The King's Consort

The King’s Consort celebrate their hundredth CD and the launch of their new classical label, VIVAT, with TKC’s largest recording in 15 years.

Huge period instrument orchestra gathered from fifteen nations, plus TKC’s award-winning choir, and world-class soloists including Carolyn Sampson and David Wilson-Johnson.

TKC records the glorious sacred ceremonial music of two of Britain’s greatest composers, Stanford and Parry.

First recordings on period instruments, including the four great Stanford canticle settings, heard in the composer’s lavish orchestrations (Stanford in G with radiant singing from Carolyn Sampson), Parry’s I was glad (restoring a long-missing section for the 1911 coronation), a magisterial performance of Blest pair of Sirens, the 1911 Coronation Te Deum and a stunning Jerusalem in Elgar’s vivid orchestration.

High quality documentation, first-rate engineering, lively promo video releasing Jan 2013 on YouTube and Vivat’s new website.

New editions of the four Stanford works parallel-published by Oxford University Press.

The first of a series of releases on TKC’s new VIVAT label.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Vivaldi’s multiple-instrument concertos!

The term ‘con molti istromenti’ (Vivaldi’s own) refers not so much to the literal number of instruments involved as to their variety and unusual deployment. For an Italian concerto of the period to use wind instruments at all would be unusual; Vivaldi combines recorders, oboes, chalumeaux, horns and bassoons alongside a wide-ranging complement of strings, itself including viole all’inglese and the even more obscure violins ‘in tromba marina’.

The composer’s opportunity to write such works arose largely from the talented pool of girls available at the Pietà orphanage in Venice. These expert musicians would turn their hands to whatever Vivaldi could possibly desire and the resultant scoring is colourful (sometimes outrageously so) and inexhaustibly inventive.

From the eleventh century, Venetian mariners gathered together once each year to offer prayers to San Nicolò, the patron saint of sailors, asking for his continued protection. Initially the service was a simple benediction in which the Adriatic Sea was blessed with holy water. By the late-sixteenth century the ceremony had evolved into one of the most lavish and important dates in the Venetian calendar. Ascension Day now launched a large spring festival which was headed by the symbolic wedding of Venice to the Adriatic—the Sposalizio.

Robert King and his serried ranks of instrumentalists and singers recreate this glorious event in the grandest style. Giovanni Gabrieli’s twenty-two-part Sonata (his largest-scale instrumental work), Andrea Gabrieli’s ‘Battle’ Canzona, the church bells of Venice, fanfares for trumpets and drums, the massive sixteen-part madrigal Udite, chiari—the catalogue of riches goes on …

Johann Kuhnau was one of life’s polymaths—as well as being a composer he trained as a lawyer, spoke several languages, helped found Leipzig’s opera house, theorized about music and even found time to write a novel sending up the shortcomings of the contemporary music scene. Musically he’s the link between Schütz and Bach, but he was alive to many different stylistic traits as this selection of sacred music demonstrates. From the brilliantly brassy opening of Ihr Himmel jubilirt to the restrained intensity of Tristis est anima mea, it’s music invigorated at every turn by The King’s Consort.

Czech-born Jan Dismas Zelenka was by all accounts one of Baroque music’s trickier customers—fervently religious but completely lacking in courtly graces. Combine this with a tendency to throw out the rulebook when it came to harmonic convention and it’s hardly surprising that he was underappreciated in his lifetime. Yet here is some of the most pungently exciting writing of the Baroque, as individual as that of his near-contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach. The very opening of Zelenka’s Litaniae sets out his stall and Robert King and his eponymous Consort make the most of its startling qualities. But he is a composer to tug at the heartstrings too, nowhere more so than in the Salve regina, ravishingly sung by a young Carolyn Sampson.

The last, and greatest, of Purcell’s four Odes to St Cecilia, Hail! bright Cecilia was composed to a text by Nicholas Brady in 1692 in honour of the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. It is a celebratory work comprising of masterful instrumental sections, majestic choruses, and varied solos, duets and trios. Written in 1695, Who can from joy refrain? was composed as an ode celebrating the Duke of Gloucester’s sixth birthday. Both these works reveal the unparalleled richness of the composer’s musical invention and explain why, more than three hundred years later, Henry Purcell is still regarded as one of Britain’s finest composers.

The King’s Consort and a distinguished line-up of soloists perform this glorious music, originally issued as Volume 2 in The Complete Odes & Welcome Songs series, with a high measure of perfection and flawless technique.

Continuing the series ‘Bach’s Contemporaries’, this volume concentrates on the wonderful music of Johann Schelle—a cousin of Kuhnau (another composer featured in this series).

This immensely striking sacred music by Schelle (one of Bach’s predecessors in the post of Kantor in Leipzig’s famous Thomas Church) brings together a top-flight group of soloists and a large and colourful assembly of instrumentalists, and presents remarkable and splendidly varied music which not only stands up proudly in its own musical right, but also greatly enhances our understanding of Bach’s own sacred writing.

Sebastian Knüpfer is yet another Baroque composer whose reputation and popularity have been overshadowed by J S Bach. Little of Knüpfer’s music has previously been transcribed from its many manuscripts, let alone published. However, in his day Knüpfer was a respected and highly soughtafter composer; his compositions were admired by his contemporaries and, according to his obituary, he ‘composed quotations of the Psalms and other Biblical books with such sweetness and skilfulness that he delighted even the saddest hearts, and his name is spoken with admiration not only in Leipzig but also outside’.

As we have come to expect from Robert King and his King’s Consort, the performances are of the highest standard with some of the finest singers on the early music platform today.