Nicholas Humprey

With ‘La Ronde’, Nicholas Angelich pays tribute to the relationships between three of Romanticism’s greatest composers for the piano. Schumann, Chopin and Liszt were born within 18 months of each other and knew each other personally. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, who dedicated two of his Op.10 Etudes to Liszt, who, closing the circle, dedicated his B minor Piano Sonata to Schumann.

The US composer Stanley Grill was strongly influenced in his writing by his passion for music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He already has a long-standing collaboration with the original sound ensemble Pandolfis Consort, and many of his works have been dedicated to the orchestra founded by violist Elzbieta Sajka-Bachler; the Pandolfis Consort's album "Und das Lied bleibt schön" now presents several works by the composer, who was born in New York in 1954. In alternating instrumentation with soprano Lisa Rombach and countertenor Nicholas Spanos, songs and song cycles based on poems mainly by R. M. Rilke, but also Heinrich Heine, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger and Rose Ausländer are interpreted. In addition to these vocal works, there are also three songs without words for two violas, violoncello and theorbo on this recording.

Composed in Rome in 1707, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno is one of Handel’s longer Italian cantatas and, if not quite matching the brilliance of Apollo e Dafne or Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, it remains a thoroughly engaging piece. Nicholas McGegan’s lively 1990 recording captures the music’s air of beguiling insouciance, Lorraine Hunt is in sweetly majestic voice as the capricious shepherdess Clori and there are deft obbligato flourishes from Elizabeth Blumenstock (violin) and Paul O’Dette (archlute). In sum, a delight.

The songs of late Renaissance and early Baroque England have been sliced and diced in various ways in concert and recorded programming, but the configuration here seems to be unique. The tenor Nicholas Phan, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, devised the program himself: pointing out "how little human experience has changed over the centuries" and that Dowland's melancholia had much in common with the Romantics' veneration of the lovesick solitary hero (both debatable ideas, but both stimulating), he assembles what he calls a pastiche song cycle from compositions by Purcell, Dowland, John Blow, and other lesser-known lights.