Jeanne.dielman.23.commerce.quay.1080.brussels

Biber was one of the most talented and fascinating composers of the 17th century. He spent his life working between Czechoslovakia and Austria, attaining a considerable amount of fame and even earning a patent of nobility (he was permitted later in life to refer to himself as "von" Biber). His instrumental music is the most fanciful and entertaining of the period, partly due to his use of scordatura, or mistuning. This technique requires a different violin-string tuning for each of the seven partitas in this collection, which gives each a particular instrumental color. A partita, by the way, is the same thing as a suite–a selection of dances collected together to make a contrasting set.

Joncières epitomises the Romantic artist fascinated by nobility and grandeur. This is clear from the titles of his works alone: Sardanapale, Lancelot, Le Dernier Jour de Pompéi, Le Chevalier Jean, Dimitri. Listening to the latter, his masterpiece (1876), we realise too that he was a contemporary of Gounod and a champion of Wagner. Dimitri carries on the tradition (begun by Meyerbeer) of spectacular, monumental works. It takes the listener from a monastery near the River Don to a palace in Krakow, then to the castle of Wyksa and finally the Kremlin in Moscow. At the time it was written, Bayreuth, Orange and Béziers were about to turn opera into a popular art with mass appeal.

Music Director of Tafelmusik from 1981 to 2014, Jeanne Lamon was loved by audiences, and praised by critics in Europe and North America for her virtuosity as a violinist and her brilliant musical leadership. Under her direction, Tafelmusik achieved international stature with over 80 recordings to its name, and with tours to over 350 international cities including invitations to the most prestigious concert halls and festivals in the world.

The well-known painting of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach reproduced on the cover of this CD must be one of the most immediately attractive composer portraits ever made. The wide-brimmed hat, the fur-lined coat, the wisp of steely hair and, above all, the reddened but unmistakably genial face (displaying, if I’m not mistaken, his father’s nose) suggest a man one would want to accompany straightaway to the nearest coffee-house. But Friedemann was actually a little more complex than that, both as a person who could be lazy and argumentative and as a talented musician torn between the styles of the late baroque and early classical periods, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that there is considerable variety in the music on this disc.

The performances are scintillating, dynamic, articulate, and vibrant, the virtuoso violin solos by Elizabeth Wallfisch occupying a playfully precarious edge between daring excitement and temporal excess–a stance joined in equal measure by her fellow soloists and her very fine orchestral partners. This is Vivaldi performance uninhibited by self-conscious stylistic gestures or distracting "period" mannerisms–it's just informed, virtuosic ensemble playing.

No opera composer of the Baroque era invested his stage works with more imaginative orchestral music than Jean-Philippe Rameau. The adventurous wind orchestration, rhythmic drive and variety, and complex interplay of voices found in his interludes, dances, and preludes are immediately striking to modern ears in a way that only the dedicated orchestral works of other Baroque masters can match (think Handel's Royal Fireworks Music, for example).