Julien Chauvin meets up with one of the great harpsichordists and fortepianists of our time, Andreas Staier, who is a leading interpreter of the Mozart concertos. He presents us with his vision of the Piano Concerto no.23 and its famous Adagio, ‘one of the most heart-rending slow movements ever written by Mozart. Performers often tend to take it too slowly, certainly thinking that this will accentuate the tragic side, but Julien Chauvin and I spontaneously agreed on a slightly faster tempo, which respects the basic pulse of this movement in Siciliana rhythm. When you start with the right tempo, it’s amazing how the whole discourse comes together perfectly, in a very logical and simple manner’, says Staier, who plays a magnificent instrument by Christoph Kern after a 1790 fortepiano by Anton Walter, the great maker of Mozart’s time. Also on the program is the Symphony no.40, in which, says Julien Chauvin, ‘Mozart explores types of writing that he pushes to their most extreme limits. This is the case in the finale, where we find a succession of dissonant disjunct intervals at the opening of the development which, on closer inspection, present us with the full chromatic scale (except for G natural, the symphony’s tonic). And so the twelve-note series was born!’

The famous Marquise de Pompadour, favorite of King Louis XV for nearly twenty years, reigned over the arts at court. Rameau, whom she particularly admired, was omnipresent. He received a specific commission for the Théâtre des Petits Appartements, where the Marquise herself sang in the midst of a troupe of amateurs and professionals: the result was Les Surprises de l’Amour, from which the ensemble Les Surprises takes its name. Under the expert direction of Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas, the group presents here the very first recording of this ballet in its original 1748 version, including the prologue entitled Le Retour d’Astrée, and couples it with another commission for one of the court’s annual residences at Fontainebleau: Les Sybarites (1753), an acte de ballet whose principal couple is reminiscent of the King himself and his favorite. A first-rate vocal line-up brings these two works back to life: Marie Perbost, Eugénie Lefebvre, Jehanne Amzal, Clément Debieuvre, David Witczak, Philippe Estèphe.

With Van Gogh in Me, the Netherlands Chamber Choir presents an experience in which the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt come to life to the music of the great Romantic and early 20th century composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Mahler... and, in a world premiere, a transcription for a cappella choir of Satie's first Gymnopédie. Originally written for solo piano, this work, which is known and played throughout the world, finds a new magical and celestial dimension in this new version for choir.

Mentioning the name of Van Gogh immediately evokes in each of us a color, a landscape, a sensation... Hence the idea of creating an immersive audiovisual experience: the choir approached an Italian collective, fuse*, to link images and sounds to the emotions of the musicians and the audience... fuse* developed an algorithm based on the works of Van Gogh and Klimt by recording their styles, colors, brushstrokes... then, during the concert, collects the sound of the choir but also biometric data that analyses the emotional state of the audience, the singers and the conductor, and creates visuals in real time, an astonishing show of colors and shapes that mixes sound, images and emotions... The visual of the album is inspired by these experiments.

Following his acclaimed first recording for Alpha Classics, Saga, the German baritone Konstantin Krimmel continues to tell us stories, with a program focusing on Zauberoper or ‘magic opera’. Accompanied by the Hofkapelle München orchestra conducted by Rüdiger Lotter, Krimmel explores operas by Mozart, Salieri and Gluck, alongside less well-known titles by Paul Wranitzky and Peter von Winter: spectacular musical comedies from the eighteenth-century Viennese repertory, with their enchanted fairytale universe. Konstantin Krimmel, with German-Romanian roots, first got in touch with music at the St. George's Choir Boys in Ulm and from this moment on, the fascination of music never left him. At the age of 21, he began his vocal studies with Prof. Teru Yoshihara, which the singer completed with distinction in 2020. In the meantime he is being coached by Tobias Truniger in Munich.

Simon-Pierre Bestion writes: “I discovered Rachmaninoff’s ‘Vespers’ singing in a choir, and the work made a genuine emotional impact on me! This music gives off an impression of naturalness and ‘simplicity’, yet in fact its architecture is complex and innovative for its time in the quasi-orchestral treatment of the voices. I wanted to place the work in a liturgical context that I conceived by drawing my inspiration from the Orthodox ceremonies I have been lucky enough to attend in Russia and Romania. The special characteristic and the beauty of this Vigil service (which in the Orthodox churches includes both Vespers and Matins) is that it accompanies the prayers of the faithful from dusk until sunrise.”

