Stile Antico

Lawrence Power is Britain’s greatest living viola player, the true successor to Lionel Tertis and William Primrose. Part of his mission is to perform and record music premiered by those masters of the previous century, including works by York Bowen, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Dale, William Walton and, here, Arthur Benjamin.

Agostino Steffani’s sumptuous 1688 opera Niobe, Regina di Tebe has proved a revelation to audiences since its first modern production in 2008. The spellbinding French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, who appeared in its US premiere at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2011, stars in this new recording, with Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin in the title role of the proud, but tragic Theban queen.

Two fantastic examples of 17th century mass performed by specialists of the genre. The whole is perfectly chiseled, mixing the warm sonorities of the viols with the vocal and textual rigor of the singers, restoring in a serene atmosphere the style appropriate to each of the composers (delicately archaic for the one, soberly modern for the other.

This recording offers an unusual selection of Dietrich Buxtehude’s vocal music performed by 2010 Grammy® Award winning ensemble Theatre of Voices conducted by Paul Hillier. Among these rarely heard works with texts in Swedish and Latin, we find cantatas in the form of virtuoso concertos, as well as arias and chorale settings and Buxtehude’s only work in the stile antico, the Missa alla brevis.

This 1994 disc is something of a classic of the new strain of the historical-performance movement, which is characterized by a certain amount of license to speculate in the reconstruction of lost works. The Miserere mei Deus of Gregorio Allegri is, of course, not a lost work, but one with an unbroken performance tradition stretching back to its composition in the early seventeenth century (before 1638). It was sung for centuries at the Sistine Chapel, where the singers were enjoined from circulating the music beyond Vatican walls…

The modern-day appreciation of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti takes a decisive turn in the direction of his church music with this early eighteenth-century composer’s Missa Sancti Pauli given an ideal recording on Glossa by György Vashegyi, the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra. Conti was a Florentine who worked for much of his career in the Imperial Court in Vienna, generating much attention there – the ever-observant JS Bach and Zelenka were both known to have been attracted by his music. Curiously, it was liturgical works like this 1715 Missa Sancti Pauli which kept Conti’s name known until near to the end of the nineteenth century rather than the operas, oratorios and cantatas with which he delighted the Viennese Court and which have hitherto been receiving the attention of artists and record labels today. If Conti’s church music is less fledgling Classical than his dramatic fare, there is much in the way of melodic tunefulness and concertato style – for both voices and instruments – to combine with fugal-imitative writing reminiscent of the stile antico.

It is not certain that all the music on this disc is by Scarlatti; the manuscript that contains the nine Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday and four Lenten motets is unsigned and in places incomplete. Conductor Sergio Balestracci is confident of their authorship, however, on stylistic grounds and because Scarlatti is reported to have composed settings of these Passiontide meditations in ‘the solid style of Palestrina’ for the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1708.

Neil Cowley Trio - Spacebound Apes (2016) {Hide Inside Records HIDECD002}
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© 2016 Hide Inside Records | HIDECD002
Jazz / Modern Jazz / Beyond Jazz / Progressive Jazz / Piano

The pop-aware UK jazz pianist Neil Cowley – frequently a thinker outside boxes – has not only spent three years developing this Arthur C Clarke-inspired concept album, but is releasing the results as a sheet-music “single”, an interactive website, a graphic novel and more. His hypnotic music has often resembled a soundtrack to visuals, but there’s more than enough distinction in this 11-piece tracklist to consider it a musical advance, not just a platform-extending conceptual one. Cowley and his regular jazz trio (assisted a little by Brian Eno FX artist Leo Abrahams), deliver a characteristic programme of sonorously looping song-hooks, pounding rock-piano patterns and baroque counterpoints, but this time in a more laid-back and low-lit manner.