Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 28

We sometimes forget how closely the didactic aspect of The Well-Tempered Clavier is bound up with the various upheavals of the 1720s which refocused Johann Sebastian Bach on his roles as father and teacher. His ambitious scheme for associating a prelude and a fugue with each of the major and minor keys could easily have become something of a tedious chore. But, on the contrary, it reveals Bach’s highly personal genius for
constant creative renewal within the framework of two fixed forms. Richard Egarr presents the complete First Book on a copy by Joel Katzman of a 1638 Ruckers, using the temperament which recent research suggests Bach himself advocated.

Dona nobis pacem – Peace and Love!
Woodstock, Nixon and the Vietnam War were undoubtedly underlying influences on the increasingly oppressive dramaturgy of this incredible ‘Theatre Piece’ composed in memory of J. F. Kennedy. ‘What's a Jewish boy like you doing writing a Mass?’, Bernstein was asked at the premiere in September 1971. Perhaps the answer lies with the ‘Celebrant’, the central figure in this work originally performed by 200 singers, instrumentalists and dancers, a piece at the crossroads between religions – and at the stylistic crossroads between classical, jazz, folk, blues, and rock – which today is still as relevant as ever.

A second youth! Dedicated to the clarinettist ‘Richard Mühlfeld, the master of this beautiful instrument, in sincerely grateful remembrance’, these two sonatas are the fruit of a close friendship which helped Brahms rediscover both the instrument and his own appetite for composition at the age of nearly 60. With their deeply Viennese atmosphere they reflect at once the solid experience of a long career and the sheer delight of writing for pleasure.

At the heart of the religious disputes which ravaged 16th-century England, Tallis and Byrd embody two opposing tendencies: the former’s austere, homophonic Protestant psalm tunes, in which the clarity of the biblical texts was paramount, contrast with the latter’s Catholic motets, which constantly heighten musical expressivity and emotiveness. Yet, far from being stifled by the rigour of one camp or the traditionalism of the other, the creativity of these two masters of English music thrived on such constraints as they dedicated themselves to the service of their art and of God.

Deliberately affecting an air of constant improvisation, the Piano Quintet, first performed in 1888, felicitously combines sheer joy and melancholy meditation, rhythmic vigour and passionate lyricism. This Dvořák masterpiece doubtless owes a fair share of its fame to the origins of its themes in folklore. Ten years earlier, the composer wrote the five Bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium – a blend of sonorities that may seem odd to us today, but Frank Braley and the musicians of the Ensemble Explorations clearly know exactly how to make it sound its best!

‘Master of the King’s Musick’ to Henri IV
Twenty years after its first anthology taken from the Meslanges of Claude Le Jeune, the Ensemble Clément Janequin offers you an ideal opportunity to take advantage of the most recent discoveries and hear these settings of poems of the French Renaissance – including the chanson Autant en emporte le vent with its famous refrain, later translated as … ‘Gone with the wind’.

These songs by Mozart accompanied the events of his life like illustrations in a picture-book – from the departure of a close friend to a meeting of his Masonic Lodge. After their highly personal exploration of the Romantic lied, Werner Güra and Christoph Berner now turn to a less well-known repertoire with this selection of vocal and instrumental works.

"Sei guten Muts, ich bin nicht wild, sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen"
'Be comforted! I am not cruel; sleep in peace in my arms', murmurs Death to the Maiden in a song written in 1817, seven years before the quartet to which it gave its name and which has since become one of the pillars of the repertoire. Here is a new challenge for the members of the Jerusalem Quartet, whose most recent incursion into Romantic territory (with Dvořák's 'American' Quartet) received exceptional praise from Le Monde de la Musique for 'its virtuosity, its vitality, its energetic, buoyant phrasing'.

The programme presented by Fretwork illustrates the genuinely cosmopolitan atmosphere that sustained musical creation at the Tudor and Stuart courts, which did not hesitate to draw on the sources of Franco-Flemish or Italian music. Although the Jews had been banished from the kingdom of England since 1290, the Italian-Jewish Bassano and Lupo families became veritable compositional dynasties, dominating music at court for the best part of a century between 1550 and 1650. Birds on Fire, by the British composer Orlando Gough, adds a contemporary echo inspired by klezmer music.

‘Not the least ornament and embellishment of this city’: it was in such terms that the Hamburg town council described the status of music in the city’s public life in the year 1615. Forty years after the opening of the first public opera house (in Venice), the date of 1678 marked the inauguration of its German equivalent: this was the stamping-ground of such masters as Keiser, Erlebach and Schürmann, but also of a certain (very!) young man named Georg Friedrich Händel. This CD contains a selection of the finest overtures and orchestral suites from the Hamburg Opera’s first forty years.