Azon Academy

Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) resumes a celebrated project to record Mozart’s complete Piano Concertos, with this ninth volume released after an extraordinary 20-year wait. Together with renowned scholar-pianist Robert Levin, AAM presents Mozart’s Piano Concertos No. 21 in C Major K467, perhaps one of Mozart’s most well-known Piano Concertos and featured in films The Spy Who Loved Me and Elvira Madigan, and No. 24 in C Minor K491, described by Mozart scholar Alexander Hyatt King as ‘not only the most sublime of the whole series but also one of the greatest pianoforte concertos ever composed’.

A generous collection of Haydn Concertos, Overtures and Dances, this 2CD set offers the Philips recordings of the Cello Concertos and the Argo recordings of the remaining works. Although released in various reissues, the Marriner/Argo Haydn Concertos have never before been offered together and this collection offers a great opportunity to explore these recordings from 1966–69. Familiar works such as the E flat major Trumpet Concerto and the two Cello Concertos appear together with the little-known Organ Co’ncerto. Also on offer, are two sets of German Dances/Allemandes (both making their first appearance on CD) and a pair of Overtures, of which that for Acide e Galatea’ is a first-on-CD release.

Purcell’s fourth and last full-scale semi-opera, The Indian Queen, is often passed over in favour of its longer and more rounded predecessors, especially King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. The reasons are plentiful: Thomas Betterton, with whom Purcell collaborated, never finished his reworking of an early Restoration tragedy and even if he had torn himself away from his business interests in 1695, Purcell would not have been alive to set the remaining music for Act 5. As it happened, Henry’s brother Daniel set the masque from the final act after Betterton had hired an anonymous writer to finish his adaptation. No one can deny that neither verse nor music achieved the heights imagined in the original collaboration; given the quality of the masques in Purcell’s large ‘dramatick’ operas (including Dioclesian, of course), there is an undoubted sense of anticlimax.

Paul Goodwin’s A Christmas Collection (his debut disc with the Academy of Ancient Music) offers an anthology of Schütz’s shorter dialogues and motets by way of an alternative to the composer’s own Christmas Oratorio. Anyone who has ever endured that drily austere work will be pleasantly surprised by the rich textures and vocal expressivity of much of the music here, and by the dramatic wit, say, of the little Annunciation scene, ‘Sei gegrüsset Maria’, for male alto Angel and soprano Mary, in which the mother-to-be can’t help interrupting her heavenly visitor, first in sheer amazement, then in her eagerness to confirm her unblemished virgin state.

This first of the two sets contains four indisputable masterpieces. In the stormy D minor Concerto K. 466, Brendel springs a mild surprise by playing his own cadenzas rather than Beethoven's, the ones most often used. I must confess to preferring Beethoven's unstylish but dramatic and imaginative cadenza to the first movement, but otherwise the performance is beyond reproach. Brendel adds some discreet and entirely appropriate ornamentation to the many repetitions of the second movement's main theme. The Olympian C major K. 467, with its incomparably beautiful slow movement, also receives some much-needed decoration: here the cadenzas are by Radu Lupu and are a bit quirkier than necessary.

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708-1763) was born in Schweidnitz, Silesia (today Poland). His special inclination towards music led him to undertake a brief period of study in Breslau (today Wroclaw) with the court musicians who were under the employment of the Archbishop of Breslau. In 1733 Janitsch moved to Berlin where the then Crown Prince, Frederick offered him a position as a double bass player. With the permission of the Crown Prince, he founded the circle "Freitagsakademien" (Friday academies), in which music was performed by professional and amateur musicians alike.

This is not strictly a compilation of what the British would term "light music," for there is music of substantial weight on these two discs: e.g., Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad, and Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, but for the most part, Marriner and his charges offer less weighty fare that is familiar to many classical music-lovers and certainly dear to the heart of Anglophiles like this writer. From Vaughan Williams's perennial favorites, Fantasia on Greensleeves and the English Folk Song Suite, and George Butterworth's nigh-ubiquitous The Banks of Green Willow to less familiar fare like Delius's Serenade (composed to honor the 70th birthday of Frederick Delius) and the suite from Elgar's incomplete opera The Spanish Lady, this compilation of recordings–originally made in 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1979–embodies the spirit of England and does so faultlessly. This is a well chosen and exemplarily executed collection of English orchestral miniatures proffered by a conductor and orchestra whose names have become synonymous with the repertoire.

Christopher Hogwood has found himself a dream cast here, with even the smallest roles taken by big names. There are a couple of surprises along the way, such as the underage First Sailor (sung by a slightly quavery treble) and the cross-dressing Sorceress, here taken by a bass. Still David Thomas cackles and machinates with the best of them, so don't let that put you off.