Intеlligеnt Мusiс Рrоjесt VI Тhе Сrеаtiоn (2021)

Intelligent Music Project VI “The Creation” Feat. Ronnie Romero (Rainbow), Bobby Rondinelli (Black Sabbath, Rainbow), John Payne (ex-Asia), Todd Sucherman (Styx), Carl Sentence (Nazareth) and Richard Grisman (River Hounds)…

Over a remarkably long and illustrious career, Camille Saint-Saëns thrilled audiences around the world as a pianist and organist, shaped the course of musical life in France, and enriched a multitude of genres with some 600 works, all bearing witness to the mastery of his craft. Setting his best-known compositions in their dazzlingly diverse context, this edition invites exploration and discovery. It spans more than a century of recording history, encompassing a host of great instrumentalists, singers, conductors and orchestras, many of them from France. Setting the pace, in performances from as early as 1904, is the composer himself.

The violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) was a celebrated Kapellmeister at the court of Archbishop Max Gandolph of Salzburg. Present-day audiences tend to think of him first and foremost as the author of anthologies of spectacular violin music such as his Rosary Sonatas of around 1670 and his Sonatas for solo violin of 1681. But attitudes to these works were initially devastatingly dismissive. In 1927, the eighth – posthumous – edition of Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski’s seminal Die Violine und ihre Meister appeared with revisions by the author’s son, Waldemar, and assured its readers that only “some” of these pieces were of “lasting musical merit”.

Buxtehude’s Opus 1 and 2 Sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord belie the composer’s common image as austere and sober. They instead delight the listener with what Johann Mattheson, writing in 1739, called their « unfamilar progressions, hidden ornamentation, and ingenious colourations ». It comes as no surprise to learn that the sonatas were a great success when they were first published in Germany in the 1690s, in the midst of the fashion for the ‘stylus fantasticus’ (described by Athanasius Kircher in 1650 as “…especially suited to instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject. It was instituted to display genius, and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues.")