Patricia Petibon / Philippe Jaroussky / Freiburger Barockorchester / Andrea Marcon HANDEL Alcina (Video)

ALCINA

 

Formato: mp4

Subtítulos: Italiano, Inglés, Francés, Alemán

Chouchane Siranossian / Venice Baroque Orchestra / Andrea Marcon TARTINI Violin Concvertos

                                                             VIOLIN CONCERTOS

The Beauty of MONTEVERDI

A selection of Monteverdi’s masterpieces presenting a survey of the Italian master’s most important sacred and secular works through acclaimed recordings from the Yellow Label.
The perfect introduction for those new to Monteverdi whilst satisfying the thirst of connoisseurs.
2 CDs celebrating Monteverdi’s 450th Anniversary on May 15th 2017.

Magdalena Kožená / La Cetra / Andrea Marcon MONTEVERDI

In 2000 Magdalena Kožená took over from an ailing Anne Sofie von Otter as Nero in the Vienna Festival production of L’incoronazione di Poppea, not only saving the day but also scoring a great personal success. And yet a deeper connection to Monteverdi and his music can be traced to a far earlier date, as the singer herself recalls: “I was sixteen when I met a lutenist with whom I formed an ensemble for Baroque and Renaissance music. It was a very important experience for me, for not only did I learn the Italian language through these pieces, but I discovered a great deal about the style of the music of this period and about the way in which it is ornamented.” Since then Magdalena Kožená has explored the world of opera in far greater depth. Not only has she sung Mozart, she has also appeared in productions of Carmen, Pelléas et Mélisande and Der Rosen- kavalier. “So it’s more of a romantic repertory,” the singer explains. “But this doesn’t mean that I have banished Monteverdi from my life. I return to him again and again and I feel at home with him.” In short, the present recording marks the singer’s return to her original repertory. She is accompanied here by Andrea Marcon, with whom she has already recorded Vivaldi and Handel recitals. For Magdalena Kožená this artistic partnership represents a great gain: “Andrea has a lot of experience in this repertory, and he is also a very spontaneous sort of person: his music-making is always highly charged and full of surprises. Of course we rehearse before a concert or in advance of a recording and agree on the basic interpretation. But we know each other so well that we can then allow ourselves the freedom to improvise. This works only with certain people and only in Baroque music – for me it’s a bit like jazz, where musicians react spontaneously to the spirit of the moment.”

La Cetra / Marcon CALDARA La concordia de' pianeti

This release marks the world-premiere recording and rediscovery of Antonio Caldara’s La Concordia de’ pianeti, a musical serenade of operatic magnitude composed for the court of Austrian Emperor Karl VI, featuring the creme de la creme of the day’s singers, including the legendary castrato Carestini (Franco Fagioli’s part).
Unearthed and edited by Andrea Marcon, the piece offers a series of virtuosic arias, breath-taking cantilenas and ethereal duets performed by some of the finest singers of today.
Franco Fagioli and Daniel Behle, two of today’s hottest vocalists, lead a distinctive cast of early music “shining stars”, including soprano Veronica Cangemi in a welcome return to Deutsche Grammophon / Archiv. The dynamic La Cetra Barockorchester, one of the most coveted period ensembles active today, lends an idiomatic touch to the program.
This is a major new release under the Archiv imprint featuring a world-class cast of singers. The opera is new to the repertoire and the catalogue altogether and has been recorded both in studio conditions and live performances in Dortmund. (ArkivMusic)

