I Cavalieri del Cornetto / Andrea Inghisciano / María González TEMPESTA DI PASSAGGI

 

TEMPESTA DI PASSAGGI

 

Il Ricercar Continuo PULCHRA ES

 

PULCHRA ES

 

Les Barocudas / Marie Nadeau Tremblay LA PESTE

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LA PESTE

 

Dorothee Oberlinger / Dmitry Sinkovsky / Ensemble 1700 DISCOVERY OF PASSION

                                                        DISCOVERY OF PASSION

Lucie Horsch / Academy of Ancient Music BAROQUE JOURNEY

The astonishing 19-year-old Dutch recorder player Lucie Horsch returns to takes us on a journey around Baroque Europe, showcasing the most virtuosic music from her native Netherlands, as well as Germany, Italy, France, Spain and England.

Highlights from the album include Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Bach’s Badinerie and the world premiere recording of a concerto by Jacques-Christophe Naudot and Dido’s Lament by Purcell.

For her second album, Lucie is joined by the Academy of Ancient Music who are making their first DECCA recording in over 20 years!

Silvia Frigato / Accademia d’Arcadia / Alessandra Rossi Lürig ET MANCHI PIETÀ

Inspired by the work of painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome 1593Naples ca. 1656), this release aims to explore features of both paintings and music of the early Italian Baroque, highlighting their creative features and their emotional foundations. Daughter of Orazio Gentileschi (one of the rst Italian Caravaggesque painters) Artemisia was, until a few decades ago, remembered chiey for the scandal of the rape trial she brought against Agostino Tassi, one of her fathers artistic partners, who abused her when she was 17. She had to wait over 300 years to see her value as a painter fully recognised. The music is performed by Accademia d'Arcadia, an ensemble comprising 13 musicians playing period instruments and a singer. The CD contains a 28 page, full colour booklet featuring 3 of Artemisias most famous paintings, detailed infos and texts, together with detailed background information, resulting in a concept that is both interesting and affecting.

John Holloway / Lars Ulrik Mortensen / Jane Gower DARIO CASTELLO - GIOVANNI BATTISTA FONTANA Sonate Concertate In Stil Moderno

This collection of pieces from the first generation of Baroque violin music presents almost unknown but highly distinctive and exciting compositions, superbly performed and recorded. The music here was recorded in 2008 and not issued until 2012, perhaps due to ECM's unease over marketing works that even Baroque enthusiasts may not have heard of. These pieces come from Venice, probably during the 1620s. They point the way toward the Baroque duo and trio sonata, still decades in the future, but they're artistically coherent unto themselves. The works of both composers, Dario Castello and Giovanni Battista Fontana, represent a stage in the application of the discoveries of Monteverdi's seconda prattica to independent instrumental music: the lines of the melody instruments have the rhythmic freedom of early opera but are shaped into abstract structures that may be quite startling. Sample the Sonata Nona for fagotto e violino (bassoon and violin) of Fontana (track 5), where the violin is withheld until well into the piece. The relationships among the instruments are constantly changing, and the gorgeous sounds of the instruments used here makes a major contribution: the bassoon of Jane Gower is a dulcian, an immediate ancestor of the modern bassoon, and John Holloway's Baroque violin is a flashing, multi-hued wonder. With superior engineering from ECM in the Propstei St. Gerold (an Austrian mountain monastery beloved by European audiophile engineers), this is a group of highly variegated, dynamic small pieces, a real Baroque find. (James Manheim)

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)