Trøbbel Bjørn Torske

For his latest Glossa album with Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer takes his lead from the funeral rites for the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 1640 – which might well have encompassed the Requiem Mass by Orazio Vecchi as recorded here – to demonstrate the coexistence in Baroque Antwerp of two apparently contradictory, but interconnected facets.

There is something deeply troubling and inscrutable in Carlo Gesualdo’s music, something that any listener, even the most inexpert one, will unfailingly experience.This most particularly holds for Tenebrae Responsoria (1611), his definitive statement, his monument, his testament. It is as if this work, firmly embedded in the framework of liturgy for the Holy Week and reaching back to the practices of the Gregorian chant, would constantly extend over its boundaries and transgress its time and setting, immediately addressing modernity, disturbing all the rules in a severe tension, reaching into something that borders on chaos and madness, within the very order and religious devotion it fully espouses.Graindelavoix, the groundbreaking ensemble based in Antwerp and directed by Bjorn Schmelzer, are the ideal performers for this disquieting repertoire which originally was sung at Gesualdo’s castle and with probably only one listener in the audience: Gesualdo himself…

Björn J:son Lindh's ancestors family name was Jansson for several generations. His father changed the family name to Lindh in 1931. The name combination J:son Lindh, where J:son originates from the family name Jansson, has been used since then, but was only in 2009 approved by The Swedish Patent and Registration Office as a family name.

Together with guitarist Boris Björn Bagger, Detlef Tewes makes his premiere recording for hänssler CLASSIC in a program of literature featuring the mandolin as a first-lass concert instrument. Before becoming the national instrument of Italy, the mandolin enjoyed a period of popularity among the composers of Northern Europe. Mozart, Hummel and Beethoven among others composed for the mandolin, admiring it's delicate sound and ability to evoke feelings of longing, tenderness and nostalgia.