This album is the story of a dialogue between two voices: the singing voice and the voice of the cello, which has always been considered the instrument closest to the human voice. It is also the story of two worlds and the meeting of two cultures, East and West. The East we encounter here is Armenia, its thousand-year-old culture, its music and its songs, which resonate with the compositions of Bach, Kodály and Ligeti.

For the cellist Astrig Siranossian, vocal melody and the sound of the cello are two voices that she has always combined in her concerts, coupling a dance from a solo cello suite by Bach with an Armenian song that she performs with great sensitivity. East and West, Armenia and Europe: it is her roots and her emotions that the young cellist shares with us here. This recording was made on two different cellos, according to the repertory: an instrument by Francesco Ruggieri dating from 1676 and the famous Giovanni Gagliano of 1756 known as the ‘Sir John Barbirolli’.

The Orpheum Foundation, which has been supporting young musicians for over thirty years, has joined forces with Alpha Classics for a series of recordings devoted to Mozart’s concertos, regardless of instrument. The leading soloists of the young generation have been selected to appear under the artistic direction of Howard Griffiths, a renowned Mozart conductor, who considers that performing his music is like ‘looking in a mirror: you can hear if everything is in place, musicality, intonation, rhythm, phrasing’. These albums will reveal the great virtuosos of tomorrow and immortalize their success in this implacable test. Ludvig Gudim plays the Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, K. 218 (with cadenzas by Joachim); Joséphine Olech plays the Flute Concerto No. 1 in G Major, K. 313; and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason plays the Piano Concerto No. 6 in B-Flat Major, K. 238.

Barbara Hannigan writes: “Sehnsucht, a central and nearly untranslatable word of the Viennese fin-de-siècle period, referring to aspects of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a collective Sehnsucht arose, in performers and audiences alike. Sehnsucht: Live in Rotterdam, played to the empty concert hall of De Doelen. We decided to issue the recording as an album, recognizing that the performance also represents continuity and mentorship through music. Both young Dutch artists, conductor Rolf Verbeek and baritone Raoul Steffani are associated with the initiatives Equilibrium and Momentum, and joined me and the Camerata RCO for this intimate journey… In Sehnsucht, we explore two song cycles of Berg, written shortly after Mahler’s 4th Symphony. All these works are presented in special arrangements for chamber ensemble. The Berg songs are expanded from their original voice and piano to a dialogue of new colors and instrumentation. Mahler’s 4th Symphony is reduced to an intimate soloistic journey, a tender conversation.”

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms.

Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigor.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet, and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel, a dialogue between the voices of the cello and the piano.

REVIEW:

The Pulitzer prize-winning Caroline Shaw (b.1982) has a gift for sensuous, delicate music in which a sturdy sense of form, often based on nature or architecture, is ever evident. She blends rough with smooth in a manner that manages to be challenging but enticing.

A solo piano piece, Gustave le Gray, takes Chopin’s A minor Mazurka, Op 17, as a starting point, intriguingly expanded with fresh material. Boris Kerner, for cello and eerie-sounding flower pots, pays homage to the German physicist who invented three-phase traffic theory. That description hardly does justice to the haunting music created here. The title work, The Wheel, for piano and cello, was commissioned by I Giardini. Guided by musical contours of the baroque, it turns beguilingly towards contemplation and demands attentive listening.

-- The Guardian (UK)

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) left two very different versions of his tragédie en musique Zoroastre: the first, in 1749, suffered from cabals and the work was withdrawn from the repertory. Rameau gave it a thoroughgoing revision in 1756. At this time, he was at the height of his powers. Melody, harmony, orchestration and choral writing no longer held any secrets for him. Zoroastre brought still further innovation. For the first time, he dispensed with a prologue, and turned the overture into a philosophical ‘program’, the struggle between day and night, between good and evil.

The 1749 version is entirely governed by avant-garde ideas; Zoroastre resembles Tamino in The Magic Flute, but two generations earlier. This disconcerted some of the audience: Zoroastre was a moral, social and philosophical opera. The 1749 version has never been revived in modern times. Alexis Kossenko takes up the challenge with zest, accompanied by an outstanding cast including Véronique Gens, Jodie Devos, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Mathias Vidal and Tassis Christoyannis.

REVIEW:

For listeners more used to English Baroque, this example of high French Baroque will require a big adjustment: every element – aria, duet, chorus, instrumental interlude – is short and thick with text; the feminine ending of each musical line reinforces the Gallic character of the whole.

