Christian Benda & Prague Sinfonia Georg Anton Benda: Sinfonias (2016)

Jiří Antonín Benda won particular distinction as a composer of melodramas: dramatic works that accompany speech with music. After earlier employment with his brothers in Prussia, in 1750 he became Kapellmeister to Duke Friedrich II of Saxe-Gotha. His career thereafter centred largely on Gotha, with shorter periods in Vienna and in Hamburg.
Benda left a varied quantity of orchestral and instrumental music, including around 30 symphonies which seem to have enjoyed some popularity in his day. They are attractive examples of the style of the period. He also left 11 violin concertos, and there is a Viola Concerto attributed to him.

Jiří Antonín Benda won particular distinction as a composer of melodramas: dramatic works that accompany speech with music. After earlier employment with his brothers in Prussia, in 1750 he became Kapellmeister to Duke Friedrich II of Saxe-Gotha. His career thereafter centred largely on Gotha, with shorter periods in Vienna and in Hamburg.
Benda left a varied quantity of orchestral and instrumental music, including around 30 symphonies which seem to have enjoyed some popularity in his day. They are attractive examples of the style of the period. He also left 11 violin concertos, and there is a Viola Concerto attributed to him.

This disc brings together four sacred cantatas by composers who only infrequently feature in these pages. Best known of them is Georg Anton Benda, brother of the celebrated violinist Franz, who served Frederick the Great for over half-a-century. Georg Benda made a name for himself with his Singspiels and innovative melodramas, which made a deep impression on Mozart. There is nothing innovative about either of the two cantatas with instruments performed here, though from an expressive standpoint they are far from being run-of-the-mill. Both belong to a cycle prepared in 1761 while Benda was Music Director at the Court of Gotha.

Charles Burney, the great English music traveller of the 18th century, was extremely positive about "Herr Kapellmeister Benda". His compositions his "new, masterly, and learned." Mozart, too, never made a secret of his high regard for Georg Anton Benda; he was well aware of how much he was indebted to the creator of the German Singspiel - right up to the "Magic Flute".

With Cupid’s assistance, the sculptor Pygmalion brings his beloved creation to life. This recording treats us to two versions of the celebrated story. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s familiar one-act opera Pigmalion, in which the deus ex machina fulfils Pygmalion’s desires, is followed by Georg Benda’s little-known gem of the same name: a gripping monodrama for spoken voice and orchestra in which we can imagine the sculptor undergoing an inner conflict between desire and reality. Rising star Korneel Bernolet conducts his Apotheosis Orchestra and a group of young vocal partners: the Canadian haute-contre Philippe Gagné sings the passionate Pigmalion in Rameau’s opéra-ballet, alongside Lieselot De Wilde as his wife Céphise and Caroline Weynants as the divine Amour.

Franz Benda (1709-1786) worked for much of his life at the court of Frederick the Great. He was a prolific composer but very few of his works were published. His brother Georg (1722-1795) received a similar education as choirboy, violinist and harpsichordist. Il Gardellino was founded in 1988 and its members are specialists in performance on early instruments.

The ultimate CD for friends of the clavichord: On this recording, Bernhard Klapprott, a pupil of Bob van Asperen and today Professor of Early Keyboard Instruments in the Bach city of Weimar, exploits all the technical and tonal possibilities offered by the original clavichord by Joseph Gottfried Horn (1788).

Many composers and compositions have yet to receive a fair hearing in the concert hall. Carl Eberwein and Georg Benda, famous composers during their own times, and their fantastic melodramas Proserpina and Ariadne are two cases in point. “A colourful effusion of sensibility… truly outstanding.“ (BBC Music Magazine)

“But surely you know that of all Lutheran composers Benda is my favourite,” W.A.Mozart wrote to his father from Mannheim… Educated by the intellectual Lutheran milieu and profoundly affected first by the French Enlightenment and then, in particular, by the artistic rebellion of the “Sturm und Drang,” Benda was a typical child of his times. His musical language crystallized into its supreme form in the 1770s, a time when he also wrote the majority of his most important works including the harpsichord concertos.

The range of the Bohemian – and to a lesser extent Moravian – musical diaspora can be very adequately gauged from the composers in this survey. Some underwent name-changing, Germanicising being the most opportune thing to do if seeking preferment in a ducal court, not least as regards pronunciation. In the first volume therefore we find Jiří Antonín Benda becoming Georg Anton and Jan Křitetel Vaňhal turning into Johann Baptist Vanhal, even Wanhal. And so on.