Reincken

From the beginning of time songs of mourning, sorrow and lamentation have been a part of Western music. Aristotle had written that nothing was more powerful than rhythm and song for imitating all the turmoil of the soul. Composers of the Baroque Period strove to deal with nothingness and eternity by exploring the utter depths of the heart. And this is what these songs are all about.

Holland Baroque offers a colourful sonic ride through the microcosmos on this soundtrack for Pim Zwier’s Metamorphosis, a film portraying the extraordinary seventeenth-century natural science artist Maria Sibylla Merian and the fascinating life of the insects she studied. Judith Steenbrink composed new music, combining nature sounds, Baroque-inspired dances and groovy melodies. Together with the sound design by Paul Gies this results in a sound world as iridescent, enticing and original as Zwier’s film.

This important release presents the complete music for harpsichord by Henri D’Anglebert. D’Angelbert was a famous keyboard virtuoso and composer at the court of Louis the XIV, the Sun King. His style is typically French, expressed in a rich counterpoint and lavish ornamentation, a free and improvisatory style, in which sometimes the metre indications are missing (“non mesuré”) and a high level of virtuosity.