The chorus and line-up of soloists is first-rate, with a suitably menacing Abramane (Tassis Christoyannis) and a witchy Érinice (Véronique Gens); with a gorgeously pure-toned Amélite (Jodie Devos), and an expressive and clarion-voiced Zoroastre (Reinoud van Mechelen). The instrumental numbers (notably the sarabands) are beautifully done, with the weather – lashings of thunder and lightning – forcefully dramatised throughout.

-- BBC Music Magazine

For the fourth volume in this collection dedicated to Mozart concertos by the younger generation of performers, the Orpheum Foundation and Alpha Classics present the Concertos nos. 23 and 24 (K488 & 491) performed by the British pianist Julian Trevelyan, who was awarded three prizes at the Géza Anda Competition in Zurich in 2021 and, at the age of sixteen, became the youngest-ever prizewinner at the Marguerite Long Competition in Paris in 2015. ‘Mozart’s music is full of life, humor and enjoyment. My life wouldn’t feel fulfilled if I didn’t have his music’, says the young musician, who is accompanied here by one of the most eminent Mozartian maestros, Christian Zacharias, conducting the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Flanked by a spectacular cast featuring the role debuts of Nicky Spence and Simona Šaturová, the conductor Ben Glassberg (Music Director of the Opéra de Rouen Normandie) once again demonstrates his Mozartian temperament. This late masterpiece (written at the same time as Die Zauberflöte) places his musical genius at the service of a plot centered on the complexity of emotions, passionate love and the absurd disaster of betrayal. Scottish tenor Nicky Spence has quickly established himself as one of the leading talents of his generation. Equally at home in the operas of Strauss, Janacek, and Wagner, he was named Young Singer of the Year 2015 by the International Opera Awards and, in 2022, Personality of the Year by BBC Music Magazine. The Slovak soprano Simona Šaturová, an active presence on the international scene, enjoys a high reputation as a Mozartian. The Pope even invited her to sing the Mass in C Minor in the Sistine Chapel. She has several recordings to her credit, and her flexible and luminous voice has won her such prizes as the Thalia Award in 2021.

Véronique Gens’s version of La Voix humaine has been eagerly awaited! This ‘lyric tragedy in one act’ might have been written for her, so ideally suited are her feeling for language and her dramatic intensity to Poulenc’s monologue on a text by Jean Cocteau, composed in 1958. This is a far cry from the ‘light’ Poulenc of the 1920s. Cocteau paid him the highest compliment: ‘Dear Francis, you have fixed, once and for all, the way to speak my text.’ Véronique Gens confesses that she had always wanted to perform and record this piece; now she has achieved her ambition, in close partnership with the Orchestre National de Lille under its music director Alexandre Bloch. Also featured on the album is the Sinfonietta: this is in fact a genuine symphony, but, as Nicolas Southon writes, ‘there is no denying that the work – commissioned by the BBC in 1947 – has a freshness and a freedom of tone that justify its title’.

REVIEW:

La voix humaine is a monodrama. Gens had long wished to sing and record the piece, and was asked to perform it many times. She waited till she was ready for such a demanding piece, a work she must carry for forty minutes of, at times, very intense solo singing. Poulenc’s favourite soprano Denise Duval performed it first. She almost co-composed the piece.

It is clear that Madame Gens has really thought through the work and what it requires. Her decision to wait to be certain before she was ready to tackle this piece would seem to have paid off handsomely. This is an outstanding interpretation, the right artist recording the right work at the right time. That top C is nailed alright, and at the few other moments of “real singing” her familiar sound and line are as eloquent as usual. But the rest, the ‘heightened talking’, is equally persuasive, realistic and moving. Of course, that realism is also distressing, as we eavesdrop on deep personal anguish. At one point, Elle confesses to a suicide attempt. Some listeners will surely find the work rather harrowing, not one for everyday listening. But if one of the duties of art is to portray life in all its grimness as well as all its glory, then La voix humaine should be heard.

-- MusicWeb International

There is no piece of music that the Patricia Kopatchinskaja cannot play in a way that unwinds your expectations and forces you to hear it anew.

This new recording marks the reformation of the legendary duo of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say. The Moldovan violinist says the Turkish pianist ‘is a volcano, with an indomitable strength and energy’, while he emphasizes the ‘freedom’ that her ‘spontaneous playing’ exudes: ‘At each concert, she creates a different character and tells a new story.’ The explosive duo presents a program devoted to Bartók’s Violin Sonata no.1 (‘a marvel from start to finish, one of his finest works’, says Patkop), Brahms’s D minor Sonata (‘I imagine a feather in flight at the opening of the sonata’) and Janáček’s Sonata, ‘an extreme work, wounded and heart-rending’.

