Bruno Cocset, Guido Balestracci, Les Basses Réunies DIEGO ORTIZ Trattado de Glosas

                                                         TRATTADO DE GLOSAS

Capella de Ministrers / Carles Magraner LA SPAGNA Danzas del Renacimiento español

La Spagna reviews the universe of instrumental dances from the Spanish Renaisance by composers such as Ortiz, Milán, Dalza, Negri, Caroso, Capirola, Cabezón, Praetorius, Barbetta, Spinacino, Narváez and anonymous works from the Cancionero de Palacio (the Palace Songbook).

Capella de la Torre / Katharina Bäuml CIACONNA

Capella de la Torre is a group of musicians who have made a name for themselves as specialists in historical performance practice. The ensemble's aim is to give listeners an immediate experience of the rich and hitherto neglected repertoire of mediaeval and renaissance music by performing it to a professional standard. 

The name "de la Torre" has a double meaning. In the first place, it pays homage to the Spanish composer Francisco de la Torre, who wrote his "Danza Alta" at the beginning of the 16th century. This is probably the most famous piece for what was then known as "capella alta", an ensemble of wind instruments such as shawms, dulcians, sackbuts and cornetti. Capella de la Torre has specialized in music written for the "capella alta". Secondly, the name may be taken in a literal sense: "de la Torre" means "from the tower" and groups of wind players (Spanish: ministriles) often played on towers or balconies at festivals and other official occasions. "Torres de los Ministriles" are still to be found in many Spanish towns today. 

Capella de la Torre does not confine itself to Spanish music, however, but also plays music written throughout the rest of Europe for the "hauts instruments" or "loud instruments". In general, it tries to breathe life into the old traditions of "ministriles", "piffari" and "Stadtpfeiffer". In the music world of today there are very few ensembles centred around historical double-reed instruments. This is particularly so in Germany.

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)

More Hispano / Vicente Parrilla YR A OYDO

Yr a oydo is an old Spanish expression for "going by heart" and is the name of MORE HISPANO's latest innovative project lead by the recorder player Vicente Parrilla. The young Spanish Ensemble presents Ancient Music of early 17th century Spain and Italy, completely improvised but not without cherishing the skills of historic performance - a goal that is as ambitious as it is unique.

MORE HISPANO holds ideal qualifications for this kind of music: the musicians have been in the business for many years, some of them performing together since childhood. Most have since come to belong to the best and most innovative specialists of their generation in Ancient Music in Spain. They perform solely on historic instruments and artful replica of instruments that were in use in the 17th century. The soprano Raquel Andueza not only performs with MORE HISPANO but also with a variety of internationally renowned ensembles and projects, among them L'Arpeggiata under Christina Pluhar.

This recording is the outcome of the musicians' experimentation and struggle with the historical standards, of their longstanding shared performances, and the playful interaction with their instruments, peer musicians and not least themselves. The aim therein was not to gain distance from the original historic compositions but an intense and often very personal involvement with those works which frequently leads to surprising results.

The record at hand stands in the tradition of the practice of improvisation: not one piece was played twice in equal manner, no solo was predictable, no one knew at the beginning of a piece when or how it would end.

As a result, the track titles are not work titles as such, but much rather hint at the structure of the piece (e.g. "Passacaglia" as a form of dance), or suggest the employed compositions (e.g. "Guardame las vacas"). In many ways, the style of making music here relates to Jazz, and oftentimes the inherent and uncompromising quest for emotion and expression will be more familiar to the fan of Jazz than it might be to the admirer of Ancient Music. It is this gap in today's musical landscape that Yr a oydo aspires to bridge. (Carpe Diem Records)

Hille Perl DOULCE MEMOIRE Glosas, Passeggiati & Diminutions around 1600

The art of improvisation was for much of musical history one of the most formidable weapons in the arsenal of performers. But in the 19th century it became largely lost (virtuoso pianists like Liszt and organists being notable exceptions) as the concept of the “sacrosanct score” gradually took root. In “art music”—to use a poor term to distinguish it from jazz—it is only with the revival of early music during the latter half of the last century that a reawakening of interest in improvisation has emerged, with performers as diverse as Robert Levin and Andrew Lawrence-King reviving long lost techniques and pushing back the boundaries of timidity.

