Mitzi Meyerson has been delving of late for Glossa into unjustly forgotten keyboard repertory from the Baroque. Praised by no less a critic than Nicholas Kenyon for her recording of Gottlieb Muffat’s Componimenti Musicali per il Cembalo (“Eureka! I’ve known these wonderful pieces for years, having bought an old edition of the music, but have never heard them properly performed. So it’s a joy to hear Mitzi Meyerson’s glorious realisation of these 18th-century suites, which lie at the heart of the high baroque style...”), Meyerson now turns her attention to the shadowy figure of Englishman Richard Jones. [read more...]

There is still much work to be done in creating performing editions of Baroque music originating in Spain (and then going out and performing it...), yet this is just one area of musical life today that Emilio Moreno is contributing to. To follow on from delving into the popular culture of the turn of the 19th century, as epitomized by the tonadilla, which he successfully recreated for Glossa on La Tirana contra Mambrú, Moreno – along with El Concierto Español – turns now to the world of allegorical courtly serenatas as the shifting political national landscapes of the 17th century were disintegrating into the War of the Spanish Succession. [read more...]

Fabio Bonizzoni’s series, with La Risonanza, of Handel Italian cantate con stromenti for Glossa has now come to a conclusion with seven volumes recorded, but not before the group were awarded the 2010 Stanley Sadie Handel Recording Prize for the fifth instalment, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (with sopranos Yetzabel Arias Fernández and Roberta Invernizzi and contralto Romina Basso in the three named roles). In commending the disc the jury of the Recording Prize made the following comments, “La Risonanza produces a delightful performance that presents all of the strengths and virtues we have come to associate with their recent explorations of Handel’s music. [read more...]

Hervé Niquet is far less interested in being known as a Baroque music specialist than for his passionate interest in all of French music, especially its vocal and lyrical compositions and nowadays he is as liable to be found directing a symphony orchestra as his own period instrument ensemble Le Concert Spirituel. It may come, for some, as a surprise to find Niquet teaming up with the Brussels Philharmonic to record Debussy but this future release will mark the inauguration of a new adventure for Niquet and Glossa focusing on the music associated with the Prix de Rome competition which drew in scores of leading French composers all the way from 1803 through 1968. [read more...]

If Spanish music from the Renaissance has become increasingly appreciated in recent decades that from the turn of the 19th century remains a blur for many. Not so for Emilio Moreno who – in addition to his musical expertise inthe Baroque and Classical, especially that gained through long association with the Orchestra of the 18th Century – has become something of a specialist in the music of the Age of Enlightenment in Spain. Moreno has been combining Herculean labours transcribing the scores of tonadillas from two centuries past with bringing their populist texts and music to audiences of the 21st century – both with singular success. Here he describes the nature of the dramatic genre that is the tonadilla and the level of its original success acting as barometer of the feelings of the ordinary people in Spain, especially those of Madrid. [read more...]

Not content with a career as a bass soloist (in music extending from 1300 to the present day) or as a teacher (he holds a professorship in early music in Bremen), Harry van der Kamp has for over two decades been directing the Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam, an ensemble whose repertoire encompasses the entire madrigal repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries. Precious recording activities of the group have extended to music by Emilio de’Cavalieri, Scipione Lacorcia as well as by Carlo Gesualdo himself. Yet van der Kamp has been stirred by the fact that no fitting tribute – no monumental representation wrought in stone or metal – exists to commemorate the composer who he regards as “the greatest that we ever have had in Holland”: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.[read more...]

Mitzi Meyerson’s insight into (and experience with) the harpsichord literature of the Baroque is such that when she makes a visit to the recording studio, one knows that something rare, fascinating and illuminating will emerge. This has been the case in recent years with both the Claviersuiten by Georg Böhm and the Musique de Salon of Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (which have also appeared on Glossa); the latest exploration beyond the mainstream undertaken by Mitzi Meyerson – Muffat’s Componimenti Musicali – is charged with the same character and sense of expectation. This is not the Georg Muffat who studied in Paris with Lully but his son, Gottlieb (also known as Theofilo), who spent much of his career in Vienna and whose set of six harpsichord suites Componimenti Musicali appeared towards the end of the 1730s. [read more...]

