Jacob's Ladder (1990)

Le cinesi (''The Chinese ladies'') is one of numerous pieces of the kind—generally called azione teatrale or something similar—composed during the eighteenth century for court entertainments.

Just before returning home at the end of his years of musical apprenticeship in Rome, the Portuguese composer Almeida composed this unusual oratorio based on one of the most bloddy episodes in the Old Testament, the decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes by Judith, a crucial episode in the struggle of the Jewis people against Nebuchadnezzar (588 B.C.). When it was revived in 1990 this powerful, at times sensual work was greeted as a 'revelation of Portuguese music'.

Founded in 1972 at the suggestion of Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and led since its inception by Dutch violinist turned conductor Sigiswald Kuijken, La Petite Bande is surely among the finest of early music orchestras with a discography ranging from Lully through Mozart. Among the group's most successful projects, however, have been recordings of Bach's sacred works, particularly the 1985 Mass in B minor and this 1987 St. John Passion. Both are superbly performed with excellent solo and choral singing and outstanding orchestral playing, but both are distinctly dissimilar in tone and effect. The conductor makes the difference.

This album sounds very much like a sequel to his first album "Eine Art Suite" from 1979…

The Sacrae concertationes were first published in 1665. Their style représentatif was designed to put to music the words of the sermons given in the oratories of Rome in the early 17th century - no mean feat bu Mazzocchi emerges as a true master of the genre.

Leonhardt gives a deeply felt, reverent and contemplative performance of the St Matthew Passion. It is beautifully played and sung; introspective yet intense, understated yet profound. This is a version completely lacking in flashy, extravagant gestures but it does rather strip the piece down to its so-deep soul.

Heinrich Andreas Contius, originally from Halle in Central Germany, was the leading organ builder in the Baltic lands during the second half of the 18th century; his work was particularly appreciated by J.S. Bach. None of his instruments has survived in its original state, but Joris Potvlieghe (Belgium) and Flentrop Orgelbouw (The Netherlands) began an exact reconstruction of Contius’ Liepāja organ to its 1779 state under the management of the Contius Foundation in 2012, using materials and techniques that Contius himself would have employed. The project is unique, as no other instrument by Contius has as yet been reconstructed so meticulously. The organ is characterised by a gentler and more elegant attack that is also somewhat rounder and milder than that of earlier instruments by Gottfried Silbermann and is therefore well suited to the refinements of the galant style. This is the first recording to use the replica of the Contius Liepāja organ in the Sint-Michiel Vredeskerk in Leuven; Bart Jacobs here presents works by composers directly linked to Johann Sebastian Bach as well as to organs built by Heinrich Andreas Contius.