La Nuova Musica / David Bates GLUCK Orfeo ed Euridice

ORFEO ED EURIDICE

Iestyn Davies / Fretwork IF

MICHAEL NYMAN - HENRY PURCELL

Aurora Orchestra MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Alison Balsom / The Englsih Concert / Trevor Pinnock SOUND THE TRUMPET

An interview in the booklet for this disc takes a long time telling us why Alison Balsom has picked up a Baroque trumpet for this disc but EMI could have saved their ink, for when the instrument is played as fluidly agreeably as it is here, nobody could doubt that it is the right tool for the job (and it’s not, by the way, the first time she has recorded on one – in 2002 she made an admired debut with the Parley of Instruments for Hyperion.

Balsom’s real point, however, is that it was the valveless trumpet’s vocal quality, its ‘human characteristic’ that informed its music and it is this above all that she demonstrates through her choice of music for this album. For it is not fanfares and tattoos that dominate, nor even concertos, but a smartly selected sequence of trumpet cameos from the theatre scores and elegant social music of Purcell and Handel. Some are real, including symphonies from Purcell’s semi-operas or Handel’s Eternal source of light divine; in some, such as Purcell’s ‘Plaint’ and Handel’s Oboe Concerto No 1, she borrows other instruments’ lines; and others see her literally slip into the singer’s place, most strikingly in Purcell’s ‘Fairest Isle’ and ‘Sound the trumpet’.

And it all works. This is rattling good music, and so easily does the trumpet fit into it that often it is hard to recall what the original scorings were anyway. Balsom, too, sounds utterly at home, whether intertwining coolly spun traceries with oboe and violin in the wondrous Symphony from King Arthur or merrily disporting in Handel’s Water Piece. She’s ably partnered by two of the finest young Baroque singers in the business (Lucy Crowe especially impressive in ‘The Plaint’) and wonderfully backed by the English Concert and the bright natural musicianship of Trevor Pinnock. Never mind the whys and wherefores – just sit back and enjoy! (Lindsay Kemp / Gramophone)

Early Opera Company / Christian Curnyn HANDEL Flavio

Premiered at the King’s Theatre in May 1723, Flavio is one of those Handel operas – Serse and Partenope are others – that takes a wryly amused view of the power struggles, bulging egos and heroic posturing endemic to opera seria. With its pungent mix of comedy, ironic detachment and near-tragedy, it now seems one the composer’s most endearing stage works. Handel’s aristocratic audiences, though, evidently preferred operas of a loftier cast. Despite the presence of the two biggest stars of the day, Cuzzoni and Senesino, Flavio ran for just eight performances (Giulio Cesare, its immediate successor, netted 13), and was revived just once in Handel’s lifetime.

Set in a legendary Dark Ages when Britain was supposedly ruled by Lombardy, the plot hinges on the whims of the oversexed, cynically manipulative King Flavio, whose lust for the beautiful – and far from innocent – Teodata threatens to wreak havoc on everyone around him. Opening with a delectable nocturnal love duet for Teodata and her secret lover Vitige, Act 1 is light in tone, with a succession of arias in graceful and/or jaunty dance rhythms. Then, as the plot takes a darker, potentially tragic turn, Handel responds with some of his most piercing arias, above all for the heroine Emilia (the Cuzzoni role), whose father Lotario has been killed in a duel by her fiancé Guido. Lotario’s death apart, all ends well, of course, with Emilia and Guido reconciled and reunited after she has feared him dead, and the ever-capricious Flavio “punishing” Vitige by granting him the hand of Teodata.

Christian Curnyn and his spruce period band finely catch the tone and tinta of this delectable opera. Tempi – mobile but never frenetic – are aptly chosen, rhythms buoyant. Yet Curnyn gives due weight to the opera’s graver moments, whether in Emilia’s haunting siciliano aria that closes Act 2, cleaving mournfully to the minor key virtually throughout, or Guido’s desolate final aria, in the rare, “extreme” key of B flat minor. The singers, many of them Curnyn regulars, dispatch their arias with fine Handelian style and spirit, and, crucially, bring real theatrical vitality to their recitative exchanges. Handel curiously cast the part of Teodata (written for the deep contralto Anastasia Robinson) for a lower voice than that of her lover Vitige. But while her timbre more naturally suggests gravity than levity, Hilary Summers catches Teodata’s teasing, flirtatious nature through inflection and phrasing. As her lover Vitige, Croatian mezzo Renata Pokupic´ sings with grace, verve and (not least in Vitige’s jealous outburst in Act 3) an exciting flame in the tone; and Thomas Walker and the sonorous bass Andrew Foster-Williams excel in the blustering, mock-heroic coloratura arias for the squabbling councillors Ugone and Lotario.

