What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[Antonmb]

Haydn String Quartets Op. 74 - Folk Music from Scotland
Maxwell Quartet
Linn Records/Outhere Music (2021), 24/192 files

Mostly Haydn but with some Scottish folk music mixed in - which may seem a little odd, but it works well and is quite entertaining. Excellent playing and sound.

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Royal Händel
Le Consort
Eva Zaïcik
Qobuz 24/96




Delicious album!
Those who like Händel will adore this.

The fast-rising young French mezzo-soprano Eva Zaïcik has looked to London for this Baroque recital, and specifically to the birth of the first Royal Academy of Music. Founded in 1719 by a group of aristocrats, and based at the King's Theatre, this was a musical venture whose audacious aim was to make London the centre of the operatic world via Italian opera, sung exclusively in Italian. Appointed as Music Director was Georg Friedrich Haendel – neither Italian nor English, but an exciting talent with ambitions in the operatic domain, and recently landed in London after four years in Italy honing his operatic skills and making key contacts.
Further names were then lured over from Italy itself: notably the composers Attilio Ariosti and Giovanni Battista Bononcini (whose skills as strings players also raised the virtuosic level of the orchestral music), and star singers such as the castrato Francisco Bernardi Senesino, and sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni; and with such an array of names and talent, success duly followed, because over the course of nine years, the Royal Academy staged no fewer than thirty-four operas, including masterpieces of Handel's such as Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Ottone and Radamisto.

Zaïcik's portrait of this Royal Academy of Music is mostly Handel-shaped, but punctuated by the world premiere recordings of three arias by Ariosti and Bononcini, including two from Ariosti's 1723 hit, Coriolano. Still, the main take-home point from this superb album is not its world premieres, enjoyable as they are, but the musical performances themselves, because the whole presentation is wonderful from first note to last. Zaïcik herself is sublime: golden-voiced, with the subtlest of soft halos around her lower registers, contrasting against crystal bright upper notes, and with a wonderful silky mellifluousness to even the most acrobatically leaping of lines.
By way of illustration, one could pick any of these arias, but for a slower aria you could head to the aching “Ah! Tu non sai” from Handel's Ottone, where the lucid textures allow you to particularly appreciate the sensitive playing of Le Consort - themselves are elegantly led by another rising young name, Baroque violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, whose recent solo album “The Mad Lover” with lutenist Thomas Dunford also warrants repeated listening. Then to hear both Le Consort and Zaïcik making neat work of a virtuosic showpiece, skip to the concluding “Agitato da fiere tempeste” from Handel's Riccardo.

All that said, the best advice is actually to not skip around at all. Instead, listen from beginning to end. Then repeat. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

[Antonmb]

The Berlin Album: Trio Sonatas From Berlin
Ensemble Diderot, Johannes Pramsohler
Aidas (2020), via Qobuz

Ensemble Diderot’s latest installment in their cities series, this is a very nice album.

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Josquin Desprez - Septiesme Livre De Chansons
Ensemble Clément Janequin, Dominique Visse
Qobuz 24/44.1




Splendid performance with crystal clear sound.

2021 sees the 500th anniversary of the death of Josquin Des Pres, the most celebrated composer of his day. Dominique Visse and the Ensemble Clément Janequin are recording a selection of his chansons from one of the most important editions of his works, Tylman Susato’s Septiesme livre de Chansons published in 1545. This edition bear witness to the diversity of Josquin’s chanson writing, but above all to the melancholy and sorrow so present in his works, and is clearly a tribute, as is also evident in the two Déplorations on his death, Musæ Jovis by Nicolas Gombert and O mors inevitabilis by Hieronymus Vinders.

This recording endeavours to present a Josquin legacy, a post mortem illustration of his chanson œuvre, in remembrance of his musical genius. It has also enabled Dominique Visse and the Ensemble Clément Janequin to express their profound musical passion for this major Renaissance composer who has accompanied them for more than 40 years. © Ricercar

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Le Coucher Du Roi - Music for Louis XIV's Chamber
via Qobuz




The Sun King didn't have a high end hi-fi, he had something much better: live music in his room!
This is a very nice release.

Night is falling. In this twilight of the reign of Louis XIV and at the end of his Grand Coucher, the king is at last free from protocol. He then orders the musicians of the King’s Chamber, to come to him; they are the most excellent in the kingdom. These "Petits Concerts which were held in the evening before His Majesty" enabled the king to hear his preferred repertoire from all that he had loved and even danced to.

Here is the “Sleep scene” from Lully’s Atys, the Sombres déserts by Lambert, La Mutine by Visée, the Grande Pièce Royale by Lalande, A Gigue by Marais, La Plainte by La Barre... Thibaut Roussel has gathered around him the finest interpreters of the French baroque repertoire, to give us, as if in a waking dream, the intimate music of this Coucher du Roi. "Let the night last", sings Le Camus, right up until Couperin's Land of Dodo... © CVSpectacles

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Friedrich Ernst Fesca - Complete String Quartets Vol. 2
Amaryllis Quartett
via Qobuz




We listened to a part of this set during dinner.
It is perfect music for this purpose.
Not thrilling enough to keep me listening for 4 hours though.

