Cos'hai da Guardare

Kapellmeister at Magdeburg Cathedral for 43 years, all of Ruhe's compositions are lost except for these five gamba works. Probably written in the 1730s, they are lively, forward-looking pieces in three and four movements (the suite has eight) which anticipate early Classical style.

Telemann’s viola da gamba fantasies are significant works in the player’s repertoire, elegantly complementing the German repertoire, of which the most famous pieces are Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba and obbligato harpsichord. According to the most current information, it appears that these Bach sonatas were composed in the late 1730s or early in the following decade, just a few years after Telemann’s fantasies.

Brahms’s Trio op.114, originally conceived for clarinet (like the two Sonatas op.120), is presented here in its version with viola: ‘Like all Brahms’s works, this trio is a vocal, melodic piece. And the viola is perhaps the instrument of the string quartet that comes closest to the human voice’, says violist Miguel Da Silva. ‘This version with viola obliges me, as a cellist, to listen differently: our two stringed instruments must “breathe” together and match their articulation’, continues Xavier Phillips. These three works from late in Brahms’s career testify to his modernity: ‘Brahms was often considered a classical composer who was impervious to modernity, the guardian of a certain tradition’, says pianist François-Frédéric Guy, who agrees with Schoenberg that he was, on the contrary, highly innovative: ‘We have a fine example, in the trio, of the extraordinary modernity of his combinations of rhythm and timbre: he is a total innovator.'

During the sixteenth century in Italy, the motto ‘i galli cantano’ (the Gauls are singing) circulated, acknowledging the supremacy of the Franco-Flemish ‘transalpine’ musicians who were summoned to the peninsula to serve princes and prelates in the techniques of composing and performing vocal polyphony. Josquin Desprez, ‘Giosquino’ to the Italians, was the emblematic figure: in addition to France, he was in the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in both Milan and Rome (1484, 1498) and of the papal (1489-95) and Este chapels (1503-4). On the fifth centenary of the composer’s death (1521), the Odhecaton ensemble proposes to retrace Josquin’s Italian itinerary with the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariæ, composed for the Duke of Ferrara Ercole I d’Este, and a selection of motets commissioned by Italian patrons. The contribution of The Gesualdo Six in the more solemn pieces brings the vocal ensemble to twentytwo singers, a number that is close to the forces of the Rome and Ferrara chapels and yields new sonic results in our quest to recreate how polyphony sounded in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.