Biber Herrmann Love

Das Freiburger Barockorchester zählt zu den wichtigsten Kammerorchestern weltweit. Zahlreiche nationale und internationale Auszeichnungen, darunter der Grammy Award, Echo Klassik oder der Deutsche Schallplattenpreis sind Zeugnisse ihres einzigartigen Schaffens.

Bernard Herrmann, born in New York in 1911 to Russian immigrants, is best known today as a composer of film music. Most notably he worked with Alfred Hitchcock on classic productions such as North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho, as well as on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But despite his strong ties to Hollywood, Herrmann always thought of himself as a composer who worked in film, and never as a ‘mere’ film composer.

Italian violinists invaded germanic countries from the beginning of the 17th century, with Farina in Dresden, Marini in Neuburg and Bertali in Vienna. Their influence was considerable, stretching over the entire Empire to the furthest flung towns of Central or Northern Germany. The Italian sonata went hand in hand with the violin, exemplifying a taste for the fantastic and the baroque. Michal Praetorius, despite his knowledge of Italian musical practice, preferred to discuss the instrument under its German name of "Geige", although the term of "violino" soon began to appear in every musical publication In this eagerly awaited, special prized re-release of his remarkable anthology of early violin music, François Fernandez gives a us a masterly and higly seductive lesson of style.

This is a gem of a CD. It's a well-chosen, well-performed and well-presented anthology of mid-Baroque German sacred cantatas. Bass Peter Kooij and the seven-person L'Armonia Sonora are directed by gambist Mieneke Van der Velden. They have a close and warm affinity not only with one another, but also for the music; it's music as varied as it's beautiful. Its rich, sustained sonorities will stay with you long after you have finished the uplifting experience of listening to the CD. Released on the enterprising Ramée label De profundis clamavi comprises seven sumptuous examples of the music written in the north German Länder in the period after the Thirty Years War. It's music which not so much 'reflects' that profound conflict, as is 'affected' by it – weighed down with detached regret and unselfconscious resignation.

1998 is een bijzonder jaar voor Reinhard Goebel en zijn Musica Antiqua Koln. Dit jaar gedenken zij niet alleen dat Reinhard Goebel de groep 25 jaar geleden oprichtte, maar ook dat zij 20 jaar geleden hun samenwerking begonnen met Archiv Produktion. Hun nieuwste cd "Sonata pro tabula" bevat tafelmuziek om bij te watertanden. Samen met het Flanders Recorder Quartet speelt Musica Antiqua Koln werken van Valentini, Schmelzer en Pezel, steeds afgewisseld met een aantal "A due" voor twee trompetten van Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber.

The music on this disc is about sonority, about the brilliance of trumpets and strings in a live, reverberant acoustic such as that of Salzburg cathedral, for which at least some of these works were conceived. And Andrew Manze and his English Concert unequivocally deliver (albeit in the less-opulent confines of London’s Temple Church), from the opening fanfare through the vibrant, tuneful, richly scored sonatas that periodically spice this thoughtfully organized program. The featured work is a Mass, the Missa Christi Resurgentis, likely written for Easter in 1764. It’s a lavish celebration scored for two four-part choirs, an added bass singer, plus two instrumental ensembles, designed to be performed antiphonally in a grand display.

This delightful release, from the Indian Summer of Bernard Herrmann's recording career, always got neglected by its potential audiences, ignored by Herrmann's fans in favor of his recordings of his film music or his own classical compositions (or more conventionally familiar works such as The Planets) and missed totally by jazz listeners of a historical bent. The material contained herein is distinctly symphonic or – perhaps more accurately – concert hall jazz, the work of established composers coming to grips with and using the then-new music in their own idiom…

The solo violin pieces of the Baroque period are not just limited to the sonatas and partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach, although these certainly represented its highpoint. Other violinist/composers in Germany sought to translate their polyphonic tradition to this four-stringed instrument, exceeding the instrument’s apparent limitations.