Celebrating Early Music and Early Music Performance

From Harmonia Mundi - In Bach's time, the exalted place the purely vocal motet had once occupied had already been ceded to the cantata. But alongside this artfully simple ‘functional’ style, Bach perpetuated in his own motets, with incomparable mastery, the tradition handed down by his own ancestors, as preserved in the so-called ‘Old Bach Archive’.

Vocalconsort Berlin was founded in 2003 and made its debut the same year in Monteverdi´s L’Orfeo under the direction of René Jacobs at the Innsbruck Festival. The ensemble specialises in early and high Baroque repertoire, but also interprets Romantic and contemporary music. Under the direction of Marcus Creed, René Jacobs, Jos van Immerseel and Ottavio Dantone, the ensemble has worked with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the Accademia Bizantina. With the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, it has participated since 2006 in the projects of Sasha Waltz & Guests at Radialsystem V, the new venue for interaction of the arts on the Spree. Marcus Creed, artistic director of the SWR Vokalensemble (South West German Radio Choir) since 2003, studied at King’s College Cambridge, Christ Church Oxford and at the Guildhall. From 1977 to 1998 he was chorusmaster at the Deutsche Oper. In 1987 he became artistic director of RIAS Kammerchor, being awarded many international prizes for his recordings. He has formed close working relationships with Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Freiburger Barockorchester and Concerto Köln. His recordings of works by Bruckner, Ives, Nono and Kurtág with the SWR Vokalensemble have received a number of awards from the critics.

From Glossa - One of the many delights coming from Frans Brüggen’s distinguished career has been the understanding which he brings to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – such as here with the St John Passion – whether on the concert platform or on record. Brüggen’s cultured feeling for Bach’s musical structures as much as for its style and expressive content permits a textural clarity enjoyed by few of his directing colleagues. A special wealth of experience in the music of Bach has also been gained by the members of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century across the three decades of its existence and as part of its regular concert series (there have now been over a hundred of these tours!) and with a concentrated opportunity to focus on one work, Bach’s masterpiece was performed and recorded in Spring 2010.

From Glossa - With Tenebrae Antonio Florio continues on his journey of exploration of the Neapolitan Baroque, now appearing on Glossa, with a timely release of Lamentations of Jeremiah from one “known” composer in Cristofaro Caresana, long-valued by Florio (and whose vocal music occupied most of his previous recording in L’Adoriatione de’ Maggi), and another from the succeeding generation at the end of the 17th century in Gaetano Veneziano, a musician taught by Francesco Provenzale. The vocal works on this new recording are scored for a solo singer and this role is taken by a soprano (who comes from Naples herself) in Valentina Varriale, fast becoming a central member of Antonio Florio’s musical organization, (the recently-renamed) I Turchini.

Instrumentalists from I Turchini take the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the Neapolitan style in string music – a Sinfonia and a four-part Sonata – by Veneziano and one of his contemporaries, Giuseppe Antonio Avitrano.

As with so many of Antonio Florio and I Turchini’s performing delights over the years, important musicological assistance for Tenebrae has been provided by Dinko Fabris, the author also of a fascinating article for this new recording of music for the Holy Week.

From Glossa - Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy, like Marc-Antoine Charpentier and later François Couperin in France, brought the musical form of the Lamentations of Jeremiah to a state of dramatic intensity, a complement to the religious ritual which even in the first decade of the 18th century had barely changed since the Middle Ages. One of the special characteristics of Scarlatti’s Lamentations is the skill with which he treats the melodic line, which he reduces to what is bare and essential stylistically, resisting the temptation to indulge himself in operatic writing, preferring instead “madrigalistic” effects.

It was around 1707 that Scarlatti composed his six settings of the Lamentations (two each for the three days leading up to Easter Sunday; although by forming part of the service of Matins they would be sung on the previous evening) and it was not until the Umbrian violinist and director Enrico Gatti went to the Bolognese Eremo di Ronzano with his Ensemble Aurora that these Lamentations received their first complete recording.

The two soloists called upon by Gatti to be backed by his instrumental group (one which includes keyboard player Guido Morini) were soprano Cristina Miatello and tenor Gian Paolo Fagotto. The church music of Alessandro Scarlatti (like his operatic, oratorio and solo cantata work) is receiving increasingly more attention from musicians and the public so the transfer to Glossa of Enrico Gatti’s 1992 recording (including Gatti’s essay on the subject) can be warmly welcomed, as it joins more recent examples of Gatti’s work in Bach and Vivaldi.