REVIEW:

There is no piece of music — works by Tchaikovsky or Schoenberg, or an old folk tune — that the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja cannot play in a way that unwinds your expectations and forces you to hear it anew. So it is with the latest chapter in her partnership with the intrepid Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say. The Janacek sonata that opens this recording and the Bartok Sonata No. 1 that closes it clearly play to the duo’s strengths: curiosity, an impatience with convention and exceptional technique. They pounce, almost too eagerly, on each of the Janacek’s lightning-quick mood changes; and in the Bartok, a piece in which the two instruments work virtually at cross purposes, they achieve an ESP-like mutual responsiveness.

Their rendition of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, however, is the paramount achievement here. Resisting the urge to swath this wistful music in a big luxuriant tone, Kopatchinskaja adopts a timbre that’s sometimes bristly, sometimes gossamer-light. She and Say push the music to extremes: The quiet moments seethe and the outbursts approach violence, but it’s all done with impeccable control. The piece sounds bereft and heartbroken even as it avoids the clichés of Romanticism. It’s not the way I’d want to hear it played every time, but it’s invaluable for offering a glimpse deep into a work you might have thought predictable, which is exactly what these imaginative musicians are after.

-- New York Times (David Weininger)

Although he already has a rich stage and recording career behind him, this is Tim Mead’s first solo album. ‘Juxtaposing the sacred and secular aspects of Vivaldi’s work, this program explores the earthly passion of the divine and the heavenly beauty of love’, says the English countertenor. ‘When they are placed side by side, his highly individual approach reveals that these two worlds are closely intertwined, in music at once astonishing and highly virtuosic.’ With his partners from Arcangelo, directed by Jonathan Cohen, we hear him in the famous Nisi Dominus and the no less celebrated cantata Cessate, omai, cessate, alongside the Salve Regina RV618 and Amor, hai vinto.

The first performance of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Zurich Tonhalle took place on 14 January 1924, to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Under the direction of Walter, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Böhm and Karajan (to name but a few!), the orchestra has since given many performances of this monumental work which was its composer’s first great success and which the conductor Hermann Levi considered ‘the most significant composition since the death of Beethoven’. The orchestra’s Brucknerian tradition is perpetuated with this cycle conducted by its music director Paavo Järvi, which will continue with the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies until 2024, the year of Bruckner’s bicentenary.

The Esterházy princes’ love of hunting prompted their ‘house composer’ Joseph Haydn to make extensive use of the horn. At the time, this was still the hand horn (Waldhorn), limited to ‘natural’ harmonics, since it did not yet have valves. Between 1761 and 1790 there were a total eighteen horn players in princely service, but no trumpeters! So, in his Symphony no.48 of 1769, for example, Haydn used the horns as ‘replacement trumpets’, instructing them to play an octave higher than usual. The horns strike a flamboyant note in Haydn’s symphonies, which is probably why an anonymous copyist of no.59 dubbed it the ‘Fire’ Symphony. The Symphony no.31 ‘Horn Signal’ (1765) gives its name to this thirteenth volume in the Haydn2032 Edition. The four horns ring out majestically and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico perform this music in their characteristically impetuous style, under the fiery direction of Giovanni Antonini.

Schoenberg's famous Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem in which a woman announces to her companion that she is pregnant by another man, is presented here in its version for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann: 'This brilliant pianist, the creator of many of Schoenberg's pieces, brings the story to life by entrusting the dialogue between the man and the woman to cello and violin alone', says Thomas Dieltjens, pianist of the group Het Collectief. Anton Webern made a transcription of Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie Op.9 in 1923 for the same forces as Pierrot Lunaire. This miniature orchestra, consisting of just two wind instruments (flute, clarinet), two string instruments (violin, cello) and a piano, 'preserves great clarity in the polyphonic line'. Het Collectif asked the young composer Tim Mulleman to transcribe for the same ensemble the Piano Sonata Op. 1 of Alban Berg, who himself made arrangements of some of his own works, including the famous Adagio from his Kammerkonzert, also presented in this programme.

This album contains a selection of key a cappella choral works by Erkki-Sven Tüür. For the Estonian composer born in 1959, words and music are intimately linked. The number of syllables in a word, the position of the tonic accent, and the word as a cultural phenomenon with a definite meaning are of essential importance. This can be heard in the Kyrie of his Missa Brevis (2013) where, like a spiral, the polyphony of the voices is transformed into a chordal texture at the beginning of the ‘Christe eleison’, and then dissolves into individual voices at the second ‘Kyrie eleison’.