Viktoria Mullova / Giuliano Carmignola VIVALDI Concertos for two violins

Thanks to The Four Seasons, the solo violin concerto is the genre with which Vivaldi is associated above all others. And indeed, at nearly 250 works, this species of composition forms the largest single portion of his output, outnumbering his next favourite, the concerto for orchestra, by more than four to one. In historical terms, too, his development of the formal aspects of the solo concerto was his greatest legacy: his model of three movements in the sequence fast-slow-fast still wields influence today, and the so-called "ritornello" structural principle - in which returning orchestral statements of a strongly defined, harmonically stable main theme offer a framework for more free-ranging and lightly scored passages involving the soloist - informed every composer's approach to concerto-writing until well into the 19th century.
Yet Vivaldi's concerto output is considerably more varied than that. Not only did he compose concertos for a wide range of string, wind and brass instruments, he also wrote them for differing numbers of soloists, from none to 13. His first taste of international fame, indeed, came with a set of twelve concertos which offered alongside its four solo concertos equal numbers of concertos for four and two violins. Published in Amsterdam in 1711 under the title L'estro armonico, it achieved great popularity in northern Europe in those early days of the instrumental concerto, making its mark on German composers in particular. The flautist and theorist Johann Joachim Quantz later recalled that "as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi's splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days". Vivaldi also acquired a keen following at the Dresden court, who sent their best violinist Johann Georg Pisendel to Venice to study with him; and in Weimar the young J.S. Bach transcribed for solo keyboard six pieces from the 1711 set, including two of the "double concertos".
Only two further concertos for two violins by Vivaldi were published in his lifetime (one as part of his op. 9 La cetra set in 1727, another printed independently in Amsterdam), but there are a further 24 surviving, most of them in the huge manuscript collection of Vivaldi's works now held in the National Library in Turin. These concertos are rarely performed today, either in concert or on record, but, like much of Vivaldi's unpublished output, contain music that is not only undeserving of its neglect, but offer facets of his creative personality that are not always evident in the works he chose to see into print.
The concertos presented on this disc by Viktoria Mullova and Giuliano Carmignola demonstrate for the most part Vivaldi's usual method of writing for two soloists on similar instruments: rapid interchanges of phrases and melodic fragments which echo, overlap and swap over with each other, alternating with passages of parallel motion, almost invariably euphonious (only the slow movement of RV 523 uses the texture to create expressive dissonances). They thus differ from the Vivaldi-inspired but more polyphonic manner of Bach's well-known Concerto for Two Violins, and show the influence of the dominant texture of the chamber music of the time, the trio sonata, in which two matched instruments would duet over a continuo accompaniment consisting of a bass-line instrument and a chord-playing lute, harpsichord or organ. This similarity appears even more obvious in the slow middle movements of RV 509, 516, 523 and 524, which feature "continuo" instead of orchestral accompaniment, and becomes explicit when it is seen that RV 516 shares both its second movement (with slight differences) and much of the material of its first and third with one of Vivaldi's unpublished trio sonatas (RV 71).
Whether these dialogues be virtuosic (as in the outer movements of RV 511 and 514) or melodious (as in the relaxed first movement of RV 509 or the expressive second movement of RV 514), they almost always give meticulously equal treatment to the two soloists, with neither assuming a dominant role in terms of range, technical difficulty or quantity of material. The effect is of a single character in the solo role, albeit one performing musical feats more complex than those achievable by a single player. In this regard it is easy to imagine them providing performance material for the youthful musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage of whose renowned all-female orchestra Vivaldi had charge as teacher and director for much of his career. Their concerts drew visitors in numbers to the Ospedale's chapel on the Riva degli Schiavoni - to admire the music of course, but also sometimes to search for wives; opportunities to show off the abilities of talented players in solo roles in as democratic a manner as possible must have been welcome. This primarily local use is suggested by the fact that while all of the concertos recorded here can be found in the Turin manuscript, thought to represent Vivaldi's own personal stock of scores, only RV 523 survives in a second contemporary copy.
Occasionally, however, there are breakaways from this two-as-one approach, when one violin will play a snatch of melody while the other accompanies. Such moments are fleeting, but can be all the more striking for that, as in the final movements of RV 524 and, most memorably, RV 516, where a glorious tune emerges from the arrow-like orchestral scales of the ritornelli. Having already pictured a pair of Ospedale inmates sharing the more equal dialogues elsewhere, is it going too far for us to speculate that Vivaldi himself, known as a virtuosic if sometimes unpolished violinist, might have taken one or other of these roles, either advertising his presence as melodic lead or gently supporting a favoured pupil with rock-solid arpeggios?  (Lindsay Kemp)

