Some of the greatest works ever composed were conceived for and inspired by keyboard instruments. Today, however, the splendor of the canonical works for keyboard instruments composed after 1600 — Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s Sonatas and Chopin’s Nocturnes — tends to overshadow works composed earlier, despite there being a rich history of repertoire and a variety of instruments at that earlier time. Corina Marti here not only explores the earliest keyboard music to be composed in Europe but also provides a fascinating insight into a world of virtuoso players and the music composed for them, playing a selection of instruments that are hardly known today: a metal-stringed clavisimbalum (an early form of harpsichord), an upright gut-stringed claviciterium, two organetti (portative organs) of different sizes, and the church organ in Altenbruch in northern Germany with its array of original pipes that date from the fifteenth century.

‘Music for a while / Shall all your cares beguile.’ In this famous song, Purcell invokes the power of music to soothe – at least temporarily – our pain and suffering. But do we really want to be soothed? Or do we prefer to cultivate our melancholy, in the company of Michel Lambert: ‘No, I sing not to charm away my sadness, but rather to maintain it’? In the St John Passion, Bach associates the funereal sweetness of the viol with the death of Christ. Like him, many other composers have chosen the instrument to evoke mourning. The pieces recorded on this album form a frame of melancholy music, just as the Japanese character (Yuu) expresses the gentleness of ‘a person who stands next to someone who is sad’. Through the vector of these melancholy pieces, the Japanese gambist Kaori Uemura makes her viol sing to maintain, but also to console sadness.

The 1750 Project proposes a journey from 1720 to 1750, each stage of which will allow us to discover the richness and specificity of a city’s musical life at a key juncture in its history. For the first episode in the 1750 Project, we stop off in Venice around 1726, at a pivotal moment in the history of music when the meeting of two styles led to an aesthetic turning point. The city, then dominated by Antonio Vivaldi, also welcomed several other leading Italian composers, including the Neapolitan Nicola Porpora and the Milanese Giuseppe Sammartini, who was about to revolutionize the world of wind instruments. The city on the lagoon was a cultural hub and a mandatory destination in the itinerary of many nobles and musicians from northern Europe who wished to round off their training and culture. Several German composers, including Pisendel, Quantz, Hasse and Handel, passed through Venice in the early eighteenth century before returning to their native regions to spread the gospel of Italian music. Let us therefore, for a short while, put ourselves in the shoes of an imaginary traveller discovering the musical life of Venice around 1726.

Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was a rare haven of peace during the Thirty Years’ War thanks to its geographical location. Many people, including artists and musicians, fled there from the horrors of plague and war. Heinrich Albert, a pupil of Heinrich Schütz (his cousin) and Johann Hermann Schein, the Thomaskantor in Leipzig, was appointed cathedral organist in the city in 1630. His garden hut, overgrown with pumpkin vines and suitably dubbed the ‘pumpkin hut’ (Kürbishütte), became the meeting place of the Königsberg Circle of Poets: a refuge and a space for cutting-edge creativity, spared from direct involvement in the war. Five musical tableaux, depicting different stages in the war, take the listener on an emotional journey and reflect the everyday emotions people of the period experienced: hope, fear, a longing for peace – but also despair and wrestling with faith in the face of the devastation of war.

"The harpsichord maker of the greatest eminence ... was Joannes Daniel Dulcken". With this quote from Charles Burney, Dulcken stands as one of the most important Flemish harpsichord makers of the 18th century in the tradition of the Ruckers-Couchet dynasty of the previous century. This recording explores the sound the magnificent single-manual Dulcken harpsichord from 1747, now in the collection of the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp on permanent loan at the Museum Vleeshuis. Korneel Bernolet proposes an imaginary Grand Tour of the year 1747, with music written in or around the year the instrument was built; as if a Flemish harpsichordist of the time put some first publications of foreign works on the music stand of the Antwerp harpsichord and started to play.

The early nineteenth century was an era of great stylistic changes in music, as composers searched for new forms of expression and tonal possibilities, which spurred rapid innovation in the field of instrument design and manufacturing. A larger sound spectrum and greater variety of technical possibilities became a defined ideal. Ludwig van Beethoven and Friedrich Kuhlau were musical giants of their time, both seeking to exploit fully the potential brought by these new developments. Beethoven’s Serenade bends the boundaries of Classicism with impulsive dynamic changes and contrasting motifs, while Kuhlau’s Grande Sonate Concertante eagerly explores a more Romantic aesthetic, containing an expressive freedom in its virtuosic writing and rich harmonic textures. The juxtaposition of Beethoven and Kuhlau’s music on this recording is inspired by the two composers' first and only encounter in Baden on the 2nd of September 1825. This charming moment in music history is remembered with a canon Beethoven wrote on the text 'Kühl, nicht lau' (cool, not lukewarm), a friendly pun on Kuhlau's name.

Classical Music

Can one imagine a more unusual and colorful character than Baron Emanuele d’Astorga? Reading the various biographies concerning him, one has the impression he lived a thousand lives… He fled Sicily around 1707 and met the Neapolitan poet and librettist Domenico Lalli, hailed by Goldoni as a ‘poetic genius,’ who was to collaborate with many of the most important composers of the time, including Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Vivaldi, Albinoni, and Caldara. The two men then forged a firm friendship in their travels across Italy with Rome as their destination. The ensemble Les Abbagliati has devised a programme built around these two protagonists. Three cantatas by d’Astorga and Giovanni Battista Bononcini respectively, recorded here for the first time on album, alternate with instrumental pieces by composers who had a close relationship with Lalli.

