Carolyn Sampson Wadsworth

For its final concert of the 2021–22 season and Osmo Vänskä’s last as artistic director, the Minnesota Orchestra chose to present Mahler’s mammoth Eighth Symphony, which calls for one of the largest complement of performers in the history of music, a symbol of the communitarian spirit of collective cultural, social and religious-philosophical endeavour in what has been referred to as a ‘Mass for the Masses’.

Partisans of the one-voice-per-part approach don't like to talk about it, but many early performances of Haydn's oratorios, and of the Handel performances in England that inspired him, included hundreds of musicians. They could be performed by smaller groups, but clearly when Haydn wanted all cylinders firing, this is what he had in mind. Historical performances that observe this precedent for The Creation exist, but this seems to be the first such performance of Haydn's second oratorio, The Seasons.

Conductor Daniel Reuss' splendid new recording of Handel's Solomon expands the extraordinarily broad range of music, including works by Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Elgar, Ligeti, Stefan Wolpe, and the Bang on a Can composers, in which he has shown his mastery. His 2006 recording of Martin's Le vin herbé was one of the highlights of the year. Handel scored the oratorio for unusually large choral and orchestral forces, and the sound of this performance, with the RIAS-Kammerchor and Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, is warmly humanistic, beautifully paced, and tonally sumptuous, and is sung and played with stylistic assurance and lively dramatic passion.

Long one of the finest living interpreters of Bach's sacred music, Philippe Herreweghe here adds two secular cantatas to an already distinguished discography. In the festive Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten and the celebratory Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten, Herreweghe leads his Collegium Vocale, Ghent in performances of rare beauty and great joy. Taking the symbolic roles of Diligence, Honor and Gratitude in one cantata and the scarcely less symbolic roles of Irene, Bellona, Fama, and Pallas in the other, the vocal quartet of Carolyn Sampson, Ingeborg Danz, Mark Padmore, and Peter Kooy performs with brilliant characterizations and consummate artistry.

Czech-born Jan Dismas Zelenka was by all accounts one of Baroque music’s trickier customers—fervently religious but completely lacking in courtly graces. Combine this with a tendency to throw out the rulebook when it came to harmonic convention and it’s hardly surprising that he was underappreciated in his lifetime. Yet here is some of the most pungently exciting writing of the Baroque, as individual as that of his near-contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach. The very opening of Zelenka’s Litaniae sets out his stall and Robert King and his eponymous Consort make the most of its startling qualities. But he is a composer to tug at the heartstrings too, nowhere more so than in the Salve regina, ravishingly sung by a young Carolyn Sampson.

The King’s Consort’s latest foray into the studio brings us a thrilling new recording of Michael Haydn’s Requiem, and reveals the little-known ‘St Ursula’ Mass to be a truly exceptional work. The Requiem was composed in response to tragedy, the death of Haydn’s patron—the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg—providing the official cloak for an outpouring of grief as much inspired by the death of the composer’s infant daughter. In itself the work is a memorable and confident example of the genre, but its deserved fame has been somewhat eclipsed by the many striking similarities between the Haydn and Mozart Requiems; when Wolfgang Amadeus composed what was to be his last—and most famous—work a full twenty years after Haydn’s memorial to the archbishop had been first performed, he doubtless intended it as the highest of praise to his friend that he borrowed melodies, rhythms, scoring, structure … Such points of musicological interest must no longer be allowed to obscure the worth of the Haydn’s original magnum opus.

Die Messe in h-Moll von Johann Sebastian Bach ist eine der zentralen geistlichen Vokalkompositionen der Musikgeschichte. Hans-Christoph Rademann widmet nun seine erste CD als Leiter der Internationalen Bachakademie Stuttgart diesem herausragenden Werk und setzt zusammen mit der Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart und dem Freiburger Barockorchester sowie renommierten Solisten auf dem Gebiet der historisch informierten Aufführungspraxis in künstlerischer Hinsicht Maßstäbe.

The present recording was accomplished in 2020 by socially distanced musicians, and director Robert King puts things in perspective, observing in his notes that Henry Purcell lived through the London plague of 1665, during which 15 percent of the city's population perished.

Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir led by Aapo Hakkinen join their forces together with an impressive vocal cast, Carolyn Sampson, Benno Schachtner, Werner Gura, Jonathan Sells and Cornelius Uhle, in this unique release of rarely heard choral works by Robert Schumann (1810-1856). This recording includes the world premiere recording of Schumann's 17-minute Adventlied, Op. 71 for soloists, chorus and orchestra, four choral ballades based on texts by Emanuel Geibel, and Schumann's version of Bach's Cantata BWV 105. Robert Schumann wrote in 1850: "Keep in mind that there are also singers, and that the highest in musical expression is achieved through the chorus and orchestra."