Mojca Erdmann / La Cetra / Andrea Marcon MOSTLY MOZART

The Muses have been revered as a source of divine inspiration since the time of classical antiquity and are said to encourage artists to give of their exceptional best. From this point of view, the Hamburg soprano Mojca Erdmann seems like a figure from the distant past. Although she is still at the beginning of what promises to be a major international career, she has already inspired a number of contemporary composers, including Aribert Reimann and Wolfgang Rihm. Indeed, Rihm even wrote the main role in his operatic fantasy Dionysos with the young soprano in mind. Her performances in the world premiere at the 2010 Salzburg Festival proved a tremendous personal success.
For her debut with Deutsche Grammophon, however, Mojca Erdmann has chosen a very different type of programme in the form of works by Mozart and his contemporaries: “Mozart has accompanied me all my life. Although my father is a composer and contem­porary music has always played a major role in our lives, for me there is nothing to beat singing Mozart, even though I feel an immense respect for him. You know exactly how it should sound, but it’s insanely difficult to achieve this.”
No one listening to Mojca Erdmann’s singing would suspect for a moment that she finds Mozart difficult. Indeed, her voice is almost ideally suited to the Austrian genius’s music. Her lyric soprano voice is remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its great flexibility and bell-like tone. And she enchants her listeners not just with her voice itself but also with the unconcealed emotionality of her singing: “Mozart goes straight to my heart. That may sound a little dramatic, but that’s how it is. He touches something deep inside me, and some­times the tears come unbidden to my eyes. It’s impossible to say why this should be so, but this magic may well be the secret of his success.”
At the heart of the present album is Pamina’s famous aria, “Ach, ich fühl’s, es ist verschwunden!”, for which Mojca Erdmann has deliberately chosen a slow tempo: “I was keen to express something very inward, very vulnerable. The listener should be able to gaze into this woman’s soul, the soul of a woman who is at her wits’ end and no longer knows where to turn. Her only release seems to be death. What interests me most of all is how exactly he intended his tempo indications to be interpreted. Above all with Pamina I’d love to know whether it would have worked for him if the aria were taken really slowly. Although it says ‘Andante’, it has to be as slow as this for me. If I sang it any quicker, there would no longer be any emotional depth to it.”
The Mozart arias feature alongside works by some of Mozart’s contemporaries and forerunners, works that have been almost completely forgotten but which Mojca Erdmann discovered while preparing for this release. They immediately aroused her interest: “In a letter to his father, Mozart writes very enthusiastically about the music to Ignaz Holzbauer’s opera Günther von Schwarzburg, for example. For me, it was interesting to see what Mozart thought about his fellow composers and how his own music is related to theirs. There are certainly a number of similarities. The aria from Paisiello’s Nina, for instance, starts in exactly the same way as ‘Ruhe sanft’ from Mozart’s Zaide.”
Mojca Erdmann was also surprised by the two arias from Salieri’s Les Danaïdes. Ever since Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus, Salieri has been viewed by the wider public as the man who murdered Mozart. Less well known is the fact that as a composer he was for a time more successful than his younger colleague. Mojca Erdmann, too, is enthralled by the musical quality of Salieri’s works: “Both arias are very short, but in spite of their brevity they are wonderful masterpieces. What Salieri packs into these two minutes is simply incredible.”
The result is an album that avoids the well-worn paths of the standard repertory and introduces listeners to some of the most beautiful arias from the early-Classical and Classical periods. One such composer is Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian and a great influence on the young Mozart’s style. Another is the Viennese composer Ignaz Holzbauer, who wrote over two hundred sinfonias and fifteen operas, most of which have now fallen into neglect. Giovanni Paisiello wrote more than one hundred operas and in his own day was one of the most famous composers in Europe. His works, too, have largely disappeared from the repertory, although they often dwarfed the compositions of his contemporaries with their melodic charm and dramatic intensity.
But the biggest surprise remains Mojca Erdmann’s voice. In her astonishing combination of technical mastery, tonal beauty and consummate expression she affords impressive proof of what Mozart singing can be like today. (Tristan Wagner 1/2011)

