Anima Mea

Born on 15 April 1924 in Lincoln, Sir Neville Marriner studied at the Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatoire. He began his career as a violinist, playing first in a string quartet and trio, then in the London Symphony Orchestra. It was during this period that he founded the Academy, with the aim of forming a top-class chamber ensemble from London’s finest players. Beginning as a group of friends who gathered to rehearse in Sir Neville’s front room, the Academy gave its first performance in its namesake church in 1959. The Academy now enjoys one of the largest discographies of any chamber orchestra worldwide, and its partnership with Sir Neville Marriner is the most recorded of any orchestra and conductor.

Roman accounts of the nobleman Kapsperger reveal a highly eccentric musician: a virtuoso theorbist, a singer, a successful composer, he was said to be arrogant, even irascible. A character straight out of a novel, as the musicians of L’Escadron Volant de la Reine present him in their first album on harmonia mundi, aided and abetted by a distinguished partner: on this colourful disc, the madrigals, villanellas and arias of ‘Il Tedeschino’ (The German) meet the literary fantasy of the writer Carl Norac.

LEIPZIG is now touted as the “New Berlin”, a mecca for vogueish twenty-somethings who are drawn by the cheap rents in the city and an artistic vibe. In 1989 the former East German industrial hub was said to have the most polluted air in the country, but the city’s illustrious past lives on. Despite extensive bombing of the city in World War II, the famous Thomaskirche and its associated Thomasschule, one of the oldest schools in the world and where the choristers are educated, survive and flourish. The Gewandhaus orchestra, with origins dating to the time of Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1740s, is known as one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras. This recording gives us a picture of musical life in Leipzig some 300 years ago, spanning the consecutive careers of three composers who led the musical activities in the city. The programme demonstrates the connection between JS Bach and his two predecessors. Bach based the general shape of his Magnificat on that of Kuhnau’s, and it was first performed in 1723, the year Bach took over as cantor in Leipzig after Kuhnau’s death. The short Schelle piece provides a rousing advent introduction.

Responsories for the Triduum sacrum, the last three days of the Holy Week before Easter Sunday, are classic examples of Haydn’s manner of composing, as influenced by the “stile antico”. With these homophonic pieces, which are directed inwards and which concentrate on the expressive presentation of the text, Haydn stands in a long tradition of these multi-voice settings: this tradition ranges from Victoria and Ingegneri at the end of the 16th century via Zelenka and Jomelli in the middle of the 18th through the composers of the Viennese classical school.

In 1994, Messe un jour ordinary intersected the vehement and shattering words of the mass with those, individual and derisory, of Laurence, a young drug addict who appeared in a documentary by Jean-Michel Carré. The meeting with the Métaboles choir and the Multilateral Ensemble, both conducted by Léo Warynski, persuaded its composer, Bernard Cavanna, to rewrite this iconoclastic mass to reinforce the presence of the voice and the choir.