Coin Katalog

Cellist Christophe Coin has embarked on a project to record all of Vivaldi’s cello concertos. With this third instalment (the sixty-first volume of the naïve label’s complete Vivaldi Edition) he now has twenty cello concertos under his belt. Christophe Coin has become a noted authority in the work of the brilliant, tirelessly prolific Venetian composer, performing it with a host of different ensembles, such as L’Onda Armonica, the ensemble founded by Sergio Azzolini. As with the first two volumes he alternates between the cello and the violoncello piccolo, providing a palette of highly varied sound colours.

This recording is something of a classic of the historical-performance movement. It combines awesome soloists just hitting their peak years, a distinctive overall approach from conductor Christophe Coin and the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, and an illustration of what's possible when Bach's music is played on the instruments he had in mind when he wrote it. The illustration is especially vivid in this case, for all three of these cantatas feature an unusual instrument: a violoncello piccolo, which is a small five-stringed cello with a higher (the extra string is at the top) and less assertive sound than a full-size cello. There is also a second disc of these with the same forces and the same virtues. Coin plays several of these instruments himself and forges an instrumental sound to match its light, ethereal quality.

Born in Normandy and largely self-taught in musical theory, Sebastien de Brossard (1655-1730) spent most of his career directing cathedral choirs in Strasbourg, Meaux, and other Alsatian cities. Brossard's 'Grands Motets' are plainly in the tradition of Lully, but have less of French elegance and more of German seriousness about them, a quality perhaps suited to Alsatian taste. Brossard has been better known as a musical theorist and as the author of the first musical dictionary in the French language, but his compositions are quite well-crafted and concert-worthy. He ranks, I think, with Delalande, Dumont, Charpentier, and a notch or two below Lully himself and Rameau. Nearly every French Baroque composer worth his salt wrote a Grand Motet on the text of Psalm 125, "In convertendo Dominus captivitatem Sion," and it's quite interesting to compare the various expressions of rejoicing in the Lord's favor.

After the violin and bassoon, Vivaldi apparently like the cello best as a solo instrument. Because while the Italian Baroque master wrote somewhere over 200 violin concertos and 39 bassoon concertos, he also wrote 28 cello concertos. Part of his special affection may come from the fact that Vivaldi himself seems to have invented the genre. Although there had been passages for solo cello in earlier composers' works, Vivaldi apparently wrote the first actual concertos featuring the cello throughout. This disc, the first in Naïve's Vivaldi's Edition's releases of all the concertos played by Christophe Coin with Il Giardino Armonico led by Giovanni Antonini, is an easy winner.

Directeur musical de l'Ensemble Baroque de Limoges depuis 1991, violoncelliste et gambiste de renommée internationale, soliste, chef d'orchestre et chercheur, Christophe Coin est reconnu comme l'un des plus mûrs et des plus créatifs musiciens de son époque. Il est fondateur du Quatuor Mosaïques, l'un des rares Quatuors à pouvoir fêter ses vingt ans d'existence.

The two Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Flute and for two Cellos by Antoine Reicha show an astonishing balance between innovation and reflection. They bear witness to an outstanding virtuosity and art of composition, which revolutionise forms through spectacular, enthusiasm-provoking lines of execution and through novelties of writing that impact their deeper structures. A composer who established a link between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Vienna and Paris, Joseph Haydn and César Franck (one of the last among his many pupils), Reicha can no longer be reduced to his theoretical and didactic dimension alone: his extensive work, still too little known, continues to surprise us.