As Flavio, Tim Mead sings smoothly and mellifluously without always catching to the full the mingled charm, absurdity and menace of the king’s character. Iestyn Davies, in the Senesino role of Guido, has slightly more “bite” to his countertenor, and rises impressively both to the anguished fury of his Act 2 aria “Rompo i lacci” and the profound pathos of his final aria. Always a lovely Handel singer, Rosemary Joshua brings to Emilia’s glorious music a pure, lucent tone and a vivid sense of character, growing from initial blitheness, through her aching farewell to Guido – one of those ravishing, timeless Handelian moments – to the grieving intensity of her siciliano lament for her father. The sole rival Flavio, directed by René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi, 7/90), has been rightly praised. But on balance I’d recommend this beautifully recorded new version of Handel’s flavoursome tragicomedy, for its (on the whole) superior cast and orchestral playing and for Curnyn’s direction, stylish, lively and unaffected where Jacobs can be irritatingly interventionist. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Arcangelo / Jonathan Cohen BACH Magnificats

Three Magnificats, by the three most famous members of the Bach family, make for a delectable triptych from a 40-year span, with each strikingly promoting their distinctive musical priorities. If Johann Sebastian’s first Leipzig Christmas in 1723 impelled him to display all his high-Baroque wares in a canticle of mesmerising variety, then both his cosmopolitan sons accept the subsequent challenge with alacrity in their colourful settings – with the more substantial CPE score now beginning to enter the canon.

For their father’s perennial masterpiece, Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo snap into their festive sparklers with grand authority and lithe ebullience, sweeping effortlessly from verse to verse with considerable purpose. There’s something attractively straightforward about ‘Quia fecit’ with the characterful Thomas Bauer agreeably supported by Cohen’s present harpsichord, not least because it has a delicious effect on the languid curves of Iestyn Davies’s and Thomas Walker’s ‘Et misericordia’, which follows. One is struck throughout by the exceptional balance of the voices and instruments yet without forgoing Cohen’s animated and imaginative way with text. Indeed, when one reaches the ‘Gloria Patri’ at the close, the music seems to have evolved imperceptibly in a generous seam of exquisitely judged verses.

Arcangelo’s voyage into the sons’ Magnificats is no less well paced or astutely textured. As we move into Johann Christian’s third setting (thought to be for Milan Cathedral in 1760), the new idiom becomes decidedly operatic, riven with self-conscious conceits and reeking of galant suavity. But it goes down very nicely in around 10 minutes, especially the expectant choral interpolations in ‘Fecit potentiam’ and even the slightly perfunctory doffing of the cap to dad with a decent enough fugue to end.

Carl Philipp Emanuel’s Magnificat is a substantial homage to his father’s setting (there are some obvious quotes), especially in the successful combining of so many contrasting elements. If CPE is rather less succinct than Johann Sebastian, there’s no denying that there are some brilliant and affecting set pieces, especially when carried by Joélle Harvey’s uniformly dramatic and engaging singing – not to mention the supreme final double fugue when the choir and orchestra all but take off. It’s 40 years since King’s College Choir Cambridge under Philip Ledger recorded the work in what seemed a rather muddy and elusive idiom. Not here, where Cohen and Arcangelo bring us an illuminated Bachian constellation of three canticles colliding in captivating relief. (Jonathan Freeman-Attwood / Gramophone)

Carolyn Sampson / Iestyn Davies / Joseph Middleton LOST IS MY QUIET

Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies have collaborated on many occasions in the field of Baroque opera and oratorio, but on this occasion they venture into a somewhat different territory. In the company of Joseph Middleton, they have been exploring the Lieder for one and two voices of Mendelssohn and Schumann, combining them with songs and duets by Roger Quilter. And even though the disc actually opens with a set of Purcell songs – repertoire which both singers have previously made their mark in – they are here performed with the piano accompaniments realized by Benjamin Britten, turning them into something quite new and different.

‘Creamy’, ‘luminous’ and ‘supple’ are words that often appear in reviews about both Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies, and in these duets they achieve a marvellous blend as well as the utmost precision. They are aided in this by Joseph Middleton, described in The Telegraph (UK) as an ‘unfailingly sensitive accompanist’

Iestyn Davies / Arcangelo / Jonathan Cohen BACH Cantatas Nos 54, 82 & 170

The question is not if but when a distinguished countertenor decides to record the Bach solo alto cantatas. The catalogue offers a remarkable range of individual vocal timbres which seem to influence interpretative parameters to a startling degree. One thinks of Alfred Deller’s small, floating lines unveiling exquisite intimations in Cantatas Nos 54 and 170 (with the young Leonhardt and Harnoncourt and their future wives) testing the historical waters in the early 1950s (Vanguard). At the other extreme, Andreas Scholl projects his honeyed and flexible instrument with richly uncompromising projection (Harmonia Mundi, 5/98).

