Daniel Hope / Zürcher Kammerorchester HOPE

 

HOPE

Jean Rondeau MELANCHOLY GRACE

 

MELANCHOLY GRACE

Ferenc Snétberger / Keller Quartet HALLGATÓ

 

HALLGATÓ

Mariana Flores / Hopkinson Smithn DOWLAND Whose Heavenly Touch

WHOSE HEAVENLY TOUCH

 

Tabea Debus / Jonathan Rees / Alex McCartney OHRWURM

OHRWURM

Bor Zuljan DOWLAND A Fancy

A FANCY

Nadia Kossinskaja GUITAR DREAMS

GUITAR DREAMS

Aurora Orchestra MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Taracea AKOÉ

                                                                          AKOÉ

Cantus Thuringia TIME STANDS STILL

Hope? Time and again it is hidden at best. Consolation? A little, but it is subliminal at most. Sadness, grief, melancholy? These are present in abundance. Anyone who sets out to discover English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will time and again stumble upon constants that left their mark on this music over an astonishingly lengthy period of time. The characteristics of melancholy may be found not only in the secular music of a Renaissance composer like John Dowland but also – several decades later – in the sacred music of two Baroque composers, Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell.

These two epochs share common features and complement one another amazingly well – “even though Dowland and Purcell each developed and cultivated a distinctive personal style, making it generally easy to recognize their authorship very quickly,” declares Christoph Dittmar, who functions as primus inter pares – the first among equals – in this new album from Cantus Thuringia. This congruity is all the more remarkable in that 132 years separate the year of Dowland’s birth from that of Purcell’s death. “By way of comparison take the elderly Telemann and the young Mozart – their lives overlapped, and yet their music is worlds apart.” It may be possible to explain this by reference to the English vocal and, more especially, choral tradition that evolved over a period of several centuries and that continued to leave its mark on composers such as Benjamin Britten.

According to Christoph Dittmar, what particularly attracted Cantus Thuringia to this programme was “the intimacy of the reduced resources, especially when compared to our previous recordings, which were devoted to a German repertory scored for relatively large forces. An additional factor was the interest shown by the recorder player Silvia Müller, who wanted to work with a vocal ensemble in her search for new challenges. “And so we chose pieces in which the recorder plays diminutions – embellishments – sometimes as the upper voice, sometimes as the middle voice. The recorder was extremely popular in England at this time and remained so until the eighteenth century, with entire recorder consorts being permanently engaged at certain courts.”

Donna Fairbanks / Jon Yerby MUSIC FOR VIOLIN AND GUITAR

Violinist Donna Fairbanks and guitarist Jon Yerby have recorded a delightful album of music for violin and guitar with music spanning four centuries. 
Ms. Fairbanks is on the faculty at Utah Valley University. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona, Eastman, and Brigham Young University. Ms. Fairbanks has appeared as a soloist with numerous orchestras and has presented recitals and master classes in South America, China, Europe and the U.S. Born in Germany.
Jon Yerby has performed across four continents as an acclaimed soloist and chamber musician. He studied at Florida State University, New England Conservatory, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has held faculty positions at the University of Utah, Utah Valley University, and Westminster College.

Seldom Sene / Klaartje van Veldhoven DELIGHT IN MUSICKE

Recorder quintet SELDOM SENE, founded in Amsterdam in 2009, is a group of five musicians with a mutual passion for consort playing. With a combined interest in the interpretation and performance of both early and contemporary music, these highly skilled and dynamic players each bring a wealth of expertise, creativity, passion and virtuosity to the ensemble. With inventive programmes that juxtapose early and contemporary music, Seldom Sene excels at all aspects of ensemble playing, performing with "power, precision and profound expression" (Gustavo Beytelmann, Illzach 2011).

The musicians originate from Germany, England, Spain and Holland and met whilst studying at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. They perform on a collection of over 50 different recorders, including a variety of baroque and modern instruments and also own renaissance consorts with recorders made by Bob Marvin, Francesco Li Virghi, Monika Musch and Ture Bergstrøm.