No period lends itself more readily to such extemporary music-making than the late Renaissance or the early Baroque, a period during which countless treatises dedicated to providing examples for both vocal and instrumental embellishment appeared. For instrumental players, such improvisatory techniques specifically involved one of two kinds of process: either the use of one of the many bass patterns or ostinatos over which the player improvised a set of variations (or glosas), or the embellishment of a tune (frequently vocal in origin) by means of filling it with passage work or diminutions, as they were known. A couple of years back, I reviewed a Jordi Savall disc which took its point of departure from a collection of written-out variations (glosas) on ostinato basses, but also included some formidable examples of Savall’s own improvisatory prowess (Fanfare 25:4).
A key figure in Savall’s collection was the great Spanish composer and gambist Diego Ortiz (1525–c. 1570), whose hugely influential treatise Tratado de glosas appeared in 1553. Ortiz also looms large on this new disc with Hille Perl and what is largely Lawrence-King’s Harp Consort, but here the emphasis is different, the collection concentrating to near exclusivity on a variety of instrumental realizations of madrigals and chansons. One measure of the popularity of such vocal pieces was the number of times they appeared in transcription, or were accorded glosa treatment. It is therefore not surprising to find three different and widely varied versions of one of the most famous and beautiful of all chansons, Pierre Sandrin’s Doulce memoire. In one, Ortiz has ingeniously added a fifth part, while his glosa of it is extraordinarily sensitive, beautifully dovetailing the variants to maintain the dignified mien of the original. No such reserve is found in the version by Girolomo Dalla Casa, a cornettist at St. Mark’s, Venice from 1568, whose flamboyantly virtuosic jazzing up of the chanson elicits some appropriately dazzling playing from Perl. Equally fascinating is the comparison between the straight transcription for viols of Cipriano de Rore’s four-part madrigal Ben qui si mostra (1561) and the version with subtle vocal diminutions by the singer Angelo Notari. The establishment of basso continuo provided yet a further way of treating vocal pieces, as the arrangement of Willaert’s expressive chanson Jouissance vous donneray by Vincenzo Bonnizzi readily demonstrates. The only true improvisation is Lawrence-King’s rich extravaganza on Trabachi’s madrigal Ancidetemi pur (1603).
In sum, this beautifully performed disc provides a fascinating insight into the way instrumentalists established a repertoire of their own from vocal models. Judging from the cover illustration (an arty black and white photo of Perl posed in a cornfield) and the gambist’s new-age comments on the music (“This piece makes you want to leave just so you can return”), I suspect that some kind of crossover market is being aimed at. And why not? It’s all a darn sight more enjoyable than those abominable discs of opera stars singing Broadway songs. (Brian Robins)

Hille Perl / Lee Santana / Marthe Perl BORN TO BE MILD

Hille Perl is widely regarded as one of the leading viola da gambists in the world. Because of the prominence of her instrument in the Baroque era, her repertory is rich in works from that period, with the names, J.S. Bach, Telemann, Marin Marais, Sainte-Colombe, and other 17th and 18th century composers headlining her concert programs and recordings. Perl also plays the treble viol, the seven-string bass viol, Baroque guitar, Lirone, and Xarana. She often performs with her husband, lutenist Lee Santana, in duo repertory, and together the pair have formed two other ensembles: Los Otros, with guitarist Steve Player, and the Age of Passions, with violinist/conductor Petra Müllejans and flutist Karl Kaiser. Perl has also appeared with some of the leading Baroque ensembles in Europe, like the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Harp Consort. She has made numerous recordings, many of them available from Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (DHM).

 Hille Perl was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1965. Her father Helmuth was a harpsichordist, organist, and musicologist. Hille began playing the viola da gamba at five. She had studies with Niklas Trüstedt (Berlin) and with Pere Ros and Ingrid Stampa (Hamburg). Perl earned a degree in 1990 at Bremen's Academy for Early Music, where she studied with Sarah Cunningham and Jaap ter Linden.

Perl steadily built her career, and soon began appearing on recordings. Among the earliest was a 1997 Deutsche Harmonia Mundi CD, Spanish Gypsies, with Santana, Player, Andrew Lawrence-King, and other notables. Perl and Santana formed Los Otros (The Others) in 2001 and their first recording, Tinto, a collection of works by Kapsberger, Corbetta, and others, appeared on RCA Special Imports in 2003. From 2002, Perl has taught viola da gamba at the University of the Arts in Bremen, while remaining busy both in the concert hall and recording studio. (Robert Cummings)

Daniel Hope AIR a baroque journey

From its creation in the mid-16th century by Andrea Amati to the present day, the modern violin has had an extraordinary and tempestuous history. Arguably its greatest development came during the Baroque era, as violinists and composers, in a sense liberated from the austerity and contrapuntal strictures of The Renaissance, went on a journey, both musically and geographically, avidly seeking more extravagant and original ways in which to express themselves on this fascinating new instrument.
Air sets out to trace one such Baroque journey. It is the story of four unique composers, three of whom were virtuoso violinists, one a lutenist – Falconiero, Matteis and Geminiani from Italy, and Westhoff from Germany. They wandered throughout Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries in search of musical inspiration and crosspollination, and their music and art of performance intrigued and delighted kings, contemporaries and audiences alike.
As well as works by these four composers, this album also features some of the other music of their time, in an attempt to show the cultural exchange taking place, much of it intuitively, between musical minds across borders.
Some of these composers were influenced directly by what they heard, whether it was Geminiani by Handel, Bach by Westhoff or Matteis by the wealth of folk music he encountered on his travels to the British Isles.
This album sets out to show just how diverse the music of the Baroque era was. Air blends the simplest and at times most primitive forms of dance music with the most sophisticated and revolutionary compositions of the day, culminating in a work by Bach - the great master, whose title is my inspiration for this collection, and whose music remains for me today more modern than that of anyone else. (Daniel Hope)