Baroque Suites Denys Proshayev

Lars Ulrik Mortensen is best known as a harpsichordist active largely in Baroque solo and chamber music repertory. But his career is quite multifaceted: he has regularly conducted both instrumental and operatic works and has taught harpsichord and historic performance practices at the Hochschule fur Musik in Munich. He has often appeared in concert as accompanist to singer Emma Kirkby and has regularly partnered violinist John Holloway and cellist Jaap ter Linden.

The 17th and 18th centuries marked the era of Enlightenment, overseas exploration, unprecedented European economic expansion and a flourishing of art and culture, not to mention the birth of the greatest composers in history. From concertos to fantasias, suites to sonatas, Brilliant Classics presents a comprehensive and concise overview of this innovative and groundbreaking period in musical history, the Baroque era. The set opens with Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni and his famous Concerti a5, in which he was the first Italian composer to use the oboe as the solo instrument in a concerto.

Handel tinkered with this allegory throughout his career, producing various versions in Italian and English. The plot is a contest for the heart and mind of Beauty: Pleasure and Deceit encourage hedonism, arguing that "life consists in the present hour." Time and Counsel advise Beauty to forswear worldly pleasures, which "will soon decay". (Guess who wins.) You'd expect the villains to get all the good tunes, but the musical interest here is evenly spread. Time and Counsel get lively and contemplative arias; in particular, Varcoe makes Time's "Loathsome urns" beguiling and chilling. Kirkby, playing a villain for once, is an all-too-convincing Deceit; Partridge as Pleasure, though not ideally youthful, makes some gorgeous sounds. Fisher is well cast as Beauty, and Darlow's direction is a triumph.

Glorious music brilliantly played and vividly recorded, this recording of suites from three of Jean-Philippe Rameau's operas by Roy Goodman and the European Union Baroque Orchestra is as fine a disc of French Baroque orchestral music as has ever been issued. The wit and élan that Goodman and his Orchestra bring to Rameau is infectious. The listener finds himself smiling at Pigmalion's Les différence caractéres de la danse and laughing at Platée's Air pour des fous gais et de fous trietes.

Energetic performances and thoroughly researched interpretations by ensembles like La Magnifica Commynita and The Netherlands Bach Ensemble. And some big names like the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the King's College Choir, Cambridge. Of course there are Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Handel's Water Music and Vivaldi's Four Seasons. But also music by Albinoni, Locatelli, Telemann, Purcell, Couperin and Corelli.

Keith Jarrett - J.S. Bach, The French Suites (1993) {2CD Set, ECM New Series 1513/14}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 671 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 243 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 40 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1993 ECM Records | ECM New Series ECM 1513/14
Classical / Baroque / Harpsichord

Jarrett plays brilliantly. Personally, I love Jarrett's playing; he is one of the most sensitive and lyrical of contemporary pianists, and his long illness has deprived us of what would surely have been a larger body of baroque music recordings. So make your own mind up. I highly recommend this collection to lovers of Bach, Jarrett and the diabolical harpsichord.

In this recording of Bach’s Suite No. 1, John Eliot Gardiner follows Passepieds I and II with Bach’s own setting of the chorale Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen BWV 299. The joyous text celebrates praise and discipleship, prolonging the suite’s exuberant mood. No other recorded version features a vocal tailpiece, but if you don’t like it, simply program your player to skip track 8. It’s good to find both parts of the Overtures to these works repeated (Frans Brüggen omits second-section repeats), but at times Gardiner can seem too rugged and unyielding for what is, after all, ceremonial or occasional music.

The version is excellent, very well recorded and Koopman offers an accurate reading without falling into the rigid excesses of some German interpreters or a certain "softness" of some English.