Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton FLEURS

FLEURS

Ex Cathedra / Jeffrey Skidmore PENELOPE THWAITES From Five Continents

FROM FIVE CONTINENTS

Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton THE CONTRAST

                                                      ENGLISH POETRY IN SONG

Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton REASON IN MADNESS

Throughout history men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new disc, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’
Brahms’ Ophelia Songs, composed for a stage production of Hamlet, appear next to those by Richard Strauss and Chausson, while Ophelia's death is described by both Schumann (in Herzeleid) and Saint-Saëns. Goethe’s mysterious and traumatized Mignon appears in settings by Hugo Wolf as well as Duparc, while his ill-used Gretchen grieves by her spinning-wheel in Schubert's matchless setting. Sadness and madness tip into witchery and unbridled eroticism with Pierre Louÿs's poems about Bilitis, set by Kœchlin and Debussy. Sampson and Middleton end their recital as it began, with a suicide by drowning: in Poulenc’s monologue La Dame de Monte-Carlo, the elderly female protagonist has been unlucky at the gambling tables and decides to throw herself into the sea.

Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton A SOPRANO'S SCHUBERTIADE

Schubert’s empathy with women is everywhere evident in his body of songs, which include songs to, by, about and for women. Devised by Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton, the present recital brings us each of those possibilities and more.
The playwright Helmina von Chézy wrote the text to the tender Romanze, intending it for her play Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus to which Schubert composed incidental music. Another female author, Marianne von Willemer, wrote the two Suleika poems for Goethe, who included them (under his own name) in the collection West-östlicher Divan. And no less than seven of the other songs on the disc are also associated with Goethe, and his characters Mignon (from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) and Gretchen (from Faust). Schubert was for a while almost obsessed with the mysterious and waif-like Mignon, making several settings of the poems associated with her. Less of an enigma but equally moving, Schubert’s Gretchen sings of awakening desire (Gretchen am Spinnrade) and laments her coming disgrace (Gretchens Bitte).
Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have collaborated on several acclaimed projects for BIS, most recently with the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies as their companion. Here they close their Soprano’s Schubertiade with three settings of poems by Walter Scott, albeit in German translations. The three ‘Ellen Songs’ are from the verse-romance The Lady of the Lake from 1810, with the last one, ‘Schubert’s Ave Maria’, being one of the composer’s best-known and most loved compositions.

Cappella Amsterdam / Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century / Frans Brüggen JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH St. John Passion, BWV 245

One of the many delights coming from Frans Brüggen’s distinguished career has been the understanding which he brings to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – such as here with the St John Passion – whether on the concert platform or on record. Brüggen’s cultured feeling for Bach’s musical structures as much as for its style and expressive content permits a textural clarity enjoyed by few of his directing colleagues. A special wealth of experience in the music of Bach has also been gained by the members of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century across the three decades of its existence and as part of its regular concert series (there have now been over a hundred of these tours!) and with a concentrated opportunity to focus on one work, Bach’s masterpiece was performed and recorded in Spring 2010.
Also of special note on this new recording is the presence of a solo group comprising both distinguished and rising talents, led by Markus Schäfer as the Evangelist and Thomas Oliemans as Jesus, and with Michael Chance and Marcel Beekman singing arias together with the added luxury of the present-day “Bach bass” par excellence in Peter Kooij and the radiant-voiced Carolyn Sampson. Choral support comes from the Cappella Amsterdam, also present (as was Peter Kooij) on another of Frans Brüggen’s recent revisitings for Glossa and The Grand Tour of the glories of Bach’s choral music, the B minor Mass. (Glossa)

Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton A VERLAINE SONGBOOK

Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have turned to Verlaine settings for their new album for BIS, drawing inevitable comparisons with ‘Green’ (Erato, 4/15), Philippe Jaroussky and Jérôme Ducros’s two-disc Verlaine survey. Wisely, perhaps, they take a very different approach. Where Jaroussky and Ducros focus on multiple settings of individual texts, Sampson and Middleton concentrate on song-cycles, bookending their recital with Fêtes galantes and Ariettes oubliées, and placing La bonne chanson at its centre. Notable among the remaining songs are those by Régine Wieniawski (‘Poldowski’ was the pseudonym she adopted), and d’Indy’s pupil Déodat de Séverac, whose plainchant-inflected ‘Paysages tristes’, one of many discoveries here, forms the disc’s unforgettable epilogue.

Sampson and Middleton are very much at home in this repertory, frequently functioning as an indivisible unit with sound and sense beautifully fused. Occasionally – in the opening ‘En sourdine’ from Fêtes galantes, for instance – Sampson lets consonants slip in a quest for dynamic shading, though elsewhere texts are scrupulously delivered. She’s in excellent voice, too, her tone clear and silvery, her upper registers exquisite: Chausson’s ‘Apaisement’ sends shivers down your spine with its floated high pianissimos and suggestive portamentos.