Whilst searching for more unfamiliar repertoire, one of the first pieces to catch their attention was Seldom sene by the English composer Christopher Tye – a short work full of beauty, precision and striking rhythmic complexity that they felt captured the essence of their vision: performing unique and compelling repertoire at a standard that is seldom seen and heard. Since their foundation, "Seldom Sene excels because of their excellent musical interpretation and beautiful choice of repertoire" (Frédéric de Roos, Le Mans 2009).

n October 2009 the group made their debut at the "Concours International d’Ensembles de Flûte á bec" organised by the "Société des Amis de Arnold Dolmetsch" in Le Mans where they were awarded 1st Prize. In 2011 they received the Interpretation Prize (by unanimous vote of the five jury members) at the 17th International Chamber Music Competition in Illzach (France). In September 2014 they were awarded the First Prize, the Audience Award and the Press Prize of the International Van Wassenaer Early Music Competition, which took place during the Utrecht Early Music Festival.

Seldom Sene has given many recitals in renowned series​They record for the Dutch label Brilliant Classics, which released CDs Taracea (2014), El aire se serena (2016) and J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (2017), selected as Bach Album of the Year 2017 by the listeners of the Dutch radio station Concertzender. Their fourth record, Delight in Musicke is a selection of songs and instrumental music from the English Renaissance featuring soprano Klaartje van Veldhoven.

José Miguel Moreno / Eligio Quinteiro SEMPER DOWLAND SEMPER DOLENS

One of the most attractive and poignant repertories from across the whole Renaissance is undoubtedly to be found in the output of John Dowland, the composer of the greatly-admired Lachrimae and the musical representative of a whole philosophical, literary and artistic outlook when it comes to evoking melancholy. Lutenist José Miguel Moreno, co-founder of Glossa and architect of cult recordings devoted to Sylvius Leopold Weiss, J.S. Bach and Robert de Visée, could not miss out on his encounter with English repertoire and, in 2002, he recorded this double disc covering, across some 32 pieces, the most significant of Dowland’s works, and accompanied by Eligio Quinteiro on the theorbo or gittern (Renaissance guitar). This is one of those albums which define the whole aesthetic standpoint of a label… (GLOSSA)

Hille Perl / Marthe Perl ELEMENTS

Greek philosophers in the pre-Christian era considered the four elements to be the basic components of life on earth; there was only the occasional argument if water or air should be considered to be the primordeal matter. The alchemists of the late middle ages and the early modern era placed the tenet of the four elements to be of crucial importance; physicians used it to characterize types of patients and astronomers discovered that celestial bodies are in corresponding constellations to the elements on this planet. Finally the Christian dogma also picked up on the elements and used them as characteristics of the four archangels.

Popular belief had a vast abundance of spirits who animated the world, there weresubterranean gnomes who populated the woodlands, fickle sylphs who whispered in the shrubbery, every well was inhabited by alluring undines, and salamanders could brave even the fiercest and hottest fires.

Is the mythological knowledge of these existential components of any significance to 21st century cosmopolitans?
Our answer to this question would be a very decidedly positive: why, of course!

Precisely at this moment, as the world seems to become unhinged on all levels,  we need more than ever the universal knowledge of the real and spiritual dimensions of the four elements, of their creative powers and their destructive energy, their interdependency and their sacred nucleus.
With this album we intended to contribute to this global challenge - and we are using music, being our language, our means of communication to enunciate the all-embracing love and kindness we have for the world- hoping to be received kindly and lovingly.

FIRE : Fire is a symbol of all-consuming love, it stands for burning passion and the comforting warmth of friendship.
And whether it be a devastating blaze or the consoling warmth of a burning wood-stove on a frosty winter’s morning….Fire is nourishing and protecting us, but it can also be a merciless destroyer - hence we are challenged to practice humility, caution and mindfulness.
A little thematic prelude by Marthe Perl initiates the contemplation of this element. We took the liberty to pick from the rich treasure of traditional Irish melodies to depict several aspects of real flames: a flag of fire to indicate the direction of movement, a fire in the mountain, maybe it is threatening the forest or a village, and an old woman who sits by the fire, sipping her tea. Then Soler’s Fandango fell into our hands: famous as a piece for harpsichord we found it quite suitable to carve out different aspects of persistent fervor and the burning passion for a theme on two bass viols.