Today there are different types of the instrument known in German-speaking countries as the Hackbrett, mainly associated with local traditional music, such as the cimbalom in Eastern Europe, the santūr in Persia, etc. The history of European music has also known moments when this type of instrument was appreciated in art music, thanks especially to its sonority, which predestined it for the so-called ‘sensitive’ (empfindsam) style. This recording is devoted to the salterio, the Italian form of the instrument, for which a considerable number of works were composed in the eighteenth century. Margit Übellacker and Jürgen Banholzer present a selection of world premiere recordings of sonatas for salterio and basso continuo. These reflect the galant style of north Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Johann Sebastian Bach left us three sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. He made various transcriptions of the gamba sonata in G major, one of which was of the last movement as a trio sonata for organ. Several movements of the six organ trio sonatas themselves are also reworkings of previously composed material from his cantatas, organ and chamber works. This practice inspired the Bach for Two program by Romina Lischka and Marnix De Cat, in which they have assembled the most beautiful combinations of viola da gamba and organ in both original and arranged versions of Bach’s chorale preludes and trios. Bach is a master of both the head and the heart. With text and melody as his starting point, he created small musical worlds in his chorale preludes for organ and takes the listener on the most varied of inner journeys. To experience musical joy, to find inner peace through every possible emotion, to be comforted in one’s search or sorrow, to be moved to the depths of one’s being — this is the art of Bach, the magician of sound.

Which ‘Clavier’ did Bach have in mind? Apart from a ‘grand clavessin’ by Michael Mietke, which he probably had at his disposal at the court in Cöthen, there is evidence that he knew instruments by Gottfried Silbermann. A harpsichord with a 16’ stop by Johann Heinrich Harrass (today in the Berlin Musikinstrumenten-Museum) is also assumed to have been in Bach’s possession. A large instrument similar to this supposed ‘Bach harpsichord’ was built by Zacharias Hildebrandt, who was closely associated with the composer during his Leipzig years. Since Bach travelled to Hamburg on various occasions, it can be assumed that he was familiar with the famous harpsichord building tradition of that city, represented by the workshops of Zell, Fleischer and Hass. Since he was known for using rich and unusual registrations on the organ, we can assume that he used equally flamboyant registrations on the harpsichord. Cristiano Holtz has therefore chosen a large instrument by Matthias Kramer after Christian Zell (Hamburg 1728).

With the world premiere recording of a rediscovered Stabat Mater, a late work by the Bohemian master František Tuma, Pluto-Ensemble and Hathor Consort expand the Baroque discography with an emotionally gripping work. The version presented here, one of Tuma’s five settings of the text, long lay forgotten in the Abbey library in Ottobeuren, until Marnix De Cat (artistic director of the Pluto-Ensemble) rediscovered this gem. It is heard here with the Requiem in F minor by H. I. F. Biber and instrumental works by Biber, his teacher J. H. Schmelzer and his Salzburg colleague A. C. Clamer. Animam gementem cano (‘I hymn the grieving soul’ – the first two words quote the Stabat Mater text) takes us on a journey through many of life's most significant moments: we are confronted with life and death, but also with our personal path towards consciousness. The programme is intended not only to provide comfort for the ‘captive grieving soul’ of every flesh-and-blood human being, but also to offer every curious music lover a voyage of discovery.

Naples was in the mid-18th century the third largest European city and one of the greatest centers of political, commercial and cultural influence. The conservatoires there were founded by religious orders and were originally intended as charitable institutions for the accommodation and education of orphans, but soon became real centers of musical education and performance; many leading composers were pupils and teachers there and so contributed to the founding of the Neapolitan School. Porpora and Hasse are the greatest representatives of the Neapolitan style and both settled in Venice before rising to international fame. Their writing was strongly influenced by opera and reflects the Italian taste of the time; it is also present in their religious compositions. Les Muffatti and the South African countertenor Clint van der Linde present works of exceptional expressive power, with Hasse’s Hostes Averni and Porpora’s Nisi Dominus being recorded here for the first time.

Dum vixi tacui; mortua dulce cano: “While I lived I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly.” Found in the portrait of the sixteenth-century lute maker Gaspar Tieffenbrucker, these words, spoken by the imaginary tone wood used for centuries in the manufacture of string instruments, fittingly depict its double life. This recording celebrates a historical instrument, whose voice time did not manage to silence: the so-called “Presbyter” (although in actual fact anonymous) lute, possibly made in Padua in 1595. One of the oldest playable lutes in existence, it was restored to its likely first configuration (a seven-course lute) and still features its original soundboard and back. Inspired by the cosmopolitan nature of the anthologies of lute music compiled at the time of the instrument’s presumed completion, Michal Gondko showcases its expressive potential with a diverse program, placing emphasis on high-quality yet largely neglected repertoire, most of which has not been recorded to date.

The city of Cracow, until 1596 the political, commercial and cultural capital of Poland, rose to prominence in Central Europe in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty. Although repertoire both performed and composed in Cracow exists from before to that period, it is the manuscripts from the first half of the fifteenth century that capture an impression of the city’s soundscape in a period when it was reportedly “gripped by the greatest enthusiasm” for music. On the one hand, they reveal an intense involvement with Italian and French art music, and on the other, rare glimpses of local musical production ranging from simple, often archaic-sounding polyphony to more complex works of Mikolaj Radomski, a mysterious Polish composer whose music is not known from other sources. The recorded programme is a musical panorama of a vibrant early fifteenth-century city in the East of Latin Europe which, six centuries later, still enchants with its medieval-renaissance aura.