Secco

One of the most important composers of opera and sacred music between Mozart and Rossini, and Donizetti’s teacher, Johann Simon Mayr also composed several major oratorios, including David and The Marriage of Tobias. Like Haydn’s more famous Il Ritorno di Tobia, Mayr’s work recounts how the archangel Raphael miraculously helps the boy Tobias to cure his aged father’s blindness. Conductor Franz Hauk prepared the performing edition for this exciting new recording.

Bavarian-born Simon Mayr spent much of his life in Italy where he promoted Viennese classical composition but also absorbed much from his studies in Bergamo and Venice. Though he was one of the most admired operatic composers of his day—he taught Donizetti, who revered him—he was particularly noted for his sacred oratorios. Jacob’s Flight from Laban is marked by his characteristically vibrant musical palette, with important writing for wind instruments, operatically-based arias and confidently-handled ensembles and choruses. Franz Hauk is Mayr’s leading interpreter and acclaimed for his many recordings.

This CD from the Real Compañía Ópera de Cámara presents two cantatas by the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler - Il Sogno and La Dora festeggiante. Il Sogno, written in 1787, is the only example of collaboration of between Martín y Soler and the great librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. These works are like a small fresco of this period of transformation. La Dora represents the end of a period, in which the Olympic gods serve as a model to human behavior, while Il Sogno, is, deep down, a pre-romantic spiritual work, in which the nymphs are no longer unattainable beings, beings that do not suffer or have human passions but on the contrary, they embody them, they live them in their own skin in spite of being in an idyllic place.

Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka is a strong candidate for the greatest rediscovery of the Baroque revival. He worked for most of his career in Dresden (the booklet, in French and English, goes into a great deal of detail about the political determinants and musical implications of this fact), and Bach, who didn't admire many composers, admired him. Each new Zelenka work that emerges, if competently performed, seems to astonish, and I Penitenti al Sepolchro del Redentore, ZWV 63 (The Penitents at the Sepulchre of the Redeemer), composed late in Zelenka's career in 1736, is no exception. The work is a bit hard to get a grip on because of its odd genre. Annotator Vacláv Luks calls it a "sepolcro oratorio": it is a little religious semi-drama based on the idea that biblical figures, who may not (as in this case) actually meet in the Bible at all, gather at Christ's tomb and contemplate his divine mysteries.

This album offers delightful chamber music of Giya Kancheli, regarded as one of Georgia’s greatest composers.

The concertos of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, not only richly varied in relation to each other, but also a welcome addition to his more unified group of eight symphonies. Hartmann discovered new and individual solutions that confirm the importance of his concertos as significant and original contributions to the development of this form in the 20th-century. The works compiled on this CD were written between 1931 and 1955, thus providing a superb insight into all of Hartmann's important creative phases.