Quattro Ristoranti Stagione 6 Streaming Ita

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alessandro Stradella was a remarkable composer and his oratorio San Giovanni Battista is a remarkable work. Both have never fallen into oblivion. As far as the composer is concerned, that is mainly due to his adventurous life, which ended with his being murdered as a result of one of his many love affairs. The oratorio was still known in the 19th century, and it was Stradella's first work performed in the 20th century: in 1949 Maria Callas took the role of Eriodiade la figlia, better known as Salome.

An exact contemporary of Haydn, Franz Ignaz Beck (1734-1809) was a pupil of Stamitz in Mannheim, but lived and worked mainly in Bordeaux, where he was rated highly. Documented information about Beck is meagre and the 3-page introduction is unable to date this Stabat Mater, which is reckoned his masterpiece. It failed initially at Versailles and caused something of a furore, because of his forward looking harmonic modulations; the orchestra sabotaged his instructions for extreme dynamic contrasts. It points towards Berlioz in its originalty and I fully endorse the commentator's claim that Beck is another neglected composer whose music, once heard, demonstrates, yet again, that the accepted canon of 'great' composers, with most of the others cast into oblivion, is misleading and regrettable.

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).

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".

Georg Philipp Telemann - cpo friends have long known - is always good for surprises. He was a diligent and also important opera composer who wrote about 35 operas for the Hamburg Opera between 1721 and 1733, of which unfortunately only nine have survived. These are, without exception, important contributions to German opera history; recent performances have all proved their viability and power, but above all the originality, the music-dramatic sense and the always attractive melody of Telemann revealed.

Friedrich Abel, geboren 1723 in Köthen, gestorben 1787 in London hat seinen Platz der Musikgeschichte bisher stets als in zweiter Linie genannte Persönlichkeit gefunden. Er wirkt als »Ergänzungskraft«, wenn es gilt, das Bild in Bach- oder Mozart-Biographien abzurunden. Dabei gehört er zu Gruppe der ganz wichtigen Übergangsmusiker vom Barock zu Klassik, denen cpo schon seit geraumer Zeit große Aufmerksamkeit widmet und ohne deren »Pionierarbeit« so manche spätere klassische Großtat kaum möglich gewesen wäre.