Domino (2005)

Charles Daniels enters into the exultant spirit of ‘Lobe den Herrn’, especially its exuberant final alleluia, and the three male voices bring an almost Italianate sweetness to ‘Jesu dulcis memoria’, one of several fine examples of Buxtehude’s fascination with the chaconne, as well as conveying all the darkness and pain of the richly-scored Passiontide meditation ‘An filius non est Dei’.

"Bernstein stamps his outsize personality on every bar and regularly has you convinced it is Mahler's own" (Gramophone). Leonard Bernstein, whose performances of the Seventh were instrumental in pushing the woek towards mainstream status, conducts it here with white-hot communicative power. When he prepared the huge "Symphony of a Thousand" with the Vienna Philharmonic for the 1975 Salzburg Festival there had been only one previous Austrian performance. The DVD encompasses the exultancy of the opening movement, Mahler's setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust, Bernstein drives the music to the final redemptive blaze of glory.

This delectable work, premiered in 1721, shows composer Alessandro Scarlatti at his most brilliantly varied. Solo passages are punctuated with choral interjections and vice-versa, an antiphon duet for oboe and the lovely soprano Suzanne Ryden at first seems like one between two singers; Scarlatti fools the ear. Soprano Dominique Labelle brings a grace to her fluent singing in both solo and ensemble passages which manages to be energetic and tender at once. The setting of the Dixit Dominus never rests; a tenor solo is interrupted by the chorus; an intricate soprano-soprano-counter-tenor trio in the "Dominus a dextris" is rendered even more complex by the chorus, which then, in an entirely different meter, nervously jumps its way to the end and then melts into a gentle baritone solo, with long, legato lines.

In Minas Gerais, a region which still enjoyed great opulence in the late eighteenth century thanks to the discovery of gold there, Antonio dos Santos Cunha practised a vivid style of composition, with all the hallmarks of Baroque rhetoric combined with musical resources deriving from Italian opera, and spiced with a tropical ‘Sturm und Drang’, thus adding his own dramatic and intense setting to the canon of Passion music.

It seems that Gary Bertini, like Gustav Mahler, is destined to be better remembered after his death than he was known during his life. When he passed away in 2005, he was little known outside Israel, Japan and continental Europe and nowhere near as widely recognised as the glamour conductors who appear on the пїЅmajorпїЅ labels. His recordings were few and hard to find. A year after his passing, Capriccio has launched a Gary Bertini Edition (see, for example, review) featuring live recordings drawn from the archives of the KпїЅlner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, and EMI has re-released his Mahler cycle.