Jean Rondeau MELANCHOLY GRACE

 

MELANCHOLY GRACE

Benjamin Alard JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH The Complete Work for Keyboard 1

 

THE COMPLETE WORK FOR KEYBOARD 1

 

Rolf Lislevand NUOVE MUSICHE

Is it fair for baroque to sound so sensual? An elegiac soprano voice wafts above an instrumental piece by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger. Flamenco rhythms underpin a passacaglia. Then suddenly we hear the typical harmonies and ornaments of Celtic folk music. Is that how this music really sounded in Italy in the early 1600s? Of course not. But what the Norwegian lutenist and guitarist Rolf Lislevand and his six colleagues bring off on Nuove musiche, their début album for ECM, has all the earmarks of a manifesto. Their vibrant and literally unheard-of readings of early baroque music from Italy are meant to grab the listener directly, as if it really were 'new music'.
'For years people tried to play early music as closely as possible to the way it was played at its time of origin', Lislevand explains 'But that's a philosophical self-contradiction. The first question is whether it's possible at all to replicate the performance of a musician who lived centuries ago. As far as I'm concerned, reconstruction is not really interesting at all. Do we really want to act as if we hadn't heard any music between 1600 and the present day? I think that would be dishonest. With this recording we say goodbye once and for all to early music's authenticity creed.'
This doesn't mean that anything goes - on the contrary. Lislevand, who learned his craft at the famous Schola Cantorum in Basle, has been professor of lute and historical performance practice at Trossingen Musikhochschule since 1993. He has turned out many prize-winning recordings, some of them with his Kapsberger Ensemble, which forms the core of the musicians on Nuove Musiche. He avidly scrutinises every available scrap of information on what he plays and how to play it properly. But those are only the preconditions for a convincing performance. After all, one vital element in baroque music was improvisation: 'Pieces were played to meet the needs of the moment', Professor Lislevand points out. 'To play strictly according to the notes on the page would be tantamount to lying, for the scores were written in a sort of shorthand. They presuppose a good deal of knowledge and self-assurance from the player.'
Take the percussion instruments, for instance. We know they were used, but nobody around 1600 bothered to write down the parts. So we have no way of knowing for sure how they were used. Did they only serve as timekeepers, or was their timbre exploited as well? Lislevand has very strong views on the subject: 'The idea that it wasn't until today that we could freely express our feelings is not only naive but arrogant. Personally I believe that the people of the 17th century were much richer and more self-aware than we assume today.' It is only natural, then, that the percussionist Pedro Estevan offers a huge range of expressive sounds and rhythms on Nuove musiche.
Lislevand searches for points of contact between the 400-year-old pieces on this recording (by Kapsberger, Pellegrini, Piccinini and others) and the musical horizons of today's performers. Usually the starting point is the passacaglia, a set of increasingly dramatic variations on an unchanging bass pattern. Passacaglias formed the core repertoire of the lute and guitar books of the 17th century. 'They thrive on chromaticism, harsh dissonances and offbeat rhythms. If the composers tried to get these effects, then we have every right to go even further. My idea is simply to develop and elaborate things already there in the material. Arianna Savall's melody really does come from the Kapsberger toccata itself. Everything there that smacks of echoes from current popular music is already contained in the pieces. I just coax it out.' (ECM Records)

David Greilsammer BAROQUE CONVERSATIONS

This Sony-label debut release by Israeli pianist David Greilsammer has much in common with his earlier recording Fantasie Fantasme, released on the Naxos label. In fact, here Greilsammer might be said to have refined the ideas on the earlier album. Both combine contemporary and mainstream repertory, and apparently Greilsammer has an inclination toward pretentious graphic design. But here the focus is tightened. Greilsammer constructs a sequence of four Baroque three-movement "pieces," each consisting of three compositions. Of these sets of three, the outer two are Baroque works, while the center is a contemporary piece, commissioned in two cases by Greilsammer himself from contemporary Israeli composers. Greilsammer balances these works cleverly: the structure of the sets of three is not fast-slow-fast, but not simply random, either; the pieces instead are linked by motive and mood, with the modern work emerging as just a slight shift from what precedes it, and as a logical introduction to the finale. One might make several objections along the way: the Handel Suite for keyboard in D minor, HWV 447, with its four movements, disturbs the plan for no very good reason, and Greilsammer's readings of the Baroque pieces, especially the opening Gavotte et Six Doubles of Rameau, are a bit too dreamy, a bit too obviously bent to the requirements of the project. Still, there's no denying that Greilsammer has come closer than most other performers to the grail of integrating contemporary music into a mainstream concert program, and that he has done it in a very inventive way. The combination of a Frescobaldi toccata and the Wiegenmusik of German-born composer Helmut Lachenmann, each with little figures gracefully spinning off an underlying rhythm, is especially effective. Recommended for listeners of a speculative frame of mind. (James Manheim)