Iestyn Davies falls somewhere in between the two and yet he is no less distinctive in personality and musical ambition. Jonathan Cohen’s invigorating direction of the top notch Arcangelo and Davies’s extraordinarily questing approach make for a happy balance between abstract delight and rhetorical flair. For example, in the centrepiece of No 170, ‘Wie jammern’—a world turned upside down by Satan—disorientation is conveyed more by a plague-like itchiness than by the tendency to over-emphasise the imagery. There are a few unsettled moments in No 170 and there have been more close-knit readings between singer and obbligato organ, but the crystalline character here is original and affecting.

Cantata No 54 sits within the small surviving group of Weimar cantatas in which the voice, emblematically at least, sits as primus inter pares in the motet tradition of Bach’s late-17th-century forebears. Davies and Cohen give little quarter to emotional indulgence, as can so often be the case. What ensues is a highly refined essay of beautifully articulated singing and playing; the forward-leaning tempo never appears frenetic, with the opening movement as resolute as Bach clearly intends.

The least well-known alto cantata, No 35, usually makes up the trio but Davies forsakes this and plumps for Ich habe genug. If ostensibly a celebrated bass cantata (which the composer reworked for soprano and flute), the transition to alto works astonishingly well, but only because the soloist is so exceptionally accomplished. ‘Schlummert ein’ with single strings is deeply moving, framed by the supple and poetic oboe-playing of Katharina Spreckelsen.

Two ruddy sinfonias—reworkings of the Brandenburgs—provide agreeably colourful and vivacious interludes. Yet the dominant virtue in this fine collaboration between the outstanding Davies and Arcangelo lies in an unsentimental perspicacity, reassuring in its intelligence and deep sensitivity. (Gramophone)

68111-B. pdf download

The Choir of Trinity College Cambrdige / Orchestra of The Age of Enlightenment / Stephen Layton BACH Christmas Oratorio

 Two new Christmas Oratorio recordings in time for Christmas, and both from forces that give regular concert presentations of the piece, one at St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, and the other at St John’s Smith Square in London. As such they are not greatly challenging to ‘normal’ expectations, but then that is the point: what you get here are good, sound performances that will not upset anyone and will surely give pleasure to most who hear them.

I mean that about not upsetting anyone: not so long ago a recording of this music by the 84-strong Leipzig Thomanerchor and the Gewandhaus Orchestra would have stayed many a buying hand, but things are different now. Germany has become the place where ‘modern-instrument’ orchestras play Baroque music best; and, except for a slight blandness in the continuo, the once-stodgy Gewandhaus’s grasp of current Baroque stylistic orthodoxy under Thomas cantor Biller seems total, while their technical ease (particularly in the brass) is a genuine enhancement. As for the Thomanerchor, the relevance to listeners of its tradition as ‘Bach’s choir’ is probably more romantic than realistic but the thrill of it is still there and can perhaps be detected in a recording at least partly made at live concerts in St Thomas’s. What we can say is that they have a typically fruity German boy sound, never seem like 84 singers (in a good way), and, despite strong underlying discipline, seem able to enjoy the more joyous moments with true enthusiasm. Except for the tenderly comforting Ingeborg Danz, the soloists (including two boy sopranos) are adequate without offering any particular insights.

Older, though not by all that much, are the 38 mixed voices of Trinity College Choir, again very well trained, especially in matters of firm text enunciation. They are less raw in the lower voices, more focused overall than the Thomaners and more agile, too, in numbers such as ‘Ehre sei Gott’ or the opening of Part 5. The soloist line-up here is in general superior both technically and interpretatively, especially the ever-incisive James Gilchrist. Newcomer Katherine Watson’s fresh-voiced sound is a world away from the Leipzig boys but lestyn Davies’s impressive messa di voce in ‘Schlafe, mein Liebster’ is not the start of a performance to match the protective warmth of Danz. If not quite at its best, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment sounds thoroughly at home (David Blackadder gives a very suave trumpet solo in ‘Grosser Herr’), and Stephen Layton conducts with care and expertise. But of the two recordings it is somehow the Leipzig one that has that little bit more heart. (Gramophone)