Cyril Amenti's Coin

The surviving musical edition of Dutch Golden Age “Renaissance Man”, Constantijn Huygens receives a fresh new recording – issued on Glossa – from a singer who has become a connoisseur of vocal music from the seventeenth century: Cyril Auvity.

The present album, number nine in Eric le Sage’s valiant Schumann edition, is devoted to the trios with piano, a favourite formation of the 19th Century that combines the economy of chamber music with the prestige of instrumental music. He is accompanied by regular partners Gordan Nikolitch and Christophe Coin with a guest appearance from Paul Meyer on clarinet for Op. 56.

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.