Canticum Canticorum Caritatis (2020) is inspired by St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. Tüür dedicated this work to Endrik Üksvärav and Collegium Musicale, the performers on this album. The multidimensional Omnia Mutantur (2020) possesses an extremely clear structure, interweaving the famous thoughts of Ovid and Virgil about the transient nature of all things. Triglosson Trishagion (2008), indebted to the Orthodox tradition and sung in Estonian, Russian and Greek, and Wanderer’s Evening Song (2001) complete this program, which is characterized by a meditative, interiorized approach to the composer.

REVIEW:

Erkki-Sven Tüür is one of the most important Estonian composers of the 20th/21st century, and this album pays outstanding tribute to him with an insight into his work for a cappella choir.

The Collegium Musicale under Endrik Üksvärä succeeds again and again in disentangling the dense sound textures of Tüür’s music, transforming them into a floating sound of delicate intimacy, which now and then can also be very expressive and decisive – for example in the Credo of the Missa Brevis.

The album bears the title of the most recent work on this recording – Canticum canticorum caritatis from 2020 – in which the central concept of caritas is the musical and interpretive focus.

The last work on the recording – Rändaja õhtulaul/Wanderer’s Nightsong – is no less expressive, with recourse to Gregorian chant. Here, too, the Collegium Musicale hits the mood right on the nose time and again: the trembling dreams, the calls from eternity, wrapped in mystically suggestive interpretations.

-- Pizzicato

‘So Romantique!’ illustrates the ‘profoundly sentimental’ side of French opera from the 1830s to the 1900s, which gradually came to be judged overwrought and was condemned to partial oblivion. ‘I am convinced that this is because the principals of interpretation were lost’, says the tenor Cyrille Dubois. ‘I have therefore put together this programme, which gives pride of place to rarities while highlighting the theatrical character and the use of registers so emblematic of the French ténor de grâce, in the hope of restoring this precious French heritage to its former glory.’ The sleuthing skills of the Palazzetto Bru Zane have assembled these treasures by Bizet, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Auber, Halévy, Donizetti, Thomas and Delibes, the less well-known Godard, Dubois and Silver, and the virtually unknown Luce-Varlet and Clapisson. With the Orchestre National de Lille conducted by Pierre Dumoussaud, the French tenor deploys the full range of his artistry, the impressive high notes, the luminous tone and the graceful phrasing that is ‘so Cyrille’!

The 'Dissonance' Quartet is probably the best-known of the set of six Mozart wrote between 1782 and 1785 as a tribute to Haydn. It owes its nickname to the strange clashes of the slow introduction in C minor. Almost a century later, the thirty-year-old Tchaikovsky wrote his Quartet no.1, op.11, whose second movement, which moved Tolstoy to tears, was inspired by a folk tune that the composer heard a housepainter whistling. The musicians of the Esmé Quartet chose these two pieces because they love their respective Andante cantabile movements. The four young women also decided to put the spotlight on one of their compatriots, the South Korean composer Soo Yeon Lyuh, who in 2016 wrote Yessori, 'sound of the past', for the Kronos Quartet. She explains: 'I first got used to playing the piano and the violin. So, later, when I encountered Korean traditional music, its relative pitch relationships and fluid rhythmic cycles felt completely new.'

Mozart’s Requiem was not performed in Paris until 1804, in a version slightly different from the composer’s original score. The press reported a triumph. That same year also saw the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte – who had brought back a pronounced taste for Italian music from his Mediterranean conquests. He appointed the Neapolitan Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) as his maître de chapelle and commissioned him to write the music for his coronation: a Solemn Mass in B flat major. The Palazzetto Bru Zane has produced the modern edition of the work that is recorded here.

Aside from the sumptuous events of 1804, the other year that links Napoleon to Mozart is 1841, when the Requiem was heard once more, this time at Les Invalides as Napoleon’s remains entered the building for their final burial. Sandrine Piau, Chantal Santon, Eléonore Pancrazi, Mathias Vidal and Thomas Dolié are the soloists in this programme, with Julien Chauvin conducting his ensemble Le Concert de la Loge and the Namur Chamber Choir.