Since Friedrich Ernst Fesca, the father of Alexander Fesca, had received an excellent education as a violinist, it is not surprising that his masterfully elaborated string quartets contributed significantly to the establishment of his outstanding reputation as a composer. Until 1818 he published a total of twelve quartets, and two others followed in 1819 and then again in 1824-25. For a decade Fesca was one of the most-reviewed quartet composers, and it is documented that he was one of the most performed such composers for an even longer period of time.

On this second volume the quality and originality of his string quartets again are revealed above all in the balance with which he combines mellow harmony, contrapuntal expertise, and formally integrated virtuosity. The eight quartets are interpreted by the Amaryllis Quartet, which at the very latest since its triumph with the finalists’ prize at the Premio Paolo Borciani in Reggio Emilia in 2011 has numbered among the leading string quartets of its generation. Pearls for friends of chamber music who delight in discovery! © CPO

[Antonmb]

Bach: Little Books
“Music from the Bach family circle”
Francesco Corti, Harpsichord
Arcana/Outhere Music (2020), via Qobuz

This was a Gramophone recommendation, and I enjoyed it allot. From the album site at Outhere Music:

“A world renowned international soloist and harpsichord teacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Francesco Corti embarks a collaboration with Arcana with a musical journey through the manuscripts of the Bach family, beginning with the two books belonging to Johann Sebastian’s brother (the Möller and Andreas Bach manuscripts) and leading to the famous Büchleine for Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann. The programme presents three major keyboard works by J. S. Bach (BWV 815, 992 and 998) that are preserved in ‘domestic’ copies.

Combined with works by the most important musical figures in Bach’s musical life: Böhm, one of his teachers; Kuhnau, his predecessor as Thomaskantor; Telemann, friend and godfather to Bach’s second son Carl Philipp Emanuel; Hasse and François Couperin. The resulting programme is an unconventional Bachian harpsichord recital, a mixture of different genres and composers, that is probably much closer to the ‘home concert’ of the period than to the standard modern recital.”

The sound is excellent, and the harpsichord has a beautiful tone.

[ehoove]

Excerpts from the Ballet: Romeo and Juliet
Prokofiev
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Erich Leinsdorf Conducting
A Fabulous Direct to Disc Masterpiece - amazing!
Sheffield Lab 8
Regards.
Jim

[Antonmb]

York Bowen: Fragments from Hans Andersen & Studies
Nicolas Namoradze, piano
Hyperion (2021), 24/192 files

Never heard of Bowen, this is very nice music and playing.

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Weinberg - Vol. One: String Quartets Nos 2, 5, and 8
Arcadia Quartet
Qobuz 24/96




I have a box set of all Weinberg String Quartets, extremely well played by the Quatuor Danel.
I have the impression this is also a good performance, with terrific sound.
These works have a strange and peculiar attraction on me...


It's strange to think that, even as recently as five years ago, the overwhelming majority of even those working in classical music had had little or no contact with the music of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996). Yet now, thanks especially to the work of Gidon Kremer (most recently partnering with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on DG for a magnificent recording of symphonies 2 and 21), Weinberg feels almost everywhere. Enjoyably so too, given the eloquence with which his Polish-accented, Jewish folk and Shostakovich-esque (but not) language speaks to us. So it was only a matter of time before quartet cycles emerged to give the Silesian Quartet's existing strong offering its first serious competition.

Weinberg's seventeen string quartets span half a century, the first dating from 1937 when he was just eighteen and still self-taught, and the final one penned in 1986 at the end of his composing career. On to the Arcadia Quartet, and while they aren't presenting the quartets consecutively, this first volume does stick to the early end of his career: No. 2 in G major was written in 1939 and 1940 in Minsk, when he was a twenty-year-old composition student; then No. 5 in B-flat major dates from 1945 when he'd settled in Russia, and No. 8 from 1959. The quartet sound itself is a bright, polished one which brings a wonderful shine and luminosity to the lucid textures of No. 2, and a poised insistence to keening, elegiac moments such as moments the dark opening Adagio of No. 8, or the improvisatory opening violin solo of No. 5's fourth movement – to which the cloaked, flute-like tonal quality from the second violin solo then serves as an ear-pricking foil. Polish doesn't mean an unwillingness to get down and dirty though. For instance there's often an invigoratingly peasanty barb to their attack throughout No. 5's Scherzo, which overall is an edge-of-the-seat-exciting reading for the way, as things become increasingly whirlingly madcap, they hold onto technical precision alongside the fire. Essentially, these are readings that will throw up fresh qualities and colours to admire with each listen, and they bode very well indeed for the volumes to come. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz