Concerto Copenhagen / Lars Ulrik Mortensen PER LA NOTTE DI NATALE

 

PER LA NOTTE DI NATALE

 

John Holloway / Jaap ter Linden / Lars Ulrik Mortensen VERACINI Sonatas

John Holloway’s “violinist’s journey” through great works of the 17th and 18th century, begun with his acclaimed New Series recordings of Schmelzer, Biber and Muffat, reaches a new stage with his account of the sonatas of Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768). The present recording - introducing a new ensemble, as Dutch cellist Jaap ter Linden joins British baroque violinist Holloway and Danish harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen – offers fascinating insights into the work of a composer whose musical achievements are still often undervalued, or overshadowed, in contemporary accounts, by the idiosyncrasies of his personal life.

In his liner notes, Holloway says of Veracini: “With his combination of brilliant technical and compositional innovation firmly rooted in the best music of the previous generation, Veracini earns an honoured place in the short list of truly great violinist-composers which includes Biber and - from a much later generation – Ysaÿe .... and, of course, Bach”.

That the Italian was one of the outstanding virtuosi of the 18th century was clear enough to his contemporaries. There are numerous reports of the clarity and forcefulness of his playing cutting through the sound of an orchestra. Even the great violinist Giuseppe Tartini is said to have been so overwhelmed by Veracini’s playing that he took time off from public performance to hone his own skills.

Veracini was one of the first musicians of his time to prefer the existence of a freelance soloist to a career as an employed court musician. From 1714 on, he enjoyed his success in London as well as in various other musical centers of Europe. He was a ‘star’ par excellence, brilliant eccentric, with no doubts about his own abilities, frequently asserting that there was only one God, and one Veracini!

Although he wrote secular and spiritual cantatas, concertos, oratorios and operas, Veracini’s significance as a composer rests on his four collections of violin sonatas, which, composed or published in 1716, 1721, 1744 and the late 1750s, span virtually his whole creative career. For the present CD, John Holloway has chosen one characteristic example of each – music that speaks for itself while allowing us to trace Veracini’s development as an artist.

The twelve "Sonate a violino, o flauto solo" with their strict use of four-movement sequences follow the sonata da chiesa form, but have no fugues. Yet the twelve sonatas published as Opus I in Dresden in 1721 represent a significant step forward, coming closer to the ambitiously contrapuntal German style. The first sonata on the present CD begins with a French overture in dotted rhythms, revealing ‘experimental’ traits in sound and technique.

But his grip on his craft was very firm. Some of his pieces, including the Sonate accademiche, were orginally composed not for the general public but for learned societies of music lovers. This was highly erudite music reminiscent of late Bach, but formal concerns and a “wild and flighty” quality coexist in the best of Veracini’s music.

“It is tempting to look for the bizarre in Veracini’s music and over-emphasise it", John Holloway remarks. "I think this would be to underestimate him. The quality of his music lies not only in the learned counterpoint, or in the outstanding writing for the violin: there is throughout a feeling for melody and harmony which display a remarkable and very personal expressivity.” (ECM Records)

John Holloway / Jaap ter Linden / Lars Ulrik Mortensen JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR Sonatas

Following his acclaimed recordings of sonatas by Biber, Schmelzer and Veracini and his no less lauded rendering of the complete unaccompanied works by Bach, British violinst John Holloway once again joins forces with his excellent partners Jaap ter Linden and Lars Ulrik Mortensen for an album of strikingly beautiful, yet little known chamber music from the baroque era. Jean-Marie Leclair (1697–1764) who trained as a dancer, lacemaker, violinist and composer and was murdered in Paris under obscure circumstances, laid the foundations for the French violin school. As a composer he is a master of mixed styles, providing a rare synthesis of Italian and French traits, of melodic beauty and dancelike vivacity. John Holloway has chosen sonatas from his “classical” period in which Leclair had gained a perfect balance of proportion, expressiveness and virtuosic display. (ECM Records) 