EARTH: earth is our soil, the humus which grows our food, the life-giving furrow. We are made of earth, as all living things, and when all is said and done we return to earth, to become dust again and tobecome the origin of new life. The element earth symbolizes the circular flow of the years and the representation of growth, decay and resurrection embedded within.
Marthe’s Earth-Prelude opens this chapter, then another Irish tune about a boggy ground. Another Ground music are the Folia-related variations by Mr. Farinell, ere we turn to a funeral music for two viols : the ‚Tombeau pour M. de Meliton‘ who was a friend and patron of the great Marin Marais. 

WATER: the water-theme. Sister-element of the earth, allegorically depicting that our life is in flow, everchanging and in constant motion, like a river that in the end shall be released into the ocean, whose infinitude makes us small human beings feel humble and lost. Water is the emotional element: we shed tears of joy and sorrow. And - just like fire - water has a huge potential for destruction: it can wash away anything that thwarts its path.
The aspect of sorrow, of lamenting and of teares is our predominant theme in this set. ‚Hume’s Lamentation‘ follows Marthe’s initial Prelude and then the Lachrimaeby Sumarte for one viol is supplemented by Marthe’s arrangement of the famous Dowland-piece. 

AIR- air is respiration! God breathes life into us, when we first appear on earth, and finally we will take our dying breath and be gone. Air is a symbol for movement, for wind and whirl, for effortlessness and creativity.  But also for the damaging power of tempests and hurricanes. Marais’ ‚Bourrasque‘ isthe presentation of a storm, then we consider together with Thomas Ford how the air has changed - or the melody. Bagpipes are very windy instruments, and in the wild goose-chase we hastily cut through the air with our bows. Finally we describe a game of badminton which apparently the noble people of Versailles already knew and played.

A pensive Andante by Francis Poulenc from his Sonata for two clarinets is our farewell music on this CD. We believe, Poulenc could have meant it to be played with two viols, if only he had known the instrument.

Fire, Earth, Water and Air: four Elements - four different physical conditions of our planet - and of our selves. We believe it to be worthwhile togive special consideration to these ingredients of life, in these times of a growing  elemental imbalance in the world.

This concertis an invitation to give way to a musical contemplation of the complexities of the world, the ingredients of life,  and to encourage a general mindfulness. (Hille Perl, Winkelsett  2014)

Collegium Vocale Bydgoszcz FINE KNACKS FOR LADIES

Collegium Vocale consort from the very beginning of its artistic path (1992) have incorporated Dowland’s songs in its repertoire, and performed them for many years in various configurations. Several presentations of solo performances and duets can be heard on the album “Bonjour, mon cœur” of 2006. The idea of recording the present CD is based on the consistent use of four-voice vocal ensemble. Why? We wanted to see, how songs, which are familiar to us in solo interpretations of Emma Kirkby, Barbara Bonney, Anne Sophie von Otter, Michael Chance, Nigel Rogers, Andreas Scholl and... Sting (among others), would sound in full 4-parts vocal performance. Do they lose its lightness, appeal and charm, or—in the contrary—the listener would discover more nuances, new layers of expression, hard to find in instrumental interpretations lacking words? Of course, we leave the evaluation of the effect to the audience. 

We invite to listen to a selection of most popular songs of John Dowland, interspersed with graceful instrumental miniatures performed on lute by Magda Tomsińska. We would like to encourage all vocal amateurs to actively perform this kind of music. 

