Libera me

Niccolò Jommelli was one of the most sought after composers of his time, but finally accepted to become musical director at the court of Stuttgart in 1753. Three years later he composed his Requiem to commemorates the recent death of the Duchess von Württemberg, mother of his patron, the Duke Carl Eugen.. Despite the fact that Jommelli owed his fame almost exclusively to his operas during his lifetime, the Requiem became his most famous work after his death; the almost one hundred handwritten and printed copies of the entire work or fragments of it that have survived in some seventy libraries throughout Europe, some also in the USA, bear witness to this. Whilst the score and parts of the first performance have been lost, we can still form a reasonably good idea of the original instrumentation thanks to a surviving list of payments made to the musicians. We know that there were eight singers (one female and seven male) in addition to Jommelli.

This SACD hybrid recording was beautifully crafted at Oslo's Rainbow Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, home and technician behind so many classic ECM recordings. While Libera Me is unquestionably a well-crafted album for those who want to simply sit back and be enveloped by something that doesn't confront or challenge, it is in the odd man out tracks—"The Teacher," "Both Sides Now," and especially "Asnah"—where we hear what this album could have been and, perhaps, should have been. Hopefully they are harbingers of what Danielsson has in store next time around.

Despite the rather numerous and diverse orchestral line-up, the idea of concertare has a more chamber-like character here. The soloist is usually not directly confronted with the massive sound of a full orchestral tutti, but rather is involved in dialogues and interactions with small groups of instruments. With exceptional naturalness, André Tchaikowsky managed to achieve in this concerto a balance between solo violin and a full-scale symphony orchestra, employing textures of a linear, quasi-polyphonic character – enriched, however, by intense and refined harmony and contrapuntal devices drawing on the Baroque tradition.