Julia.2008

Since early childhood, the works of Gabriel Fauré have been a source of inspiration for fellow French virtuoso, Renaud Capuçon. Together with treasured colleagues Guillaume Bellom and Julia Hagen, as well as his cherished Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Capuçon pays homage to his lifelong compositional hero. The release celebrates familiar classics, while also spotlighting rarely-heard gems. With Berceuse, the violinist presents a first impression of this upcoming album.

Real estate agent Christian travels the countryside scouting for investment prospects. In a forgotten, seemingly abandoned village far off the main roads, he finds more than he is looking for. Getting entangled in an encounter with a taciturn teenage farmhand, he confronts his sexual frustrations and, in the process, gets drawn into the undergrowth of a bloodthirsty rustic community.

Manuscript number Mus. Ms. 31528 of the British Library, London, is a collection of 46 undated works for violoncello. Of these at least 30 are autograph works from Giuseppe Dall’Abaco (a mix of solo sonatas with basso continuo, 2 virtuoso cello duos, as well as 1 ‘Duetto’ of debatable provenance) including his unpublished „Op.1“ (XII Sonate | Per il Violoncello, e Basso | Del Sig. Giuseppe Barone | Dall’Abaco). The very high quality script, along with the appearance of bass figures at critical moments, strongly suggests that this set of pieces was in preparation for publication. The manuscripts of the remaining 18 sonatas are not so carefully prepared, including scribbled revisions, and are in need of some final corrections. Furthermore, the bass line appears almost entirely without figures, leaving ambiguity as to which instrument(s) would have made up the continuo section.

Written down already in 16th-century tablatures, by the beginning of the 19th century it had crystallised into a musical showcase of Polishness. On an international and local scale, in which it finally settled under its imported French name – polonaise. At the threshold of Romanticism, this dance was not only a recollection of an idealised noble idyll, but also by far the most popular, most published genre in the dancing culture of the capital’s urban salons. Polonaises, usually schematic, built of repetitive segments, were actually written by everyone who created incidental music. This phenomenon coincided with the rapidly growing dominance of a new instrument – the piano – in the salon life, as a result of which, until 1815, polonaises constituted as much as 96 percent of dance pieces for piano published in Warsaw! At the same time, however – which was complained about by ambitious composers, including Kurpiński and Elsner – every relatively popular melody, such as opera arias, was used to create them.

Manuscript number Mus. Ms. 31528 of the British Library, London, is a collection of 46 undated works for violoncello. Of these at least 30 are autograph works from Giuseppe Dall’Abaco (a mix of solo sonatas with basso continuo, 2 virtuoso cello duos, as well as 1 ‘Duetto’ of debatable provenance) including his unpublished „Op.1“ (XII Sonate | Per il Violoncello, e Basso | Del Sig. Giuseppe Barone | Dall’Abaco). The very high quality script, along with the appearance of bass figures at critical moments, strongly suggests that this set of pieces was in preparation for publication. The manuscripts of the remaining 18 sonatas are not so carefully prepared, including scribbled revisions, and are in need of some final corrections. Furthermore, the bass line appears almost entirely without figures, leaving ambiguity as to which instrument(s) would have made up the continuo section.