This came as quite a revelation. Choosing five sonatas from what he believes to be Leclair’s finest collection, and, along with his colleagues, performing them with deep understanding and expressive finesse, John Holloway makes a persuasive case for the French violinist as a major figure of 18th-century music. … All three players capture unerringly each movement’s rhetorical style, and are sensitive to the many expressive details of harmony and melody, while remaining natural and unaffected. … I urge you to listen. (Duncan Druce / Gramophone)

John Holloway BIBER Unam Ceylum

This is a disc of such stunningly brilliant virtuosity that is hard to know where to start. … This is bravura music in the truest sense, music capable of moving from dynamic energy to eloquence in less time than it takes to write the words, music that can hurtle forward with seemingly unstoppable momentum only to fall back to calm, sensuous lyricism, music that can encompass everything from skilled counterpoint to rumbustuous humour. Holloway’s performances encompasses all this with playing of amazing fluency and bravura passion, at times leaving the listener gasping. He is ably supported (as on his equally superb Schmelzer disc) by both organ and harpsichord, a combination that apparently caused some critical muttering over the Schmelzer recording. The recording has a vivid presence, giving the impression that all three players are in the room with the listener. In short this is a staggering celebration of the art of violin playing that should immediately be added to every Goldberg reader’s collection without delay. (Brian Robins / Goldberg ) 

Virtuosic, experimental, meditative, Biber was a man who seems to have been able to say whatever he liked through the medium of his instrument, and Holloway has contributed as much as anyone to modern-day recognition of his status as one of the greatest of all violinist-composers. … With the violin resonating pleasingly through the many double and triple-stoppings, and Holloway’s bowing demonstrating a delicious lightness and freedom, these fundamentally inward, tonally aware performances also seem somehow to have more of the smell of the 17th century about them than their current rivals. … A respectfully resonant recording is a help here, as is the gentle but effectively unfussy continuo support of harpsichord and organ. (Lindsay Kemp, Gramophone)

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)

John Holloway BIBER / MUFFAT Der Türken Anmarsch

“Der Türken Anmarsch”, a recording distinguished by extraordinarily inventive and committed performances, marks “the end of an era” for John Holloway. The album brings to a conclusion fourteen years of intensive work on Biber’s music. “I have come to an ever greater admiration of Biber,” Holloway says, “and of his immense contribution to the development of the violin as a serious instrument for Western music.” As with his previous album “Unam Ceylum”, the British violinist and his associates perform pieces from Biber’s 1681 anthology, Sonatae Violino solo, which formed the cornerstone of his reputation. They show how secular and sacred concerns are interwoven in music as arresting and as innovative as the “Mystery Sonatas”.
In the liner notes, Peter Wollny writes: “Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), chapel-master at Salzburg, has gone down in history as one of the greatest violinists of his age. His astonishing prowess can be seen not only in the demanding violin parts he wrote in his music for instrumental and vocal ensemble, but especially in his many sonatas for solo violin. But Biber, in his compositions, was concerned with more than simply flaunting his extraordinary virtuosity: as he stressed several times in the prefaces to his printed editions, his music was meant to be pervaded - and thereby legitimized - by his compositional skills. In making good this claim, he also acquired the reputation of being one of the supreme composers of his generation.”
“Der Türken Anmarsch” takes its title from Biber’s A-Minor Sonata. Some questions remain regarding authorship of parts of the work, for the manuscript is attributed to Schmelzer. Andreas Anton Schmelzer, son of the great violinist composer Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, apparently reworked a piece by Biber to relate it to events of 1683, when the Turks launched an assault on the city of Vienna. Though the programmatic theme – Islam versus Christianity – has lost none of its topicality over three centuries, there is little indication that religious war was on Biber’s mind when he structured the piece. Large parts of the composition clearly stem from Biber’s tenth sonata in the “Mystery Cycle”, intended to depict the crucifixion in the original context.”