Patricia Petibon ROSSO Italian Baroque Arias

One of the great pleasures of attending the theatre is to see a singer come out onstage when the curtain rises and to know that the mere fact of her appearing will put you in a good mood, even if you can already sense from the orchestra that she will be singing something som- bre, moving or emotionally charged. Strange though it may seem, sadness, too, can be a source of pleasure in this way. And that pleasure increases as soon as the singer opens her mouth. Life’s difficulties are all swept away and forgotten. Patricia Petibon achieves this marvellous feat: she makes you happy even when what she is singing brings tears to your eyes. But the most astonishing thing of all about the present programme is the exceptionally close correlation between her own very special qualities and the music that she performs. Patricia Petibon sings all kinds of music from Lully and Handel to Mozart, Debussy and Bernstein but is particularly fond of Baroque music. Even so, it was not with this that she began her career. “When I arrived at the Paris Conservatoire and studied with Rachel Yakar,” she recalls, “I worked on all sorts of music with her. At that time I also sang Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. I continue to love all kinds of music: to sing the part of a nun in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is as moving as lending my voice to all the lovers I’ve recorded.” As for the Baroque period, it was her meet- ing with William Christie which, as she herself acknowl- edges, “pointed me in the right direction”. The music that Patricia Petibon sings on this new recording is a distillation of early opera, a genre that began in Italy before spreading to the rest of Europe. Baroque sensibilities, coupled with the tastes and pleasures of the time, could hardly be satisfied with a style of musical declamation that contemporaries de- scribed as “spianata” – plain and simple. They needed an element of surprise: they needed emotion and wonderment. Composers, audiences and, above all, singers wanted a sense of the marvellous, a magical aspect that even suggested folly: in short, a style described as “fiorito”. The poetry became the servant of the music, which sought to characterize the affetti, or affections, giving rise to a new, closed form, the da capo aria, which allowed the emotions to find lyrical expression, whether that expression was dramatic or more light- weight, and allowed the singer to develop that emotion through his or her vocal virtuosity. Emotion was in this way combined with wonderment. The Baroque world is deliberately located in a world of unreality, vocal mar- vels reflecting a staging filled with apparitions, flying machines and clouds. It echoes the lyricism of Bernini’s Saint Teresa, just as the architectural virtuosity of Francesco Borromini showcased that of the singers in the churches that he designed. As Patricia Petibon says, she tries to “act out what the music says”. The Handel arias that she has recorded here are in themselves enough to provide a cross-section of all the musical and emotional possibilities of Italianate opera of this period. (Excerpts from the booklet text accompanying the album)

Patricia Petibon NOUVEAU MONDE Baroque Arias and Songs

With Christopher Columbus (yes, him from 1492) joining Harnoncourt, William Christie and Savall on the dedicatees’ list, Petibon’s new release explodes like an alt-folk concept album. As Basle’s La Cetra, plus certain South American obbligato instruments, Baroque and baroll behind the French soprano, it can get loud – José de Nebra’s opening zarzuela aria (1744) sounds like an attempt at all four Handel Coronation Anthems in less than six minutes while Petibon’s contribution mixes a tale of shipwrecked love with yelping early salsa-style vocalises. For contrast there’s a serene ‘Greensleeves’ and a wonderful, painfully impassioned (if exotically pronounced) ‘When I am laid in earth’ – with most imposing continuo – to vary the emotional dynamic. Then the mocking demons in Charpentier’s Médée and their grungy accompaniment (the effect accentuated by the timbre of the ancient instruments) sound like evident contemporaries of Purcell’s witches and sailors. Andrea Marcon’s band rightly get a break of their own, a dance actually, in further Charpentier before their whistles and thundersheets kick up the storm that nearly overwhelms heroine Emilie in Les Indes galantes. We may be on the way to a ‘new world’ – Petibon’s booklet interview links up influences which include Brazilian rock radio, Michael Haneke’s Don Giovanni and Cortés’s Conquistadors – and we reach it eventually at Purcell’s ‘Fairest isle’ (the English again rather special) but there’s sure plenty of well-acted vocal heartbreak on the way. And folk rock – try the version of the traditional ‘J’ai vu le loup’ or the Peruvian ‘Tornada La Lata’.

Like her equally Spanish-tinged ‘Melancolia’ album – but with totally other colours – ‘Nouveau monde’ is a tightly thought-through and arranged and compelling programme, a tour de force for its performer/ compiler, most atmospherically recorded (Rainer Maillard) in Basle’s Martinskirche. Compulsive, repeatable listening.

(Mike Ashman)