Haendel Václav Luks

Rameau’s career was nearing its end when the rehearsals of his last composition, Les Boréades, began at the Académie Royale de Musique, in spring 1764. The death of the composer in September interrupted the production of his lyric tragedy, which was only saw the light of day two centuries later! This magnificent opera is certainly the most accomplished of Rameau’s works, composed as he was aged eighty and in full possession of his creative means: the composition for orchestra and choir is highly virtuoso, the melodic invention exceptional, the drama powerful: a true musical testament.

The music here was written for performance during Holy Week at the splendid Catholic court of Dresden in 1722. The example of Dresden stirred Johann Sebastian Bach to some of his most Italianate flights of opera-like music, and the composer of the Holy Week responsories heard here, the Bohemian-born Jan Dismas Zelenka (whom Bach himself admired), had an experimental, progressive spirit in much of his music. All the more of a surprise, then, to find that these pieces are written in an almost antique style. Each of the three Matins services is divided into three Nocturns, each of which is provided with three pairs of readings or lessons (given in chant) and three responsories, polyphonically set for a small choir (the two-singers-to-a-part forces heard here were apparently typical), with orchestral strings mostly doubling the vocal lines.

Leila Schayegh, Václav Luks, and Felix Knecht present four of Franz Benda’s violin sonatas (and a movement extracted from another sonata) from a collection of 34 ornamented examples of the genre included in manuscript form among the holdings of the Berlin State Library. The ornamentation, provided for both the slow movements, for which Benda earned a reputation, as well as for faster ones, could serve as a sort of compendium of German period practice (Schayegh’s own notes suggest that the works hail from about 1760).

An innovative Baroque composer whose reputation was steadily on the rise during the anything-goes years of the waning twentieth century, Jan Dismas Zelenka was born in Lounovice, Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). He was a court musician in Dresden for most of his career, and both J.S. Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann knew and admired his music. Except for brief periods of travel, during which he refined his craft (he took lessons from Fux and Lotti even after his own technique had been perfected), he served as a double bass player in the court orchestra and later aided the ailing court music director Heinichen in his duties.

Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) Officium defunctorum ZWV 47 – Requiem in D ZWV 46 (Music for the funeral rites of Augustus the Strong) Jan Dismas Zelenka’s music for the funeral rites of Augustus the Strong – Officium defunctorum ZWV 47 (Invitatorium, Nocturno I-III) and Requiem ZWV 46 – reveals the most impressive face of the Baroque theatre of death. The man in the chief role of this spectacle follows the appeal in the 95th psalm of the introductory antiphon of the invitatorium “the King, in whom everything lives, let us worship Him”, and bows his head before God and the majesty of death.

Handel’s Messiah is already very well represented on the market with dozens of existing recordings and new productions appearing at regular intervals. Yet this is a very special version, carefully crafted by the Prague-based Collegium Vocale and Collegium 1704 under the baton of Vaclav Luks, founder of the ensemble and one of the most exciting conductors of the Baroque and Classical repertoire. The fine young singers Giulia Semenzato, Benno Schachtner, Krystian Adam, and Krešimir Stražanac joined the ensembles for two moving live performances in Prague’s Rudolfinum in March 2018, and those performances are now presented here.

Glucks Orfeo ed Euridice is one of music history's most important operas. The cast is led by Bejun Mehta, arguably the best countertenor in the world today (Sueddeutsche Zeitung) as Orfeo, Austrian soprano Eva Liebau as Euridice and Regula Mühlemann as Amore. Director Ondej Havelka combines period details with modern psychological interpretation. The baroque specialist Václav Luks leads the Collegium 1704 and Collegium Vocale 1704. This cinematic edition celebrates Glucks 2014 tricentenary!

“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.

New recordings from Supraphon’s Gramophone Editor’s Choice winning series “Music From 18th Century Prague” Unlike the copiously preserved sacred music, instrumental works by Czech composers in the Prague of the first third of the 18th century are as scarce as hen’s teeth. The twenty or so instrumental pieces by Antonín Reichenauer are among the most significant. Reichenauer was a musician in Count Morzin’s chapel, in which he assumed the role of in-house composer after Johann Friedrich Fasch. The ensemble’s superb quality is documented by the Count’s regular contacts with Antonio Vivaldi, whom he engaged as his “maestro di musica in Italia”.

Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka is a strong candidate for the greatest rediscovery of the Baroque revival. He worked for most of his career in Dresden (the booklet, in French and English, goes into a great deal of detail about the political determinants and musical implications of this fact), and Bach, who didn't admire many composers, admired him. Each new Zelenka work that emerges, if competently performed, seems to astonish, and I Penitenti al Sepolchro del Redentore, ZWV 63 (The Penitents at the Sepulchre of the Redeemer), composed late in Zelenka's career in 1736, is no exception. The work is a bit hard to get a grip on because of its odd genre. Annotator Vacláv Luks calls it a "sepolcro oratorio": it is a little religious semi-drama based on the idea that biblical figures, who may not (as in this case) actually meet in the Bible at all, gather at Christ's tomb and contemplate his divine mysteries.