We believe that the music lovers of today can appreciate it and get much pleasure and satisfaction from performing it, and it is really worth it to resurrect the great seventeenth-century tradition of home musicmaking. (Michal Zielinski)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra SCHUBERT Death and the Maiden

"With the wonderful Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra we are presently exploring Schubert's quatuor ‘Death and the maiden’. Of course we have to include Schubert’s earlier song with the same title on the poem of Matthias Claudius. This song belongs to the medieval tradition of the dance of death. Therefore we also play "Toden Tanz" (with poor me dancing), an ancient death dance written up by the German organ player August Nörmiger (1560-1613). Schubert’s song and the slow movement of his quatuor use the solemn rhythm of a Pavan, so we also play one of Dowland’s Pavans from "Seaven Teares". Add to this "Moro lasso" a madrigal about death by the famous Renaissance composer (and murderer!) Gesualdo. In between we also refresh our ears with other unsettling works by modern composers like György Kurtag and Heinz Holliger." (Patricia Kopatchinskaja)

Simone Kermes / Enrico Casazza / La Magnifica Comunità LOVE

A collection of beautiful baroque and renaissance love songs that reflect the versatility of love – passionate, dramatic and addictive by the most popular composers of this time, from Monteverdi, Purcell, Cesti to Merula and Dowland.

Love is Simone Kermes’ most intimate and personal album yet.

The arrangement, cast of instruments, and recording set up is as such that the “pop song” quality, the contemporary and eternal spirit, the immediacy of these compositions is revealed. All sung with the unique legato, pure, and silver quality that makes Simone Kermes’ voice so special.

Simone Kermes is a dramatic coloratura soprano and multi-award winner. For her solo albums she has received a number of international awards, such as the annual award of the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik, the Echo Klassik award for 2011 Female Singer of the Year, the Diapason d`Or, Midem Award, Choc Le Monde de la Musique and Gramophone magazine’s Recording of the Month. In April 2013 she received one of Russia’s highest cultural awards, the Golden Mask, for her performances as Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Tchaikovsky State Academic Theatre in Perm.

Opera performances have taken her as Konstanze, the Queen of the Night, Fiordiligi, Donna Anna, Giunia, Rosalinde, Lucia, Gilda, Ann Truelove, Alcina and Laodice, among other roles, to New York, Paris, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Moscow, Beijing and German state opera houses. (Presto Classical)

Pamela Thorby / Andrew Lawrence-King GARDEN OF EARLY DELIGHTS

The title’s a play on both Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Jacob van Eyck’s recorder collection The Flute’s Garden of Delights; but more than anything this new disc recalls Herbert’s line “a box where sweets compacted lie”. Straddling the Renaissance and early Baroque, the programme comprises sonatas, sets of divisions and arrangements of songs and popular tunes from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and England. This repertoire proves rich soil for Thorby and Lawrence-King, and the resulting cross-fertilisation of styles and modes of expression with a modern scholarly aesthetic enlivened by two of the keenest musical intelligences in the business results in a most satisfying listening experience. 

Thorby maximises the affective impact of the music through an incredibly varied approach to articulation and phrasing - compare the lively glosses of the delightful opening track, Diego Ortiz’s Recercada segunda de tenore, with the evocative, floating lines of Giovanni Battista Fontana’s Sonata seconda. Lawrence-King is likewise alert to the rhetorical possibilities inherent in both his accompaniments and solos; in the former category, he proves an ideal partner for Thorby in his ability to think vocally, while in the latter his almost visual sense of line and colour is apparent, as in Biagio Marini’s Passacaglio and Dowland’s “Weep you no more”. 

Recorded sound is nothing short of stunning, while the cover image of a hummingbird nicely encapsulates Thorby’s lightness and agility as she darts from piece to piece to extract its nectar. This is Paradise indeed. (William Yeoman)

Collegium Terpsichore / Ulsamer Collegium DOWLAND - GESUALDO - MOLINARO - PRAETORIUS Dances of the Renaissance

Unfortunately, Deutsche Grammophon may be striking an all-too-effective blow against its own catalog with this two-disc compilation of Renaissance dances. With just one inexpensive purchase we can acquire some great background music and get a mostly delightful and generous sampling of works “representative” enough of the period to satisfy the most casual listener’s needs or desires. There’s plenty of period instrument color and courtly elegance here, and anyone who has even the slightest notion of Renaissance (and early Baroque) instrumental music will feel in familiar territory. Among the selections are six dances from Michael Praetorius’ famous collection known as Terpsichore and three suites from Johann Schein’s Banchetto musicale. A large portion of the program features works by anonymous composers, and many others may as well be–few listeners will know anything of Hans Neusidler, Joan Dalza, Erasmus Widmann, or Luis der Milán. But in this two-hour-plus program, we do get to hear all of one minute and fifty-two seconds from one of the period’s more illustrious composers, John Dowland, as well as fifty-seven seconds of Orlando Gibbons, and slightly more than two minutes of Gesualdo (even though he’s billed on the disc’s cover).