Anne Sofie von Otter BACH

It was with Bach that Anne Sofie von Otter made her very first solo appearances when she performed the alto arias in the St. John Passion in Stockholm. But by then, as she has explained, the experience gained as a chorister in the Stockholm Bach Choir had already had a fundamental and enduring influence on her approach to the composer. “The conductor of the Bach Choir at that time was very dynamic: he was on fire for this music, and I became on fire for it as well. Then Nikolaus Harnoncourt came up to conduct the Bach motets, and that was also a marvellous experience. Harnoncourt was revolutionizing the performance of Baroque and Viennese Classical works - spring-cleaning tempos and phrasing and using original instruments to shed the old woolly sounds of a Romantic orchestra and make the music vibrant again. It was an exciting time for young people like me who gathered around the gramophone and listened eagerly to his new recordings of Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart. Harnoncourt really was my main influence in Bach."
“In the first ten years of my career I sang a lot of Bach," the singer adds, “but after that I purposely put his music and oratorio aside, because there was so much else to explore, especially opera. So this disc is like coming back full circle." Her concept for the recording and the repertoire she has chosen for it date back to the autumn of 2007. “I borrowed discs of every single Bach cantata, listened to them all, and made notes. It was wonderful to discover new arias, but rather than have a solo vocal recital I decided to break it up with purely instrumental movements. I'd known Lars Ulrik Mortensen for a long time, though we hadn't seen a lot of each other recently, and suddenly this name 'Concerto Copenhagen' appeared on the horizon; I heard them on the radio, and I thought: 'What a wonderful ensemble!' Sure enough, Lars Ulrik was the leader of this great ensemble, so when the idea of the Bach recording came up I thought: 'Why don't I ask Concerto Copenhagen?' I cut down the original list, Lars Ulrik added new ideas, and we had a fantastic time making this recording." As for instrumentation: “Bach often puts the alto voice together with the oboe, so that choice was given, and the sound of the Baroque oboe is one I love."
There is a strong showing in the programme of works from the latter part of the young Bach's years in Weimar, from 1714, when he composed Widerstehe doch der Sünde BWV 54, for alto, strings and continuo, and the more elaborately scored Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV 12, with its plangent Sinfonia. After his subsequent spell at the court of the music-loving prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, where most of his secular orchestral works were written, Bach returned to composing cantatas when he was appointed Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1723. At the end of May he began the production of what would, in a relatively short time, turn out to be a staggering quantity of work for the Lutheran liturgical year - some 300 sacred cantatas for Leipzig in five annual cycles, not to mention the great Passions and oratorios. For Christmas that year he wrote the first version of his Magnificat, originally in E flat major and with four insertions specific to Christmas Day; the pastoral siciliano of the lilting alto and tenor duet “Et misericordia", with its two flutes, is heard here in the more familiar D major version, made toward the end of the decade.
The two sacred works that tower over that period, however, are the St Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass, both represented here. From the St Matthew Passion, first performed on Good Friday 1729, Anne Sofie von Otter sings the profoundly moving aria “Erbarme dich", which occurs at the point in the Easter narrative when Peter has fulfilled Christ's prediction that he will deny him three times before the cock crows, and follows the words “And he went out, and wept bitterly." The B minor Mass was initiated in 1733 with the Kyrie and Gloria and expanded with music composed both previously and later before reaching its final form at the end of the 1740s. The great alto aria “Agnus Dei" was written in 1735.
Historical considerations aside, for von Otter the music remains the starting point, and then the way it relates to the text. Bach poses specific problems for any singer: “Bach is tricky as far as breathing is concerned. There are these wonderful lines, and you want not to breathe so as not to break them up. But more and more the text has increased in meaning for me. Bach really does something with the words, and I enjoy using the text, getting it across. It's not by chance that Bach will really squeeze everything he can out of certain vowels or consonants - this symbolism is something I learned about in the Bach Choir. One has to paint the picture in Bach's mind with one's voice. 'Erbarme dich', for instance, has great sadness, in the pleading of the minor sixths, while in 'Widerstehe doch der Sünde' we decided on a particular approach to convey the image of the poison in the text."
“I dived into this project with great excitement. Lars Ulrik really has what I always like in a conductor, particularly in a Baroque conductor: very clear ideas and a lot of energy. He leads from the organ, so he's part of the music-making himself in a very active way. It was a creative collaboration, and the time was spent with great love." (Kenneth Chalmers)