1578 and 1660 respectively.

Though Frederick II of Prussia, better known as “the Great” (1712–1786), was one of the greatest strategists of history; he found a way of reconciling his army life, his battles, and his political determination with his passion for the flute and for music in general. He played every day, even when he was at war, and in the course of his life he composed, among other things, 121 sonatas and 4 concertos for flute, annotating some of these works with the phrase ‘Frederick composed [it] amidst torments’.

In Potsdam Frederick had teachers of extraordinary skill, ranging from Johann Joachim Quantz to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and while he was certainly influenced by their style, he also proposed a style of his own that was not only closely associated with forms of ‘recitative’ influenced by vocal music, but also inspired – in certain respects – by his masonic faith. In fact, in his music one finds interesting esoteric symbolisms associated with numerology, masonic keys and the concept of the initiatory journey. Almost all the sonatas for flute and continuo are in three movements in an ascending progression of tempos: Adagio, Allegro, Presto. Of particular interest is the Sonata in C minor (King’s Catalogue No.190) in which an introductory Recitativo and an Andante cantabile lead to the closing movement, which is a Fugue (the only example of this genre of composition in all his works). Moreover, the subject of the fugue includes an evident reference to the ‘Thema Regium’, the famous theme that the King gave to Johann Sebastian Bach during their meeting in Potsdam in 1747, which formed the basis of the Musical Offering BWV1079.

Among the musical genres that were most appreciated and cultivated in Vienna in the early eighteenth century, one that stands out decidedly is the chamber cantata. The Italian cantatas, which were favourite compositions for the cultivated entertainment of the court, were abundantly circulated in manuscript form and collected in a great quantity of books that made chiefly between the eighteen-tens and the eighteen-forties. Now these cantatas are scattered in collections and libraries that have been the object of important musicological studies.

The six cantatas presented in this recording are all drawn from the Mus.Hs.17567 manuscript in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek of Vienna, and were quite probably all composed there around 1710-1712. It is an extremely interesting handwritten-copy collection formed of twelve compositions that are attributed with certainty to Giovanni Bononcini (three), Francesco Conti (three), Antonio Caldara (three), Emanuele d’Astorga (two), and Andrea Stefano Fioré (one). The two symphonies by Caldara (for solo cello) and Giovanni Bononcini are completing the listening of this cd by the Aurata Fonte ensemble, already protagonist of the recording of some great Italian Baroque music discovery (TC670202, TC611990).

With a catalogue of acclaimed albums for Brilliant Classics stretching well into double figures, the Dutch recorder virtuoso Erik Bosgraaf goes back to Bach for his latest release, with an album of arrangements as imaginatively conceived and as stylishly executed as Volume 1 (94296), released in 2011, which won glowing reviews from the international music press. Bach wrote as inventively and idiomatically for the recorder throughout his career as he did for every other instrument at his disposal, but he left no concertos in which the instrument takes the spotlight.

Thus Bosgraaf and his colleagues have attempted to answer the question, what might Bach have done, or could he have done, if he had written concertos for the recorder? They have looked for inspiration to the cantatas, and not only those where Bach composed memorable recorder parts such as the Actus Tragicus. For example, the album’s opening G major concerto is compiled from a tenor aria of dazzling runs in BWV74, followed by the sorrowful opening Sinfonia of BWV12 (in which the oboe originally takes the starring role), and then another tenor aria from BWV81 which graphically illustrates the foaming waves of a stormy sea. In both aria transcriptions, Bosgraaf’s recorder takes over the vocal line, and paints vivid sound pictures with his remarkable palette of tone colors. A second concerto in D major draws its music from similar sources, followed by a Partita which the Dutch musicologist has arranged from movements of the Fifth French Suite. A further concerto is supplied by a relatively ‘straight’ transcription of the familiar (but sublime) A minor Concerto for violin, BWV1041.

First recordings of the complete surviving keyboard works by a forgotten figure of the French Baroque.

Brilliant Classics has revived the names of many composers from obscure corners of history. Few of them have been as buried by the past as Pierre-Claude Foucquet, who was active in Paris in the first half of the 18th century. Yet anyone listening to this first complete recording of his music for harpsichord will surely wonder why. Three volumes survive: two books of Pièces de Clavecin, and a third entitled Caractères de la Paix. This was the first to be published in 1749. By then Foucquet had been organist at the magnificent Church of Saint-Eustache for some years, and he would go on to take up the post of titulaire at Notre Dame. He was following in a distinguished family line, his father and grandfather both having been organists at Saint-Eustache.

Foucquet must have been a richly talented organist and improviser in the French tradition, and this latter quality is abundantly and delightfully preserved by the character pieces which make up these harpsichord suites. They belong to the same tradition as the Pièces de Clavecin of Couperin, d’Anglebert and Rameau, but they have a palette of colour and a dramatic imagination of their own. The third movement of Caractères de la Paix is titled ‘Le Feu’, and it fairly sets the instrument alight with pounding explosions and ribbons of flame, demanding all the resources of both an instrument and interpreter at full stretch.

From 1751 and 1758 respectively, the second and third books are hardly less full of vividly pictorial representations – of chickens and champagne, of figures lamenting and working and praying in a gallery of probably real people whose names are now lost to us but whose personality lives on in the keyboard music of French composers from the time.

This album of Foucquet is a notable addition to the Brilliant Classics discography of Fernando De Luca, which already includes complete surveys of other unfamiliar names from the time such as Jollage, Moyreau and most recently Pierre-Thomas Dufour (96771).

The apogee of the French harpsichord came in the 18th century with the publication of the musical works of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, the two leading representatives of the French harpsichord school. These were followed by numerous livres de clavecin written by a new generation of composers such as Claude Balbastre, Pancrace Royer, Jacques Duphly, and Michel Corrette.

It is within this rococo-galant context, which marked the final glory days of the harpsichord, that we encounter the music of Jean-Baptiste Parant, a composer for whom only scant biographical details are known. Parant’s Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, published in 1762, contains 16 pieces written in the light and carefree rococo style, which makes them a true reflection of the music that would have been heard at this time in the salons of aristocrats and patrons such as the Prince de Conti and Monsieur de La Pouplinière or at the literary salons of Madame du Deffand, Julie Lespinasse, and Madame Geoffrin.

The titles of the pieces allude to persons from Parant’s circle, such as La Angôt and De la Bauve, or to places such as Passy (most probably a reference to the Château de Passy, the residence of the aforementioned important and very wealthy musical patron Alexandre de La Pouplinière) and Lyons (‘La Lionoise’). His sources of inspiration are also to be seen in such evocative titles as ‘Les Cascades’, ‘La Majestueuse’ or ‘La Pétulante’. Running throughout his music are the dances most commonly found in French suites, such as the menuet, rondeau, allemande, gavotte, and lourée.

The young violinist Conor Gricmanis and his early music ensemble Noxwode, have recorded rare and beautiful violin sonatas by the early Italian Baroque composer Marco Uccellini for FHR. His sonatas for violin and continuo contributed to the development of an idiomatic style of writing for the violin (including virtuosic runs, leaps, and forays into high positions), expanding the instrument’s technical capabilities and expressive range. This stylus fantasticus genre is evident in this recording, providing ample opportunities for the soloists and ensemble to personalize their interpretations. On this recording, Gricmanis plays what is believed to be the oldest fully playable violin in the world, a 450 year old Andrea Amati made in 1572.