Hervé Niquet resurrects Ariane et Bacchus (1696), using for the first time the exact performing forces and layout of the Paris Opéra orchestra in 1700 and thus giving us a historically informed version of this tragédie en musique by Marin Marais. The latter became a viol player at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1676, just as his mentor Lully's Atys triumphed there. Lully subsequently initiated him into the skills of operatic composition, and Ariane et Bacchus was premiered nine years after the older man's death. This production, made possible by the support of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, was performed in concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to great acclaim in 2022, when Diapason wrote that the work was 'deservedly rescued from oblivion' and was 'magnified by a sober and telling interpretation from Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, in perfect consonance with a remarkable cast', featuring such luminaries as Judith van Wanroij, Véronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, Hélène Carpentier, Marie Perbost, Matthieu Lécroart, David Witczak, Tomislav Lavoie and Philippe Estèphe.

REVIEW:

The singers are largely splendid. I have praised Judith Van Wanroij, Veronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, and Matthieu Lecroart on previous occasions, in wildly varying repertory (by such composers as Gretry, Felicien David, Gounod, and Saint-Saens). Here they offer exemplary renderings, never allowing concern for the music to interfere with their attention to text or vice-versa. Some of the low-voiced males are a little thin at the bottom end, but that’s not unusual these days in the opera world.

Some of the singers take more than one role (there’s a long prologue, with entirely different roles than the rest of the opera), so you’ll want to follow the libretto, which is given in the booklet in French and good English. If you don’t follow the libretto, you might easily be misled when a singer keeps mentioning the name of a character: s/he is actually often speaking of her/himself. Juno, for one, loves to describe her feelings in the third person. The effect, in her case, strikes me as properly haughty. Fortunately, the various singers have distinctive enough voices and interpretive manners that I gradually learned to tell them apart without recourse to the libretto. Actually, one of the wonderful things about French Baroque opera is that the musical numbers are constantly attractive, with a dance or march or pantomime scene always around the corner. And the phrase structure is often unpredictable, unlike the foursquareness of much music of the late 1700s and early 1800s. So you could, I suppose, listen to Marais’s opera without looking at the libretto at all (or even thinking about the rather episodic plot) and still have a fine time and enjoy many surprises.

Still, the experience is that much richer if you know what Junon or Adraste (to use their French names) is up to at a given moment.

Wow, there’s a whole ‘nother side to Marais that I knew nothing about!

-- American Record Guide

Under the artistic direction of Nicolas Altstaedt, this multi-award winning series in collaboration with the Lockenhaus Festival continues to bring to light great works of chamber music by composers who are already well known or still awaiting discovery. Schoenberg was in his early seventies when he composed his String Trio op. 45 in 1946, completing it after suffering a terrible heart attack. He told Thomas Mann that the trio reflected his physical and psychological condition of that period. The composer Constantin Regamey, born in Kiev in 1907, is little known. A Swiss of Polish descent, he was also a pianist, music critic and writer, who was appointed lecturer in Indian philology at Warsaw University in 1936. He joined the Polish Resistance in 1942 and it was at this time that he wrote his Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano.

During the Carnival of Venice in 1637, a play ‘rappresentata in musica’ was opened to the public for the first time – a success. Opera was born and spread like wildfire. Venice had the largest number of theaters in the world. In 1677, the Teatro Sant’Angelo opened its doors on the campo of the same name. Tiny, chaotic, cheap and extremely productive, it was renowned for its musicians and its sets. This effervescence owes much to the figure of Vivaldi who, from 1705 onwards, regularly premiered his operas there and acted (with his father) as impresario. His own Arsilda, L’incoronazione di Dario and La verità in cimento triumphed there, but he also invited composers such as the young Fortunato Chelleri and Giovanni Alberto Ristori. The mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet and her partners in Le Consort pay tribute to all these composers with a flamboyant program that mixes famous arias and world premieres – no fewer than twelve of them!

REVIEW:

Venice’s Sant’Angelo Theatre opened its doors to the public in 1677. Though never the grandest of the Serenissima’s opera houses, it nonetheless attracted important names, including Antonio Vivaldi. Alongside a selection of Vivaldi arias, this album includes a dozen first recordings unveiling other composers who trod the theater’s boards. Spanning the gamut of Baroque affects, the program contrasts frothy arias with tragic outpourings and displays of vocal fireworks.

Adèle Charvet dispatches the showpieces with agility and bravura, but her velvety voice is particularly well suited to the pathos arias which are eloquently articulated; just occasionally her vibrato wavers a little intrusively. She’s superbly supported by Ensemble Le Consort who, under the brilliant young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, perform with fire, passion and breathtaking virtuosity.

-- BBC Music Magazine