Rias Kammerchor Wolfgang Rihm Astralis & Other Choral Works

Jephtha, first performed in 1752, was Handel’s last major work, written while he was struggling with poor health and failing eyesight. Yet the score contains some of his most powerful and moving music, notably the chorus’s bleak paean to blind faith, ‘How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees!’ Jephtha is also one of his more operatic oratorios and, if many Baroque operas require the suspension of disbelief, this libretto (by Thomas Morell) may need modern listeners to suspend their distaste at the perversities of its 18th-century pietism. Handel’s wonderfully humane music cuts through all such sanctimony, however, as if – as the Handel scholar Winton Dean has argued – in highlighting the themes of personal suffering and capricious fate, Handel implicitly ‘makes Jehovah the villain of the piece’.

After the celebrated Stabat Mater, already recorded to great acclaim by the RIAS-Kammerchor, here is Rossini’s other masterpiece in the domain of sacred music, the last of his “sins of old age”. This Petite Messe solennelle is indeed “small” in terms of the forces deployed - the instrumental accompaniment is limited to two pianos and a harmonium - but it also well deserves the adjective “solemn” for its ample scale and its formidable dramatic power. In many respects, this work may be seen as its composer’s musical testament. Dazzled, like all his critical colleagues, Filippo Filippi wrote after the first performance in March 1864: “This time, Rossini has surpassed himself, for no-one can tell what is the more impressive, his learning or his inspiration.”

This is the 6th instalment of Haenssler’s critically acclaimed survey of Rihm’s orchestral music. Wolfgang Rihm celebrates his 60th birthday this year and this release is of two very melodic concertos. The works feature the phenomenally talented siblings Jörg and Carolin Widmann.

Saul is one of Handel's most action-filled, fast-moving oratorios; an opera in everything but name only. It has been lucky on disc–both Paul McCreesh (Archiv) and John Eliot Gardiner (Philips) have led superb readings, and Joachim Carlos Martini leads a good performance on Naxos, which is a bargain. Now René Jacobs and his remarkable Concerto Köln come along and offer a truly majestic reading, filled with real drama and beautiful, precise singing and playing. Tenor Jeremy Ovenden sings Jonathan with nobility and faces down Saul in Act II with style and power. David is sung by countertenor Lawrence Zazzo, and he's as good as the best-recorded competition (Andreas Scholl, Derek Lee Ragin). Emma Bell is ravishing as Merab; Rosemary Joshua makes a fine Joshua.

When Nature took on new meaning. The transition from Winckelmann to Rousseau marked one of the biggest upheavals of thought in the Enlightenment - and it is perfectly illustrated in these four Seasons with their decidedly Romantic 'descriptivism'! In this music, even though lambs frisk, fish teem and thunder booms, it is the question of Man within Nature that is the central issue. By going back to the very first version of The Seasons (with the orchestral introductions played in their entirety), René Jacobs enables us to relive that day in April 1801 that saw the triumph of old 'Papa' Haydn.

It was when the young Haydn was appointed Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that he composed his Missa Cellensis, a work of vast proportions, whose popularity is demonstrated by the many surviving copies. In this interpretation full of vivid contrasts, the RIAS Kammerchor and the Akademie für Alte Musik confirm their extraordinary ability to reveal every subtlety of a composition that possesses almost operatic energy.

Tutuguri: Poème dansé, after Artaud, is obliquely inspired by Artaud’s poem Tutuguri – Le rite du soleil noir in his radiophonic "play" Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu of 1948 as well as by Artaud’s life and work in general. Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948), actor, playwright and stage director, was once a member of the French surrealist circle which he left when he realised the Surrealists’ Communist leanings. From early on, he suffered from nervous and mental disorders, often cured by various drugs to which he remained addicted throughout his life.