José Valentino Bajista

Montserrat Caballé as Leonora is precisely what one would hope for. The voice is in near-pristine shape–the occasional attack on a loud high note early on can be vicious, but she sings with unusual commitment (not that the role has many nuances), glorious tone, and her entire arsenal of tricks: long-breathed phrases, diminuendos, high, floated pianissimo, grand chest voice. She even sings most of the words, rarely relying on “ah” sounds for high notes. The sound is huge and major-league and her comportment–acting is the wrong word–is regal. She sings the “Vergine degli angeli” with her back to the audience and the sound is as ethereal as you ever wanted it to be.

Spanish/Dutch horn player José Sogorb, 3rd Horn at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, releases Mélodies Volées, a multifaceted hommage to melody. ‘Voler’ means ‘stolen’ in French. Stealing a melody or (better) using its ‘DNA’, is a phenomenon which is from all times. To whom does a melody actually belong? On this sublimely versatile album José investigates this question. He does this in close relation with the splendid pianist Éadaoin Copeland on the majority of the program and featuring José’s RCO colleagues Miriam Pastor Burgos, Mark Braafhart and Rob Dirksen. On Mélodies Volées, you’ll be treated with impeccable horn playing with repertoire ranging from J.S. Bach, Schubert, Brahms, De Falla, Pärt, semi-improvised music, finalised by a freshly made arrangement of a Björk song that flows back again to Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (who was a contemporary of Bach).

Sofia Gubaidulina’s religious nature, specifically Russian Orthodox, finds expression in each of these pieces. Each also makes use of her much-loved bayan, the Russian button accordion played here with great virtuosity by Iñaki Alberdi. Kadenza is a solo tour de force; Et exspecto, based on the closing words of the Creed (‘I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’) is an impressive five-movement sonata in which, the booklet-note tells us, the performer’s interpretation goes, with her encouragement, well beyond the composer’s notation. In the other works, much is made of the combination of the accordion sounds and Asier Polo’s cello. With In croce, a number of cross-like ideas derive from the title – crossing of registers, crossing of lines and textures and so on – which are essentially private creative stimuli for the composer. But in the major work on the record, the half-hour Seven Words, the sentences spoken by Jesus on the cross are graphically, even fervently implied. Gubaidulina’s love of short motifs, here often using very close intervals, produces in her hands music of strong and even painful intensity, seizing and gripping the attention, sometimes with fiercely punched chords on the accordion or with soaring harmonics on the cello that vanish into silence after the final Word. The longest movement is the central No 4, Jesus’s cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, a powerful and deeply affecting invention. This is a remarkable, compelling work.

José de Nebra, born in 1702 to a family of musicians from Aragón, already made his career in Madrid as a young man: at the age of 17 he took over the position of organist from Tomás de Victoria and also celebrated great success at the opera. In 1736 he was appointed organist and later vice kapellmeister of the Royal Chapel. From this time on, his creative focus was on sacred music and he created more than 170 sacred compositions. After the coronation of Fernando VI and his wife Bárbara de Braganza, the musical work at the court experienced a great revival: the queen brought the famous musicians Scarlatti and Farinelli to the Spanish court and the Royal Chapel also experienced a great boom.