Ricercar Consort

This recording includes an excellent selection from Beethoven’s many settings of Irish folksongs, with imaginative new arrangements of his accompaniments, rescored for more traditional instruments than the original piano, violin and cello. His settings are interspersed with more conventional versions of Irish and Scottish folk tunes taken from other sources. These help to highlight his remarkable ingenuity, which preserves the original character of the folksongs while elevating them to a much higher level of interest.

Four years after the superb ‘Membra Jesu nostri’, the Ricercar Consort once again turns to Buxtehude.The majority of the cantatas in this recording are centred on Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. With the both dramatic and comforting sounds of his cantatas, Buxtehude succeeded in shifting the focus from human suffering to divine help, thus giving people a foretaste of heavenly harmony and perfection.

It was in Amsterdam in 1740 that a lawyer named Hubert Le Blanc published an astounding work that defended the use of the bass viol at a time when the violin and the cello were becoming more and more important in Parisian musical life. This recording provides a musical equivalent of his essay, depicting the initial success of the bass viol and of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (celebrated in the film Tous les matins du monde), its moments of glory and, above all else, the repertoire of the viol, violin and cello during the first half of the 18th century.

The Ricercar Consort is a Belgian instrumental ensemble founded in 1980 together with the Ricercar record label of Jérôme Lejeune.The founding members were violinist François Fernandez, organist Bernard Foccroulle, and viola da gamba player Philippe Pierlot. The initial repertoire was focussed on the German Baroque, and the Consort was closely identified with the series Deutsche Barock Kantaten. In recordings and concerts the Consort was joined by baroque specialist singers including; Greta De Reyghere, Agnès Mellon, countertenors Henri Ledroit and James Bowman, tenor Guy de Mey and bass Max van Egmond, as well as the cornett player Jean Tubéry.

Bach wrote his passion-oratorio during the first year of his assumption of duties in Leipzig. The city fathers were rather strict in their Lutheranism, and forbade anything that remotely smacked of the newly-found opera craze that was infecting the country at the time, and seeped into the passion music of such luminaries like Telemann. As a result Bach was constrained, if such a word can be used, to employing the gospel only as the source of his libretto. Because of this the St. John Passion has perhaps the greatest text of any passion ever written, and Bach was determined to make the piece worthy of the scriptures he was setting.

Bruhns was one of Buxtehude’s most talented pupils, impressing his contemporaries with his skills as an organist just as much as with his talents as a violinist and as a singer. He died at the age of 32, leaving five organ pieces (RIC204) and twelve sublime Cantatas that form an evident link between Buxtehude’s religious music and J.S. Bach’s. This programme is rounded off with the cantata Erbarm dich by Lovies Busbetsky, another Buxtehude pupil, which formed the inspiration for one of J.S. Bach’s chorale preludes.

From the beginning of time songs of mourning, sorrow and lamentation have been a part of Western music. Aristotle had written that nothing was more powerful than rhythm and song for imitating all the turmoil of the soul. Composers of the Baroque Period strove to deal with nothingness and eternity by exploring the utter depths of the heart. And this is what these songs are all about.