la Veillee Imaginaire

Eighteenth century Naples was not only a creative, cultural melting pot, but also one of the most important cities in Europe. Full of impressive contrasts between decay and splendour, and with an immense artistic output whose musical influences stretched across Europe, attracting many musicians and composers, Naples was a source of fascination and has retained its appeal to the current day.

This recording features a work with a strange coincidence in its compositional process and an astonishing dual authorship. Remarkably, Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Lute Suite SW47 (which he named Suonata) also comes with a violin part that can be played over the top of it, composed by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. A recent comparison of sources revealed that the harpsichord part in Bach’s Suite for Violin & Harpsichord BWV1025, long considered to be of doubtful attribution, perfectly matches Weiss’s suite. The violin part, meanwhile, was indeed composed entirely by Bach and is an additional melody independent of Weiss’s musical material. It feels almost like a ‘free improvisation’ above the suite and recalls a similar process carried out by Charles Gounod in 1859: his Ave Maria fits over the first Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier BWV846. The sole exception is the Fantasia movement in Bach’s piece, which is not derived from Weiss’s suite, meaning both the violin and harpsichord parts in it are unique to Bach.

1694: the first French opera composed by a woman is premiered at the Academie royale de musique. The fateful destiny of the Greek lovers, driven to blindness and horror by the gods: Cephalus will kill Procris, whom he believes to be unfaithful, and himself… A virtuoso harpsichordist much appreciated by Louis XIV, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre chose to become a composer at a time when such freedom was virtually unheard of for a woman. Her gamble paid off, with six performances and the admiration of posterity: this flamboyant work has finally been brought back to the public by Reinoud van Mechelen.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.

Le Destin du Nouveau Siècle (‘The Fate of the New Century’): what a pertinent idea for a libretto for the year 1700! This unknown opera-ballet by Campra, premiered at the College Louis-le-Grand, foreshadowed the century that was opening in France, where Louis XIV had been King for… 57 years!

For this new instalment of their series devoted to British music of the eighteenth century, the musicians of La Rêveuse take us to London in the 1740s. The leading Italian and German virtuosos Handel invited to play in his orchestra brought a powerful wind of change to English musical life, while the Scot James Oswald achieved the tour de force of making the music of his country fashionable in the drawing rooms of London.

With the present disc, Pascal Rophé and his Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire pay tribute to their great countryman, Claude Debussy – but not with the standard orchestral fare. Debussy Orchestrated paints a portrait of a light-hearted composer, seen through the eyes of two of his collaborators, Henri Büsser and André Caplet, who transferred the works recorded here from the keyboard to the orchestra. In Petite Suite, composed for piano four hands in 1899, Debussy makes allusions to Fêtes galantes by Paul Verlaine, the poet who so often inspired him.

Capella de la Torre is a German early music ensemble led by Katharina Bäuml, founded in 2005. In 2016 Katharina Bäuml and Capella de la Torre won the ECHO Klassik Ensemble des Jahres for their CD Water Music. In 2017 Capella de la Torre was awarded again with ECHO Klassik for the CD "Da Pacem" with Rias Kamerchor conducted by Florian Helgath. The ensemble is a wind ensemble, but has enlarged to include singers, lute, organ and percussion.