This 2004 CD from CPO completes la Stagione Frankfurt's recordings of Franz Ignaz Beck's Symphonies, Op. 3, begun in 2000 with the Symphonies Nos. 3-5, released on CPO 999 390-2. Led by Michael Schneider and featuring members of Camerata Köln as section leaders and soloists, this fine ensemble performs on period instruments and renders Beck's works in a vivid and believable eighteenth century style, fully attuned to the various influences that shaped his music. These symphonies clearly developed from ideas promulgated by the Mannheim School, but Beck also absorbed Italian and French mannerisms, so the international flavor of these pieces is noteworthy.
Cinque Profeti is a little known Christmas cantata by Alessandro Scarlatti. It has a power and subtlety redolent of Handel coupled with touches of early Monteverdi. Sung here to great effect by the five soloists with sensitive instrumentalists, they play together to bring the gentle and subtle melodies - surely written to confer a sense of the special nature of the Christmas season - to life. It’s a recording which is sure to please. Opera was not performed in Rome for much of Alessandro Scarlatti's lifetime; that's why his vocal church music mostly comprised oratorios and cantatas, of which he wrote three for the Palazzo Apostolico. Only one survives: to a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia. Cinque Profeti takes the inventive form of a conversation between the five old testament prophets, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Abraham (the cinque profeti) about the birth of Christ – which was about to be celebrated on the occasion of the cantata’s first performance, in 1705 at the Papal Palace in Rome.
Charles Burney, the great English music traveller of the 18th century, was extremely positive about "Herr Kapellmeister Benda". His compositions his "new, masterly, and learned." Mozart, too, never made a secret of his high regard for Georg Anton Benda; he was well aware of how much he was indebted to the creator of the German Singspiel - right up to the "Magic Flute".
CPO's Franz Ignaz Beck: Symphonies Op. 4 Nos. 1-3 is the third installation in period-instrument group La Stagione Frankfurt's outstanding series of recordings of the symphonies of Beck. Beck's symphonies are strikingly advanced for their time; he was already utilizing four-movement structures by 1760, and his symphonies are rich with the violent contrasts and explosive effects associated with the Stürm und Drang phase found in Haydn's middle symphonies and those of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Although all three of these symphonies are in major keys, they are no less aggressive and intense than the minor key symphonies that have attracted so much attention to Beck's work since late in the twentieth century. As to the virtues of this particular disc, the performance, led by Michael Schneider, is lively and enthusiastically played.
Among Gluck's three Italian 'reform' operas, Paride ed Elena (1770) comes, in every respect, third. Gluck's reformist notion, of concentrating in each opera on a single dramatic theme, is followed here as in Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, but in this case the theme—certainly to us, but seemingly to Gluck's own audiences too—is less momentous. We cannot be as excited as we are by the grand, all-embracing love-death themes of the other two by what Gluck himself described as the portrayal in music of the different characters of two nations, the Phrygians and the Spartans, ''contrasting the rude and savage nature of the one with all that is delicate and soft in the other'' (Spartan austerity, that is, against Trojan voluptuousness).
Joseph Martin Kraus was born in the same year as Mozart and died only one year after him; like him, he was also a musician who revealed his extraordinary talent at an early age. It is only in recent years, however, that Kraus has again begun to receive somewhat more attention as a multitalented artistic personality. Born in Miltenberg am Main, Kraus enjoyed a career that took him to Stockholm as court music director to the music-loving King Gustavus III. In their originality his sacred compositions tower above the conventional liturgical repertoire produced in Southern Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Faszinierende stilistische Fundgrube Noch immer bietet die Musikgeschichte Überraschungen und Entdeckungen, die einen bisher fast vergessenen Komponisten plötzlich in den Mittelpunkt rücken: Franz Ignaz Beck ist solch ein Fall. Die Sinfonien dieses „Berlioz des 18. Jahrhunderts“ sind dermaßen verrückt unkonventionell und kühn, dass man auch heute nur noch staunen kann über die „Modernität“ des zeitgenössischen Pariser Publikums, das ihm geradezu zu Füßen lag. Beck entpuppt sich als im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes fortschrittlicher und individueller „Stürmer und Dränger“, der die Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten seiner Zeit weit in die Zukunft öffnet. Von Mannheim aus über Italien fand Beck seinen Weg nach Marseille, wo seine Sinfonien sich zu wahren Zugstücken der berühmten Pariser "Concerts spirituels“ entwickelten und zahlreiche Druckauflagen erlebten.
Michael Schneider ist mit der vorliegenden Produktion des Magnificat von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach vor allem eine sehr geschmeidige Einspielung gelungen. Der Brückenschlag von der barocken Kontrapunkt-Strenge der Chorfugen zur frühklassischen Kantabilität der Arien gelingt stilsicher - auch die Solisten agieren mit viel Fortune.