Rieger

Nicola Porpora, a contemporary of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Haydn (and a very young Mozart) is best remembered today as a famous singing teacher and opera composer. During his long career (he lived to age 81) he suffered many employment-related difficulties and disappointments that caused him to move frequently. Naples (where he was born), Venice, Dresden, and Vienna (where he taught Haydn) all enjoyed Porpora's reputable presence, and he even spent a period in London at the behest of a group seeking to unseat Handel and his opera company from its preeminent position. In addition to his operas and vocal music, Porpora wrote instrumental works such as the six violin sonatas featured here, which are drawn from a set of 12. Although anyone familiar with Italian Baroque and early Classical-style solo violin music will discover nothing particularly original on this generally fine recording, if you enjoy that genre and period you'll find much here to indulge and satisfy your taste.

In its way, this German release is more radical than many of the other discs on which recorder players have asserted their rights to big swaths of the Baroque repertory. The radical quality doesn't lie in the arrangement of Bach works for the recorder, which in no way goes beyond Bach's own musical recycling ethic. (Three works were originally written for flute, one was an organ trio sonata, one was a violin sonata, and one is for harpsichord alone.) The unusual quality of the arrangement instead lies in the treatment of the accompanimental harpsichord, which is all alone with no gamba or anything else supporting its fundamental line.

This plunge into the steady stream of Biber releases comes from violinist Anton Steck, an alumnus of the Musica Antiqua Köln period-instrument group. Austria's Heinrich Ignaz von Biber was a brilliant, iconoclastic violinist and composer of the late seventeenth century, hardly known 25 years ago but now the recipient of attention from violinists and casual listeners alike. His Mystery Sonatas collectively depict the Passion story through the unique device of scordatura, or retuning of the violin, which forces the instrument into strange, unearthly textures and moods.

The pearl of great price: the German tenor who could make you wish to retract all you ever thought, wrote or spoke about the species, the Mozart tenor who could sound both elegant and manly, the singer who could almost persuade you that Strauss loved the tenor voice as he did the soprano. We hear Wunderlich in this collection additionally as Rossini’s Almaviva, scrupulous with his triplets and almost as careful with his scales. His “Il mio tesoro” drops not a semiquaver and takes the long phrases with confident ease.

Leila Schayegh, Václav Luks, and Felix Knecht present four of Franz Benda’s violin sonatas (and a movement extracted from another sonata) from a collection of 34 ornamented examples of the genre included in manuscript form among the holdings of the Berlin State Library. The ornamentation, provided for both the slow movements, for which Benda earned a reputation, as well as for faster ones, could serve as a sort of compendium of German period practice (Schayegh’s own notes suggest that the works hail from about 1760).