Ensemble Kapsberger / Rolf Lislevand ALFABETO

The Alfabetos are guitar tablatures which were used until the end of the 18th century, they scored the chords as letters as jazz and rock music tablatures noxadays do. These simplified scores tell the essential, giving the players all the freedom to improv and use their virtuosity. For a long time, Rolf Lislevand played the electric guitar, some rock and a lot of jazz music and just a little bit of classical guitar to enter the conservatory. Pat Metheny leads him to jazz guitar, but the real hit comes from a lute concert by Hopkinson Smith. He starts learning how to play the lute and other early instruments. Ever since, he has shared his time between the baroque and the jazz or alternative stages along his improvisations. 'The baroque music offers much room, there is always air around it' (Rolf Lislevand): Alfabeto proves that baroque music was born in the street, that it was above all a music to dance (folias,...), basically intended to entertain people...His musicians in his ensemble are virtuoso improvisers, they dare everything with as much freedom as possible. Three baroque guitars phrase, nuance, launch solos and rhythms, they converse with Arianne Savall's aerial vocalizations, Pedro Estevna's imaginative drums or Bjorn Kyellemyr, one of Charlie Mingus's disciples, who leaves her his double bass for some colascione. (Naïve)

Rolf Lislevand DIMINUITO

This recording is all about the Italian renaissance, how it understood itself, how we understand it today and how we would have understood it if we had been contemporary with it, because no other period in European music’s history was as contemporary with itself as was the renaissance. During the 16th century, humanistic inspiration had led to the most equilibristic levels in all arts and had stretched the human mind to the highest achievements and skills flourishing in a landscape of youth, spring and rebirth of all of mother earth’s beings.

Diminutions, divisions, or glosas were one of the renaissance’s unique inventions. Technically it means embellishing a melody into a much more flavored and elaborated melody in faster movement and shorter rhythmical values, presuming that the simple melody still remains in the listener’s mind. This supreme discipline of ornamentation became a new work of art in itself.

The original composition on the other hand was reduced to a humble servant of this invention – an object of abuse for an instrumental protagonist without further empathies neither consideration of its origin.

It is like the game of drawing lines through numbered points on the last page of newspapers: creating shapes and figures making lines from a number to another. Melodies are like these shapes and contours of a drawing, and each numbered point is the plucked sound, drawing lines from one attacked sound to another one, believing that a figure eventually occurs in our imagination!

The art of diminution almost completely denaturalized the plucked instruments in the same way it has done to the electric plucked instruments in our own days. The distorted sound of an electric guitar made it a bowed string instrument and changed all its musical logic. The diminutions allowed the plucked string instrument to regain some of the qualities of the human voice, the phrasing, coloring and dynamics. By means of fast and small melodic figures which make bridges and reinforce the shape of the simple melody, the lute suddenly appears as protagonist, soloist and conductor, wowing a patchwork of colors, shadows and lights and in a unique way adding value to the simple and beloved, but all to well known melody. (ECM Records)

Maurice Steger & Ensemble VENEZIA 1625

Swiss recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger is one of the most exciting specialists on his instrument to come along since the late and lamented David Munrow, and he was already becoming an established touring artist in Europe while still a student. Having previously delivered two fine discs of Telemann and Giuseppe Sammartini chamber works, Harmonia Mundi's Venezia 1625 finds Steger as leader and coordinator of a large group of instrumentalists, though not all play at the same time; larger configurations of the ensemble dominate the first half of the program. What ties it all together is the concept, which centers on the early Baroque chamber sonata (or sinfonia) as practiced in Venice around 1625, a time and place that nearly signify the declaration of independence for Western instrumental music. Publications of that era tend to be so vague in terms of instrumentation that nearly any combination is conceivable to realize a given piece, and Steger takes full advantage of this in making his ensemble choices and taking them apart again, not to mention the observing convention that anything written for violin then could also pass for the recorder. The backdrop supporting Steger is different literally from track to track, and this helps provide variety, though the latter half of the disc is geared more toward pieces of modest of dimensions. 

Steger certainly knows how to pick players; some of these folks are the crême de la crême of the early music movement in Europe; the quality of their playing and inherent ensemble blend would have caused Venetian jaws in 1625 to drop. Hille Perl, whose gamba can be heard on most of the tracks, makes a big difference in the Tarquinio Merula Ciaccona, rolling continuo lines around on her viol in passagework worthy of what's in the solo parts. When Christian Beuse's dulcian comes in on Fontana's Sonata IV, you take notice, for it's a new instrument and picks up ones ears in the wake of the lively Merula Ciaccona. The first half of the disc is great; its balance of pacing and material makes for a terrific spring-summery mix that keeps on moving forward. After about midpoint, however, Venezia 1625 begins to drag, owing to a concentration of slow pieces and small forces; it's rather like the wind got knocked out of it. 

Nevertheless, Steger is a dazzling player, in every way able to match the violin as to flexibility and speed, and for passages requiring double stops he has a couple of additional recorder players to pitch in a little assistance. Venezia 1625 will be a wonderful disc for the car, and for the kids, who respond well to the sweet piping sound of the recorder; if you are looking to take a summer outing and want something other than the Beach Boys to listen to, then at least the first half of Harmonia Mundi's Venezia 1625 will be perfect for that; perhaps the second half is for the drive home. (Uncle Dave Lewis)