国际新闻（成品）2017.04.16 (16:50)

The first half of the seventeenth century marked the heyday of the air de cour at the French court. This was a monophonic lute-accompanied song that was generally on the subject of love. Sentimental songs of this kind soon found their way to other parts of Europe, including England, Germany and the Netherlands. With their exceptional programme, mezzo-soprano Marie-Claude Chappuis and lutenist Luca Pianca breathe new life into this courtly musical culture in all of its elegance and beauty, performing works by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Étienne Moulinié, Michel Lambert, Gabriel Bataille and others.

Claudio Monteverdi, whose 450th birthday is being celebrated by the world of classical music in 2017, was one of the most important composers in the history of music. His impressive output had a major influence on the course of music history and still thrills listeners today with the incomparable quality of his compositions. One of his greatest sacred works is Vespro della Beata Vergine from 1610, yet there is another excellent work which has been overlooked until today: the Vespers for the Blessed Virgin from 1650.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) - virtuoso organist and composer of a wealth of orchestral, chamber and vocal music - is one of the most influential composers ever to have lived, one whose works form an established part of the repertoire of every instrument for which he wrote. This collection comprises the Goldberg Variations BWV988, a composition that takes its name from a young pupil of Bach, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who was in the service of Count von Keyserlingk. The Count was a notoriously bad sleeper, and requested of Bach a series of pieces for Goldberg to play to him when he could not sleep; he then considered the work to be 'his', although it is widely referred to by the name of its performer.

The name Dufaut is usually mentioned together with other lutenists of his time – the Gaultiers, the Gallots and Charles Mouton – when the French lute school and its founding father Ennemond Gaultier ('the elder') are discussed.

The group of Weimar cantatas is exciting on many levels. The purpose Bach expressed in his Mühlhausen resignation letter – which became a master beam of the musical edice he built throughout his life – is expressed with an even more seminal vigour, due to the restrictions it suffered previously. Besides the beauty of the surviving works, which renders the loss of the missing ones all the more bitter, it is moving to see the musician engage, with each new piece, in experiments with form, ideas, and the language for expressing the word of God through the most sensitive possible texts. The choice of developing themes dear to him enabled him to afirm and deepen his faith.

Previous albums on Brilliant Classics have illuminated significant figures in the school of North German organ music in the generations before Bach: among them Georg Ludwig Bohm (BC94612), Johann Gottfried Walther (BC94730) and Dieterich Buxtehude (BC94422). Here is the work of another, hardly less significant figure, Heinrich Scheidemann. Hamburg-based, Heinrich took over from his father as organist at the church of St Catherine’s in 1629 and remained in post until his death in 1663. He wrote almost exclusively for his instrument, and in the expected forms of chorale fantasias, motet arrangements, preludes, toccatas and fantasias which constituted the bread and butter of the 17th-century church musician’s diet.

The group of Weimar cantatas is exciting on many levels. The purpose Bach expressed in his Mühlhausen resignation letter – which became a master beam of the musical edice he built throughout his life – is expressed with an even more seminal vigour, due to the restrictions it suffered previously. Besides the beauty of the surviving works, which renders the loss of the missing ones all the more bitter, it is moving to see the musician engage, with each new piece, in experiments with form, ideas, and the language for expressing the word of God through the most sensitive possible texts. The choice of developing themes dear to him enabled him to afirm and deepen his faith.

Delphine Galou is renowned and admired for her musicality and her appealing timbre.
She has taken part in many productions of Baroque music and recordings of operas (notably by Vivaldi), but this is her first recital.

Some of the Italian musicians who came to London to ‘make their fortunes’ found themselves influenced by the Celtic lands and their rich tradition of folk music. They were in their turn admired and sometimes even copied by their counterparts in the British Isles. This recording shows the outcome of that encounter. Lorenzo Bocchi was probably the first Italian cellist to settle in Edinburgh, in 1720.