Outhere Music

The Orpheum Foundation, which has been supporting young musicians for more than thirty years, has joined forces with Alpha Classics for a series of recordings devoted to Mozart’s concertos for various instruments. The finest soloists of the young generation have been selected under the artistic direction of Howard Griffiths, a renowned Mozart conductor, who considers that playing his music is like ‘looking in a mirror: you can hear if everything is in place, musicality, intonation, rhythm, phrasing’. For this fifth volume, the American pianist Claire Huangci joins the Mozarteum-Orchester Salzburg and Howard Griffiths, her mentor for the past ten years. For her, she says, these concertos are ‘true musical revelations, works full of virtuosity and imagination’.

Very little is known about the life of Anthoni van Noordt. Following in the tradition of Jan Piertszoon Sweelinck, he was organist at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam from 1664. After the death of Dirck Sweelinck in 1652, the van Noordt family became Amsterdam's most important musical family. The van Hagerbeer organ in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, a large 17th-century Dutch city organ with a wide variety of stops, is particularly well suited for the performance of van Noordt's music. The organ still has many of the characteristics of a traditional Renaissance organ, but the earlier preference for strongly contrasting timbres has given way to greater homogeneity, generally tending towards a somewhat darker sound. Also new is the striving for solemnity and weight, expressed above all in the disposition of a 24' in the Hauptwerk and a Trompete 16' in the Pedal

Johannes Brahms drew texts from various Biblical sources for his Deutsches Requiem . As we hear in his choral music, he had a passion for polyphony and was inspired by models from the great Lutheran tradition of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Ricercar and Vox Luminis have explored this early repertoire with the same passion for many years now, although with no less admiration for Brahms's masterpiece. It is no surprise that some of the texts that Brahms chose had already been set by his illustrious predecessors; it simply remained for us to trace a path through these earlier scores, so many meditations on death, and to assemble a very different Deutsches Requiem : one animated by the emotions of the Lutheran Baroque.

Alessandro Grandi - born in Venice in 1590 - was an extremely precocious talent. Appointed deputy of Monteverdi in 1627 in Saint Mark’s Basilica, he is regarded by scholars as “the greatest motet composer of his time”. After the highly praised Grandi’s motets album “Celesti fiori” (A464), Accademia d’Arcadia now presents Lætatus sum: a selection from the three extant Psalms collections. Grandi ventured in the field of Psalms with large-scale writing only at the end of his life, his collections of Psalms were undoubtedly intended for grand occasions: the relationship between soloists, tutti, and instruments is very modern, as successive portions of the text are set in sharply contrasting textures and styles. Recorded in the sumptuous Palladian church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, this recording features magnificent and compelling masterpieces by an author considered by his contemporaries as equal to Monteverdi in the field of sacred music.

Ernest Bloch’s Suite Hébraïque was the starting point for this programme: ‘This music came as a revelation to us. Its language is overwhelming and tells of the ravages of the twentieth century. The other composers in this programme (Ravel, Bloch, Bruch, Prokofiev, Shostakovich) each in their own way experienced the full force of this tormented century and drew inspiration from the most timeless and universal aspects of folk and sacred repertories, the better to respond to the brutality of the age’, say violist Arnaud Thorette and pianist Johan Farjot, who devised this programme. Johan Farjot has also arranged John Williams’s famous Schindler’s List theme for viola and cello. An intense and poignant experience, also featuring other superb artists: Antoine Pierlot (cello), Pierre Génisson (clarinet), Karine Deshayes (mezzo-soprano), and Sarah and Deborah Nemtanu (violin).

In February 2021, when public concerts had been cancelled for several months, the musicians of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne were able to meet behind closed doors on the stage of the Opéra de Lausanne in order to record this disc under the direction of Heinz Holliger. An album released in 2013 presented an earlier recording collaboration between the Bernese conductor and the Lausanne-based ensemble with two works by Schoenberg ( Verklärte Nacht and the Chamber Symphony No. 2 ) and an early piece by his pupil Anton Webern ( Langsamer Satz ). Nearly a decade later, the same performers are reunited and continue to highlight these two leading composers of the Second Viennese School.

‘Well, what a surprise – a divine surprise! I have delighted in immersing myself in the world of Handel for more than forty years now. But I must admit that I experienced yet another lesson in strength and joy when I toured and recorded the Dettingen Te Deum and the Coronation Anthems ’, says Hervé Niquet. As a lover of large orchestral formations, he has assembled a number of instrumentalists and singers close to the (gigantic) forces used at the premiere, with a large band of oboes, bassoons and trumpets, and assigned the solo arias to the entire ‘chapel’. Niquet speaks of ‘the glittering power of this ceremonial music concocted by a Handel conscious of placing the best of his genius at the service of the crown and of history’, and he in turn invests all his enthusiasm and expressiveness in these works combining ‘grace and strength’. Fans of Champions League football will recognise in Zadok the Priest the theme of that competition’s anthem!

In the eighteenth century, the sonata model established by the published works of Arcangelo Corelli conquered all of musical Europe. Throughout the century, transcriptions of his music were published for every instrument, and the viola da gamba was no exception. The most interesting collection is that held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (MS Vm7 6308), which presents the twelve sonatas of Corelli’s op.5 in transcription for viola da gamba. Although it is preserved in Paris, certain stylistic elements suggest that this transcription originated in the German-speaking region of Europe, with particular reference to composers such as Johannes Schenck, Konrad Höffler or Gottfried Finger, whose works were deeply influenced by Corelli’s style. It is to this repertory that Teodoro Bau, winner of the 2021 Ma Festival Bruges competition, devotes his recording.

Bruno Cocset, an eminent ambassador of the Baroque cello, here makes a teenage dream come true: to record the Beethoven sonatas. ‘When we rediscover it from the inside, this music overwhelms us: its art of the mise en abyme, its ability to deviate from the formal scheme, to dare to go as far as the uncontrolled surge of frenzy or the break in tempo. On the part of a champion of the metronome (Beethoven took a hand in its creation), this imperious seizure of freedom creates immeasurable spaces, thrusting performer and listener into unknown, unforeseen depths. The piano and the cello are bound together throughout the narrative by a fertile, pungent, exhilarating complementarity.’ At the fortepiano, a longstanding musical partner, Maude Gratton, plays two different instruments, chosen according to the character of each sonata: a Viennese piano after Johann Andreas Stein and an original John Broadwood from 1822, a model that circulated in Vienna and which Beethoven himself played. In order to tackle this repertory at the cusp of Classicism and Romanticism, Bruno Cocset commissioned a new cello from another faithful partner.

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was one of the most complete musicians of the Elizabethan era. He made talented contributions to every genre of vocal and instrumental music. In the domain of the fantasia for viols , he wrote for numerous combinations of between two and six instruments and elaborated endlessly inventive formal structures, in which traces of Italianism are by no means absent. L’Achéron offers us a wide selection from this repertory, which it has recorded on viols based on early seventeenth-century English models.