The subtlety of Verlaine’s poetry – in which inner emotion and external reality are in continuous if fragile accord – encouraged song composers to expand the range of their piano-writing, and Middleton’s playing is marvellously fresh throughout, the thin dividing line between wit and melancholy superbly negotiated. When it comes to La bonne chanson, I prefer the more forthright approach of Gérard Souzay, say, or the underrated Camille Maurane, to Sampson and Middleton’s reined-in interpretation, fascinating though it is. Ariettes oubliées, on the other hand, gets one its finest performances on disc, the slide from eroticism to bitterness immaculately judged. Very fine. (Tim Ashley / Gramophone)

Bach Collegium Japan / Masaaki Suzuki MOZART Great Mass in C minor

Period-instrument C minor Masses get better and better. The bar was set in the mid 1980s by Gardiner and Hogwood, then raised in the new millennium by the likes of McCreesh, Krivine and Langrée. This new recording from Japan, which joins Suzuki’s scholarly and startling Requiem, is fully worthy to join them. Reviewing the Requiem (1/15), I was disappointed that the acoustic and engineering blurred the inner voices, obliterating Mozart’s (or Süssmayr’s, Eybler’s or Suzuki Jnr’s) counterpoint. Here that problem is largely avoided in a similarly grand acoustic: that, and the fact that the C minor Mass is a far more vocally orientated piece than the Requiem.

The choir are well drilled and the two female soloists are matched as well as any on disc (see my Collection on the work, 6/13). Carolyn Sampson takes the bulk of the soprano solos (the ‘Laudamus’ is taken by the second soprano, Olivia Vermeulen, as is traditional) and does so with the lithe coloratura, rich, silky tone and innate identification with this music familiar from her sacred Mozart collection with The King’s Consort (Hyperion, 5/06), and intertwines memorably with Olivia Vermeulen in the duet and trio of the Gloria. Suzuki is no speed merchant (a full minute slower than Langrée in the Kyrie, for example), and maintains the through line in more strenuous movements such as the ‘Qui tollis’ and the ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ fugue that closes the Gloria. He takes his time especially in the ‘Et incarnatus est’, its beautiful pastoral scene spun out mesmerisingly by Sampson.

The edition used of this tantalisingly incomplete work is that by Franz Beyer, published in 1989. There is nothing here to discombobulate the general listener; however, those for whom such matters are important will wish to know that there are no (editorial) trumpets in the ‘Credo’ or horns in the ‘Incarnatus’, whose new string parts are perhaps more active than those in the more usual HC Robbins Landon completion. (Beyer also contrived an Agnus Dei from the music of the Kyrie but that is not recorded here.) As the only other recording of this edition is Harnoncourt’s, whose peculiar balance between voices and instruments is a sticking point, it is worthwhile to hear Beyer’s work on this disc.

Sampson is once again the soloist in the popular Exsultate, jubilate, the treat here being a parallel recording of the opening aria in the ‘Salzburg’ version, which boasts a different text and flutes instead of oboes. As a package, the disc as a whole is certainly a winner; the Mass easily ranks alongside the period-instrument benchmarks. (David Threasher / Gramophone)

Bach Collegium Japan / Masaaki Suzuki MOZART Requiem

Masaaki Suzuki’s recording of Mozart’s incomplete Requiem is based on a new edition of the score by his son, the harpsichordist and organist Masato Suzuki. Those familiar with the regularly performed Süssmayr version will notice a couple of important changes – though to spot the others they may have to follow a score carefully.

Mozart’s assistant Franz Süssmayr was given the task of completing the Requiem following the great composer’s death. But Joseph Eybler – a musician Mozart apparently admired – had already made some interventions which Suzuki generally prefers to Süssmayr’s; in other places he has corrected some of the faulty writing for which Süssmayr has long been criticised. More noticeably, he adds a fugal Amen chorus to the Lacrimosa, based on a genuine sketch discovered in Berlin in 1960. He also follows the first edition of the score (1800) in allotting the great majority of the trombone part of the Tuba mirum – all but the first phrase in fact – to the bassoon, though this version is only included as an appendix.

Such details aside, the performance is notable for its super-clean orchestral edges and refinement – taken to such an extent that the result can feel distanced, however perfectly articulated. The soloists – a perfectly matched quartet – follow this approach to the point of sounding a little bloodless, not helped by the resonant acoustic, which creates a hazy impression. The Solemn Vespers are again of a piece, neat and perfectly efficient, but a little cool nevertheless, even in Carolyn Sampson’s direct Laudate Dominum. (George Hall)

Carolyn Sampson / Iestyn Davies / Joseph Middleton LOST IS MY QUIET

Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies have collaborated on many occasions in the field of Baroque opera and oratorio, but on this occasion they venture into a somewhat different territory. In the company of Joseph Middleton, they have been exploring the Lieder for one and two voices of Mendelssohn and Schumann, combining them with songs and duets by Roger Quilter. And even though the disc actually opens with a set of Purcell songs – repertoire which both singers have previously made their mark in – they are here performed with the piano accompaniments realized by Benjamin Britten, turning them into something quite new and different.

