Francesco Michael Alexander Willens

The Kölner Akademie under its proven conductor Michael Willens now presents more atmospheric Christmas compositions by Francesco Durante, one of the greatest Neapolitan church composers of the first half of the eighteenth century. Durante continued the Neapolitan tradition of composing Christmas cantatas or motets, with a series of vocal works that he assigned to the category of the ‘Pastorale’ in order to indicate their relation to the Feast of Christmas and to the shepherds in the field.

Francesco Durante was one of the great Neapolitan church composers and teachers during the first half of the eighteenth century in Naples. He chose to focus on sacred music and his Magnificat in B flat major is doubtless the best known, most beloved, most performed, and most recorded work by him among the Neapolitan Christmas compositions on volume 1.

The waning of the era of lute player in the early 18th century coincided with the rise of the smallest member of the lute family, the soprano lute, also known as the mandolin, mandola or leutino in Southern Italy, especially in Naples, the city of music. In the following decades, the city of Naples, with it's famous conservatories, saw the birth of a number of compositions for mandolin. Many distinguished composers set out to discover the new possibilities this instrument offered.

Nagasawa delivers technically impressive and musically inspired interpretations. I am less enthusiastic about the orchestra whose playing I sometimes found rather dull, dynamically a bit flat and not very colourful. Even so, this disc deserves a positive reception because of the quality of the music and the performances by Masumi Nagasawa on a beautiful historical harp.