It seemed that the music of Carl Friedrich Abel was proving singularly impervious to modern performance initiatives. More is known about the life and times of this Köthen-born composer than about his actual music (he can be placed as a pupil of JS Bach and as someone who died in the year of the 17 year-old Beethoven’s first visit to Vienna). Yet it was as a virtuosic improviser on the by then (surely?) outdated instrument of the viola da gamba that Abel was equally known for by his contemporaries. So, the most suitable candidate in the 21st century for bringing back Abel’s music to its rightful place needs to be not only a supreme interpreter on the viola da gamba and steeped in its repertory but one capable of understanding the almost lost art of improvisation. [read more...]

“It is the same effect as when you see the sun shining through stained-glass windows in a church: suddenly all the colours are singing.”

After nearly three decades of carving out a niche (as rich as Romanesque statuary found in the Burgundy where he lives and works), Dominique Vellard has returned with a new vigour for performing (and recording), whether it is with his colleagues from the Ensemble Gilles Binchois or as a solo singer. The tenor voice of this deeply-thinking musician has the capacity to explore and explain the messages and subtleties of liturgical traditions that range far beyond the Western tradition. [read more...]

How has the orchestra’s approach to the Beethoven symphonies evolved over the years?

This is a discussion that is very much alive in the orchestra: when we first started, we had no repertoire. So, with every piece that we were approaching we had to work and to discuss, in the old-fashioned way. For years we worked like this, never doing more than one Beethoven symphony in a year – and then we played it over and over again. So, it took us twelve years before we completed the cycle with the Ninth. If you play such pieces again after so many years, things start to change: tempi have changed and whereas we had always been arrogant about all those conductors, who after a certain period of time, decided to rerecord pieces, we – the orchestra members and me personally – now think that it is a good idea to do it again. [read more...]

“Making these old, broken stones sing is a wonderful experience”

Following Caput and Joye you are now turning to another area of the medieval musical world. What has inspired you to consider 13th-century Brabant?

After trying to show two important 15th-century composers in a different musical light, I thought it would be interesting to do a programme which is more geographical yet at the same time more “virtual”: one based only on musical remnants, traces and ruins. In this way we might try and create the sound world of an entire region: rather than producing portraits one would be able to paint full landscapes of scenes hitherto lost and in need of being invented anew. [read more...]

“I really do not think that there is one composer who can be rightly compared to this genius.”

In completing their masterful Monteverdi Edition, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana have returned to the beginning – to the Madrigali a cinque voci… Libro primo – of Monteverdi’s exploration of the madrigalian art form, a journey which was to occupy the composer for more than 50 years of his life across his staying in the cities of Cremona, Mantua and Venice. In this First Book, published in 1587 when the composer was barely 20 years old yet demonstrably showing clear evidence of his approaching maturity, La Venexiana’s performances are again faithful to Monteverdi’s passion for the written word – above all to the weight theme of love. In this final release in the Monteverdi Edition Cavina adds a twist in the tail by including on this new CD the madrigals from the posthumous Libro Nono put together by the composer’s Venetian publisher. With the rerelease of La Venexiana’s recording of Il Terzo Libro (complete with a new essay penned by Stefano Russomanno), eight volumes now comprise Glossa’s Monteverdi Edition, all available within the attractively and imaginatively unified design style which has become the hallmark of the label. [read more...]

For many years Cantica Symphonia has devoted much performing, musicological and recording energy over the music of the French composer Guillaume Dufay. Born at the dawn of the 15th century, Dufay’s musical career looked back to medieval conventions and forward to the early Renaissance. He was a much-travelled figure and was regularly present as musician, composer and emissary of church and secular powers at the many Ecumenical Councils held by the Roman Catholic Church during these turbulent political times. Dufay was often called on to write motets for important occasions such as the dedication of the Duomo of Florence – Nuper rosarum flores – or an especially critical meeting between the Pope, Eugenius IV and the Emperor, Sigismund – Supremum est mortalibus bonum (the names of both these two are to be found within the words of the motet). [read more...]

In the third instalment in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of the secular cantatas with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy, come a quartet of works associated with the Venice-born maecenas Pietro Ottoboni – including the substantial Ero e Leandro, the libretto for which is plausibly considered to have been written by the Cardinal Ottoboni himself. As well as the seldom-performed cantata for bass, Spande ancora a mio dispetto and Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio scored for soprano solo, Bonizzoni also directs the Spanish-texted No se emendará jamás.[read more...]