‘Creamy’, ‘luminous’ and ‘supple’ are words that often appear in reviews about both Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies, and in these duets they achieve a marvellous blend as well as the utmost precision. They are aided in this by Joseph Middleton, described in The Telegraph (UK) as an ‘unfailingly sensitive accompanist’

Carolyn Sampson / Freiburger Barockorchester / Petra Müllejans JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Cantatas for Soprano

For biographer Philipp Spitta, Bach's period as organist and later Konzertmeister to the Duke of Weimar (1708-17) was the time of his ‘early mastery’. Nowhere is this more evident than in the small but highly distinguished body of cantatas he wrote there, whether for the court chapel – the Himmelsburg or ‘Castle of Heaven’ – or for some clearly very joyful wedding (BWV202). From the ravishing duets for soprano and oboe of the latter to the penitential strains of BWV199, the radiant voice of Carolyn Sampson and the virtuosos of the Freiburger Barockorchester do full justice to Bach's inventiveness.

Soprano Carolyn Sampson has been proclaimed "the best British early music soprano by some distance" by the editors of Gramophone. A native of Bedford, she studied voice with Richard Smart at the University of Birmingham, and made her debut with the English National Opera in a production of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea and continues to appear with this company with regularity in addition to appearances at the Paris Opera. The vast majority of Sampson's singing has been heard in concert engagements with period ensembles, and by 2006 she had appeared with most of the best-known groups of this sort, but especially the King's Consort, Collegium Vocale, and Ex Cathedra. Sampson has recorded extensively for the Hyperion, BIS, Harmonia Mundi, and Deux-elles labels. (Presto Classical)

Le Concert Spirituel / Hervé Niquet JEAN -PHILIPPE RAMEAU Les Fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour

The latest in Hervé Niquet's 'reinvigorations' of French operatic music from the Baroque and beyond for Glossa is Rameau’s 1747 'Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour'. A ballet heroïque in a prologue and three entrées, the whole work was designed to comprise a complete theatrical spectacle. Music for dancing – as befits a ballet – is given a prominent role and Rameau is able to create especially expressive symphonies and to give the choruses – even a double-chorus – an integral role in the action. Added to this are supernatural effects, and plots for the entrées which explored the then uncommon world of Egyptian mythology (including a musical depiction of the flooding of the River Nile). In his vocal music Rameau deftly switches between Italianate style and the French mode, current in the mid-18th century, allowing the distinguished team of vocal soloists to demonstrate their accomplished talents. Overseen by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, and with booklet notes from Thomas Soury, this new recording is an important addition to the Rameau catalogue – the more so in the 250th anniversary year of the composer’s death. It brings to life one of Rameau’s finer, if underrated, compositions, and a dramatic work written on the cusp of important reforms in opera. (Presto Classical) 

Jean-Philippe Rameau originally conceived Les Fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour as a ballet héroïque on the subject of the Egyptian gods. Pragmatically, he later adapted it to celebrate the royal marriage of Louis, Dauphin of France to Maria Josepha of Saxony. This 2014 Glossa release marks the 250th anniversary of Rameau's death, though the music is far from gloomy. Le Concert Spirituel, under the direction of Hervé Niquet, performs the ballet in delightful Baroque style, with rhythmic precision, scintillating ornamentation, and fresh sonorities, and the re-creation of Rameau's score has all the elegance and panache one would expect of a courtly entertainment. The vocal writing is quite florid and fanciful, but the French cast is a joy to hear, even though the mythological libretto is quite stilted and almost nonsensical by modern standards. Recorded in Versailles, the sound is extraordinarily clear, vibrant, and detailed, so audiophiles are in for a treat, even though the format is standard CD. Highly recommended for fans of Baroque theater works. (Blair Sanderson)

Carolyn Sampson / Britten Sinfonia / Stephen Layton EŠENVALDS Passion and Resurrection

Australian concert-goers have sampled the mesmerising choral sound of the Baltic as championed by Stephen Layton in 2010. Now Layton and his British group Polyphony introduce the young Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds, whose a cappella and accompanied choral works are accessible for their heartfelt expressions of suffering and joy.

The Latvian struggle for independence from the Soviet Union has been dubbed the “Singing Revolution”, in which freedom fighters raised their voices in a chorus of forbidden songs.

His Passion draws on sacred texts in English and Latin, and the impossibly pure Polyphony tone wrings devastating emotional impact from every syllable. The warm plainchant opening is gradually submerged in glassy string dissonance from the Britten Sinfonia. Extreme changes of mood and atmosphere fade seamlessly into one another so that the climax’s stormy repetitions of “crucify!” lull themselves into the gentlest of prayers.

Carolyn Sampson’s haunting, at times visceral soprano solos place Passion and Resurrection alongside other contemporary classics like Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The works on the album pay tribute to womankind, from soaring soprano lines to texts by American women poets and Mother Teresa, as well as depictions of Mary Magdalene and the stabat mater.

The Sara Teasdale setting Evening describes a “chorus of shimmering sound”, a phrase that equally applies to the disc as a whole. Two decades have passed since Latvia achieved independence but we are still hearing a “singing revolution”, with Esenvalds leading the charge. (Copyright © Limelight Magazine).