Although this set may appear ideal for the novice–and for anyone who just wants a little “courtly elegance” in his collection for those occasions when unobtrusive refinement and civility are called for–in actuality it’s more like a musical version of a trip through those international exhibits at Disney World. There, in one authentically inspired but undeniably artificial package we are supposed to experience the true flavor of a time and place hitherto unvisited. And for many, this experience will remain their only encounter–woefully incomplete, somewhat distorted, and misleading, as this sometimes odd array of pieces certainly is. One of the beauties of listening to music of this period is to discover the multitude of ways it can be interpreted and performed–and the multitude of influences on its form and style from country to country. Indeed, we get to hear performances by some fine practitioners of Renaissance-period instrumental music, although even these don’t represent the top drawer artists in the DG/Archiv catalog. The sound, dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, varies from constricted to warm to bright. I’m not sure exactly who this collection is for, but I’d recommend it only as a tiny beginning step in discovering the fascinating, vast, and varied world of 16th/early-17th century dance music. (Classics Today)

The Parley of Instruments DOWLAND Lachrimae or Seaven Teares

There have only been  two occasions when English composers have profoundly affected the course of European musical history. The first was in the early fifteenth century when the motets, Mass movements and chansons of John Dunstable and his contemporaries became the models for subsequent developments in Flanders and Burgundy. The second was two centuries later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when a number of English composers and instrumentalists found work at northern European courts. They went abroad for three main reasons. Some, like Peter Philips and Richard Dering, were religious refugees, in flight from Queen Elizabeth’s persecution of Catholics. Some, such as William Brade and Thomas Simpson, were probably attracted by the lucrative opportunities available in the prosperous small courts and city states of northern Europe. Others were associated with the English theatre companies that began to tour the Continent in the 1580s and ’90s following the 1572 Act of Parliament that restricted the activities of ‘common players in interludes and minstrels’. Henceforth, actors were forbidden to work in England unless they were under the patronage of the Queen or a prominent courtier. 

John Dowland probably had mixed motives for leaving England in 1594. He had just been turned down for a post as a court lutenist, but he also had Catholic sympathies. He worked first at Wolfenbüttel and Kassel, and in 1598, after a second attempt to obtain a court post, he joined the group of English musicians in the service of Christian IV, King of Denmark. He remained in Copenhagen until 1606, though he visited London in the summer of 1603 ‘on his own business’, as a Danish court clerk put it. By 1603 he was one of the most famous lutenists in Europe and could reasonably have expected a court post in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death in March of that year, for the wife of the new King James I was Anne of Denmark, sister of Christian IV. In the event, it still eluded him, perhaps, as Peter Warlock once suggested, because Anne did not wish it to be thought that she had poached one of her brother’s musicians. When he finally became one of James I’s lutenists in 1612 he had long left the Danish court. Dowland probably hoped to attract Anne’s attention by dedicating Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares to her. In the dedication he states that he had ‘access to your Highnesse at Winchester’ (the court was there in September and October 1603), and that he had twice tried to sail back to Denmark but had been compelled to winter in England ‘by contrary windes and frost’. 

Dowland broke new ground with the publication of Lachrimae. At the time, dance music was usually written or printed in sets of separate quarto parts, but Lachrimae is a folio volume and has the parts for each piece distributed around each side of a single opening, so that in theory they could be performed around a table from a single copy. Dowland may have adopted this format, the one he used for his lute songs, because he included a lute part in tablature, which could not easily be accomodated in a small set of part-books. Lachrimae is certainly the first English collection of five-part dance music, manuscript or printed, to include a lute part, though lutes often appear in contemporary pictures of violin bands accompanying dancing. (Peter Holman)