Baroque Cello

The growing catalogue of Platti albums on Brilliant Classics includes his Cello Concertos (BC94722), his keyboard works (BC95118) and a first recording of chamber music (BC94007). Taken together they paint a vivid and engaging portrait of an 18th-century musician/composer who came to exercise on generations of composers writing for the cello. Platti himself was proficient on several instruments but he retained a special affection for the cello, producing as many as 28 cello concertos – even more than Vivaldi – and other works including the 12 accompanied cello sonatas on this album. These are divided into two groups of six, both dated 1725 – just a few years after Bach’s cello suites.

The Accademia Bizantina under conductor and keyboardist Ottavio Dantone is one of a number of young Italian historical-instrument groups that have been revolutionizing the world of Baroque instrumental music performance. The basic idea of the style of this group and its compatriots is that the dominant genre and stylistic exemplar of Italian music in the early 18th century was opera, and that instrumental music ought to reflect the sense of high drama that an operatic audience would have expected.

Antonio Vivaldi had his own cello specialist for part of his tenure at the Ospedale della Pietà, and there were several other virtuoso cellists in his orbit. His six sonatas for cello and continuo, of an unknown date of composition, are surprisingly simple technically and may have been intended as teaching pieces at the Ospedale. Most Baroque cellists and viol players, as well as quite a few performers on the modern cello, have recorded them, but this set by Dutch-Swiss cellist Roel Dieltiens stands out as dramatic and adventurous.

Active as a soloist and as a member of leading early music groups worldwide, Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann has appeared on a number of BIS releases, often being singled out in reviews for her performances as continuo player and soloist. For her first solo disc, she has devised a programme illustrating the rise of the cello – from its beginnings as a large-bodied, deep-voiced provider of accompaniments in church music to a glittering, flittering solo instrument of the Rococo. The programme begins with some of the earliest repertoire for the instrument – two unaccompanied pieces by Domenico Galli and Giovanni Battista degli Antonii, and a solo sonata by Domenico Gabrielli, all hailing from around 1690.

C.P.E. Bach, Vivaldi & Tartini - Cello Concertos - Mstisislav Rostropovich, Hugh Wolff (2016) {Teldec-Warner Classics rec 1993}
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© 1993, 2016 Teldec / Warner Classics / Parlophone | 0825646773305
Classical / Baroque / Cello

While J.S. Bach’s Suites for solo cello are, by definition, closely identified with Mstislav Rostropovich as the supreme cellist of his time, the B flat concerto of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach represents a more unusual departure. It is programmed here with two concertos in D major by Italian composers of the elder Bach’s generation, Antonio Vivaldi and Giuseppe Tartini.