Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 8

This is a compilation of superb concerti–six in all–taken from four of remarkable violinist Andrew Manze's previously released CDs. The "Tempesta di mare" of Vivaldi is chock-full of picturesque sounds of nature familiar from the composer's Four Seasons; his Sinfonia for strings, though without a violin soloist, is a veritable festival of strings textures. The two Handel Concerti Grossi remain perfect examples of the genre, with a full string section offering fun-filled, energetic, and beautiful accounts of this music, and the Bach concerto for two violins (one of the few he wrote for violins and not harpsichords) brings out the virtuoso in each player. The Geminiani, based on a sonata by the composer's teacher, Corelli, is a study in darkness and light, mellowness and drama. All the performances are glorious. Those who have not become familiar with the playing of Manze, the finest Baroque violinist in the world, should buy this CD immediately; a desire for his others will certainly follow.

Robert Levine

According to his friend Albert Stadler, Schubert's celebrated 'Trout' Quintet was based, at the request of the patron who commissioned it, on an earlier piece by Hummel for this unusual combination of instruments. Given the respective dates of Schubert's work and of Hummel's op.87, the latter was probably not Schubert's model; but its reputation as one of Hummel's finest compositions is amply justified here in this highly appropriate coupling.

J.S. Bach's favorite son–apparently a drunk and a difficult man–wrote handsome music of great rhythmic and harmonic variety, which this CD highlights. The harpsichord concerto is very rich, with the soloist and orchestra bickering back and forth nicely. The two Sinfonias differ in temperament: the D major is formal and elegant; the F major is more jumpy and entertaining. Similarly, the two adagios and fugues recorded here differ greatly. The one in F minor dazzles us by its close, while the D minor is severe but equally interesting. W.F. Bach sounds little like either his father or his better-known brother, C.P.E. Bach. He's quirkier and not at all predictable. The disc is full of surprises.

Robert Levine

The Rosary Sonatas is one of the most unusual collections of violin music ever assembled and it is this work on which Biber's present-day fame rests. Calling for a different violin tuning (scordatura) in each of its 15 Sonatas - all played here on the same Amati instrument - the full set is a triumph of Baroque invention and 17th-century virtuoso style. The Gramophone Award winning partnership of Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr meets this challenge with dazzling results.

The spirit of the variation. A little over forty years separate Brahms’s Fourth Symphony from Schoenberg’s Variations op.31: little enough for two sound-worlds so radically divergent! Yet a certain conscious classicism in the handling of variation forms (the chaconne in Brahms, balanced serialism in Schoenberg) and a common affiliation – to Bach – link these masterpieces of Romanticism and dodecaphony. Is there really such a sharp divide between them?

Caldara, Venice and the oratorio… Imported to Venice almost seventy years after its birth, from 1690 the oratorio enjoyed a powerful revival in the City of the Doges - thanks to Caldara. His forty-odd contributions to the genre asserted themselves as key works at the turn of the 18th century, among which Magdalena at the Feet of Christ was to become a kind of standard-bearer. Within the framework of a fixed pattern (recitative/aria) the composer achieves an astounding dramatic intensity which calls to mind Pergolesi or the Vivaldi of the Stabat Mater.

Perhaps Jacobus de Kerle, contemporary and peer of Orlande de Lassus, Clemens non Papa and Philippe De Monte, needed a tireless pioneer of the calibre of Paul Van Nevel to rediscover him for the 21st century. This master of polyphony, who was active in Flanders, Italy and Germany before finally settling in Prague, left works of timeless beauty - as this CD will prove.

The music of John Dowland reaches across the divide of centuries to touch our deepest emotions. In his “Lachrimae,” Dowland took conventional themes – tears, numerology, melancholy – and transformed them into musical gold.

The music on this disc is as exquisite and beautifully crafted as anything by Ravel or Fauré. Indeed, the Nursery Suite of 1931, Elgar's last completed work and a nostalgic look back at the dreams of youth, might well be described as an English counterpart to Le tombeau de Couperin or the incidental music for Pelleas et Melisande. The best-known work on the disc, the Serenade for Strings, dates from 1892, and the program includes pieces from the first and second decades of the 20th century as well: "Dream Children" (1902), another wistful tribute to youthful innocence; "Sospiri" (1914) and the poignant "Elegy" (1909), both for strings; the Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra (1909-10); and the gently passionate nocturne "In Moonlight" (1903-04), originally conceived as the interlude to In the South. Here in a nutshell, then, is almost 40 years of Elgarian reverie, beautifully served up by the English Chamber Orchestra under the sympathetic guidance of Paul Goodwin. Best-known as one of the world's foremost Baroque oboists, Goodwin shows himself to be a gifted interpreter of this music, and one unafraid of expressing its sentimental mix of ardor, rapture, melancholy, and attenuated grief. The recording is first-rate.

Ted Libbey

Inspired by Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, these Haydn symphonies illustrating the different times of the day – except for night, which is absent – are amongst the very first works the composer was required to write for the Esterházy court.