Favourites,
Gifts for... Baroque and Early Music fans
With highlights from this year's early music releases (including recordings from Rachel Podger, Mahan Esfahani and Jordi Savall), excellent box sets and collections, and some new books, we've selected some perfect presents for lovers of medieval, Renaissance and baroque music.
Outstanding 2019 Releases
This lovingly-crafted debut album from the English tenor is easy listening in the most positive sense – though most of the material here was new to us, several of the songs wormed their way into our consciousness after a single hearing, and Lyon approaches them from a standpoint of sound historical awareness spiced with the odd audacious anachronism. Recommended for casual listeners and early music aficionados alike.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Olivier Latry performs a programme devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on the massive Cavaillé-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Paris. Gramophone said this is ‘Bach played with no hang-ups, using the full resources of a magnificent organ… This is a joyous celebration of Bach’s music, not a kneeling, hands-together, head-bowed worship of it’.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Though works like the Goldberg Variations and The Art of Fugue have been reimagined for everything from saxophone quartet to recorder ensemble, Bach’s Cello Suites have largely remained untouched by non-cellists (barring the occasional viola-player); in fleet-footed interpretations which never stop dancing, Rachel Podger transfers them to the violin with an integrity and imagination which pay particular dividends in the gigues and courantes, and offers an ingenious solution to the final Suite, originally composed for a five-string instrument…
Available Formats: 2 SACDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
JS Bach: Markus Passion BWV247 (1744)
La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Le Concert des Nations, Jordi Savall
Jordi Savall directs this newly-reconstructed version of Bach’s lost St Mark Passion. A pasticcio setting, constructed from material already composed for other works, Savall’s version proceeds along these lines and supplements the gaps with material from Bach’s two surviving Passions, creating a coherent and convincing work which is given a vivid performance by Le Concert des Nations and La Capella Reial de Catalunya.
Available Formats: 2 SACDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Mention the words “Bach” and “toccata” to most people and they will inevitably think of his great organ toccata BWV565, which has passed into the realm of B-movie clichés as a musical shorthand for thunder-and-lightning melodrama. There are, of course, a great many other toccatas by Bach, many of them just as dramatic and varied; nowhere is this more clearly shown than in Mahan Esfahani’s new recording of the seven toccatas for harpsichord BWV910-916, in which he makes full use of the expanded capabilities of a multi-register instrument and delivers a no-holds-barred performance that seems at times to emulate the organ’s mighty sound.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
JS Bach: Violin Concertos
Isabelle Faust (violin), Bernhard Forck, (violin), Xenia Loeffler (oboe), Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Isabelle Faust continues her journey through the violin works of JS Bach, with contributions from Xenia Löffler and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under Bernhard Forck – a noted Bach interpreter in his own right. Alongside the concertos themselves, they perform the results of their musicological research, restoring a selection of sinfonias, overtures and trio sonatas to their hypothesised original form as concertante violin pieces – including one very familiar Bach favourite indeed!
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
BACH: Heinrich, Johann Christoph, Johann Michael, Johann Sebastian - Kantaten
Vox Luminis, Lionel Meunier
The Belgian early-music ensemble Vox Luminis, under their conductor Lionel Meunier, continue their fascinating investigations of JS Bach’s musical ancestry – having devoted a previous album to recreating a series of concerts that had a formative effect on the young Bach, they now unpack the DNA of his hugely successful church cantata style. Vividly-imagined works from earlier members of the Bach family show the twists and turns that this uniquely German genre underwent in the generations preceding him.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The first volume of Čičić’s survey of the Italian-born composer’s sonate da camera was a Presto Recording of the Year in 2017, and its successor is no less enthralling – if anything, these later works find Carbonelli in more adventurous form, with some unexpected harmonic twists and turns (No. 12 in particular is full of surprises) and plenty of rustic colour from the continuo group in the gigues and sicilianas.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
You can enjoy Vincent Huguet’s starkly beautiful modern-dress stagings on the bonus DVD, but the taut theatricality of these performances of Charpentier’s Biblical dramas comes across loud and clear through the audio alone; Caroline Weynant’s serenely assertive Judith and Lucile Richardot’s sensual Mary Magdalene are especially compelling, but every single singer is unfailingly invested in the action throughout.
