Wim Becu plays on a bass trombone made in 1994, based on a 1640 instrument. No fanciful programs here. This is simply music emphasizing the bass sackbut, the so-called trombone grande , composed around 1600. It was at the time among the most popular of ceremonial instruments, both for noble and civic use, as numerous surviving inventories and payment schedules of the period attest. These things change, of course, and by the end of the 17th century the entire trombone family had faded away—not to reappear on the international stage until 100 years later, in a different role, associated with the tonal expansion of the modern orchestra. (Both Gluck and Mozart set the trombone to accompany Don Giovanni on his trip to hell, but the instrument had a two-way ticket.)
Besides having a flourishing career as a composer, Steffen Schleiermacher has made a name for himself as a pianist and conductor, focusing on new music. This MDG release features three very early works by Philip Glass from 1968 and 1969, Music in Similar Motion, How Now, and Music in Fifths. The works are stylistically closely related and come from a point in the composer's career when he was exploring the use of repetitive structures varied through additive and subtractive processes. Their tonality, limited pitch material, and constant rhythmic patterns gave rise to the popular misconception that Glass' music is about nothing but repetition.
The programme chosen for this CD by the eminent early music specialist Rinaldo Alessandrini and performed by members of his hand-picked ensemble Concerto Italiano illustrate most of the forms that instrumental music adopted in the course of the seventeenth century. Amongst the composers featured are Giovanni Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Zanetti, and Torelli, as well as lesser known figures of the period including Giovanni de Macque, Evaristo dall’Abaco, and Giovanni Bononcini.
Melancholic poetry provided endless nourishment for musical creativity in the late Renaissance. In his first recording for harmonia mundi, Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in music from the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Bryd to Gesualdo, Italian and English madrigals rub shoulders with motets and Tenebrae responsories, finding pleasure even in meditating on what causes one's pain.