Carolyn Sampson Wadsworth

Thomas-Louis Bourgeois (1676–1751) is one of the masters of the French chamber cantata at the time of the Régence, when – at last – it was permissible to introduce Italian influences openly in France. His imaginative music, as elegant as it is compositionally skillful, forms a welcome complement to the works of contemporaries such as Campra or Rameau who are infinitely better known today. Carolyn Sampson and Le Concert Lorrain revive for us the charming insouciance of the Régence.

Acclaimed soprano Carolyn Sampson, partnered by Robert King and The King's Consort,with whom she has been associated throughout her professional career, turns her talents to Handel's two most dramatic cantatas, linked by the theme of abandoned women.

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart.

The 37 songs in this recital, written by 27 composers – male, female, English, French, Swiss, German, Romantic, modern and contemporary – bear witness to the richness of Shakespeare’s works to which this recital is dedicated.

That Baïlèro, a shepherd’s song from the highlands of Auvergne sung in the Occitan dialect of the area, should become a favorite with singers ranging from Victoria de los Angeles to Sarah Brightman by way of Renée Fleming and Karita Mattila, is all because of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret. As a budding composer in Paris in the 1900s, Canteloube was unable to interest himself in the various musical cliques and currents. Instead he looked for inspiration in Auvergne in central France where he was born, starting to collect the songs of the farmers and shepherds that lived in the mountainous region. But he did so as a composer rather than a musicologist, and between 1923 and 1954 he published a total of thirty Chants d’Auvergne, arranged, harmonized and sumptuously orchestrated.

Carolyn Sampson, Iestyn Davies, Joseph Middleton - Lost Is My Quiet - Duets and Solo Songs (2017) {BIS Digital Download}
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Classical / Classical Vocal / Piano

Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies have collaborated on many occasions in the field of Baroque opera and oratorio, but on this occasion they venture into a somewhat different territory. In the company of Joseph Middleton, they have been exploring the Lieder for one and two voices of Mendelssohn and Schumann, combining them with songs and duets by Roger Quilter. And even though the disc actually opens with a set of Purcell songs – repertoire which both singers have previously made their mark in – they are here performed with the piano accompaniments realized by Benjamin Britten, turning them into something quite new and different.

Icelandic music of the last half century is the focus of this recording by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, led by its conductor, Graham Ross. Born from his close collaboration with the native composers of the “Land of Fire and Ice,” this programme sets out to explore and highlight their hypnotic soundworld, instinctively leaning towards contemplation. A prime example is the touchingly beautiful Requiem by Sigurður Sævarsson, which here receives its world premiere recording.

Throughout history men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new disc, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’