Available Formats: 2 CDs + DVD Video, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The ‘godfather’ of the title is Telemann, whose godson was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; the album opens with his Concerto in D TWV54:D3, and also includes concerti by JS Bach, Vivaldi, Brescianello, Fasch and Pisendel, several of whom enjoyed close mentor-student relationships not unlike that of Telemann and CPE Bach.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Handel: Brockes-Passion
Robert Murray, Cody Quattlebaum, Elizabeth Watts, Ruby Hughes, Academy of Ancient Music, Richard Egarr
Using a new performing edition prepared by oboist Leo Duarte (who also contributes some magical obbligatos), Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music bring Handel’s neglected ‘Passion Oratorio’ to life in all its visceral immediacy for the 300th anniversary of its premiere. Amongst a superbly involved and involving line-up of young soloists, American bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum stands out as a volatile, very human Jesus and British tenor Gwilym Bowen emerges as a voice with huge potential in Peter’s furious outbursts and anguished soliloquys.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The conductorless British vocal ensemble are in their element with this thoughtfully-assembled programme exploring music by Elizabethan composers who found themselves literally or figuratively estranged from their homeland due to their Catholic sympathies; Robert Dering’s Factum est silentium showcases their springy agility and immaculate ensemble, whilst Huw Watkins’s new setting of Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle had me craving more contemporary music from this source.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Josquin des Prés: Missa mater Patris & Noel Bauldeweyn: Missa Da pacem
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
The Tallis Scholars’s series of the complete Josquin masses (which began in the late 1980s and has accrued several Gramophone Awards along the way) is now approaching the finishing-line, and this penultimate volume pairs the Brumel-influenced Missa Mater Patris with the Missa Da pacem, now thought to be at least in part the work of Josquin’s compatriot Noel Bauldeweyn.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Monteverdi: L'incoronazione di Poppea
Sonya Yoncheva (Poppea), Kate Lindsay (Nerone), Stéphanie d'Oustrac (Ottavia), Les Arts Florissants, William Christie
Recorded live at last year’s Salzburg Festival, this Poppea features Jardin des Voix alumna Sonya Yoncheva taking a break from heftier assignments such as Norma and Tosca to return to her early music roots; The Financial Times praised her for ‘bring[ing] a plush, seductive soprano and touch of vulgarity that is not inappropriate’ to the role, whilst BachTrack described her as ‘an all-round artist, as at home in the early 1600s as she is in the late 1800s.’
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
New Box Sets and Collections
Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan completed their series of recordings of Bach’s secular cantatas in 2018, and now all ten volumes are available in this limited edition box set. Of the final volume, Gramophone noted Suzuki’s qualities of ‘expressive lucidity, unforced coherence and the quiet nobility of one serving the music as the most natural of reflexes’.
Available Formats: 10 SACDs, MP3, FLAC
This new collection from Alpha tracks the remarkable evolution of the piano; following its invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the piano gradually replaced the plucked strings of the harpsichord with a hammered, striking action, increasingly winning over musicians and composers. Across 10 CDs, explore the development of the piano from CPE Bach to Liszt, with works performed on instruments similar to those the composers would have known, by iconic artists including Jos van Immerseel and Eric Le Sage.
Available Format: 10 CDs
Released on 27th September to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (which Koopman founded in 1979), this 10-CD anthology features music by Frescobaldi, Soler, Buxtehude, Telemann, Handel, and JS, CPE and WF Bach; soloists include Barbara Schlick, Michael Chance, Christoph Prégardien and Monica Huggett.
Available Format: 10 CDs
New Books about Early and Baroque Music
The Sixteen are prolific recording artists, and perform at festivals and venues all over the world. Harry Christophers has succeeded in nurturing a choir of exceptional calibre, establishing a business model that includes a record label and extensive tours to capacity audiences, mining a rich variety of repertoire, and combining enormous popularity with the stamp of approval from experts. This collection of conversations will appeal to anyone interested in the sound of the human voice.
Available Format: Book
Written by fourteen leading experts in the field, this Companion covers almost every aspect of the harpsichord - the history of the instrument, tuning systems, the role of the harpsichord in ensembles, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and includes separate chapters devoted to Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Handel. With musical examples, illustrations, a timeline of the harpsichord, and an appendix of composers, reliable editions and original sources, this book is for all who love the harpsichord, or want to learn more about it.
Available Format: Book
Now available in paperback, this book tells the story of a young German composer who followed his princely master to London in 1712 and remained there for the rest of his life. Jane Glover tells a story of music-making and musicianship, of practices and practicalities, but also of courts and cabals, of theatrical rivalries and of eighteenth-century society.
Available Format: Book
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