In•ter At The Drive In

The music industry sees artists come and go on a regular basis. Plans change, life gets in the way and bands fade away. Occasionally we’re lucky enough to see an important band return from their silence: enter At The Drive In. While At The Drive In was quiet, the members (Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Tony Hajjar and Paul Hinojos) were incredibly busy, selling millions of albums, winning Grammys and putting out a lot of quality music with their other projects (The Mars Volta, Antemasque, Gone Is Gone and many more). After a 15 year break, the band returned to the studio to create the follow-up to 2000’s Relationship of Command.

If only for his melodic genius, Handel would have been forever acknowledged as one of history's greatest composers. These delightful sonatas for recorder provide abundant evidence to support that claim, and Marion Verbruggen's warm, resonant recorder and brilliant flute prove the perfect partners for bringing these rarely heard pieces to life.

Janine Jansen, Joris van Rijn & Benjamin Schmid - 24 Capriccios for Violin from The Netherlands (2002) {2CD NM Classics 92120}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 541 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 273 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 116 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2002 NM Classics | 92120
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Chamber Music / Violin

In 1998, the Rotterdam Arts Foundation commissioned 24 Dutch composers to write short works, or "capriccios", for solo violin, clearly with the idea of being a modern counterpart to the 24 caprices of Paganini. The one main rule was to compose acoustically, i.e. no use of electronics/remixing, overdubbing, or other outside means of sound besides the violin on its own and the violinist on her/his own. The Dutch music publishing house Donemus published these works in a single collected volume in 1999. All of these works received their premieres that same year at the International Gaudeamus Interpreters' Competition, which centered on the violin that year.

It's hard to believe this CD was done with only a violin, viola da gama and harpsichord. This is polyphonic music at its finest. It does tribute to Buxtehude, who preceded Bach. The ensemble is perfect - the instruments complement each other. When they go from slow to fast, it is remarkable to hear the contrast. These are expert musicians with a complete mastery of their instruments. They use loud-soft as easily as any masters of the Baroque. The result is joyous, lively and entertaining.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.

Pietro Antonio Cesti, byname Marc’ Antonio, (1623-1669) composer who, with Francesco Cavalli, was one of the leading Italian composers of the 17th century. Cesti studied in Rome and then moved to Venice, where his first known opera, Orontea, was produced in 1649. In 1652 he became chapelmaster to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at Innsbruck, a post he combined for a time with membership in the papal choir. From 1666 to 1669 he was vice chapelmaster to the imperial court in Vienna.

The re-release of The English Concert’s award-winning recording of Corelli’s Op 6 concertos offers a welcome opportunity to reflect on some of the changes in taste that have emerged since 1989. Two competing recordings, by groups led by Italians – that of Ensemble 415 and Europa Galante – oblige with two quite different approaches to this most quintessential of Baroque music.