Originally recorded for the Hi Fi label, this CD reissue features tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca as the main soloist on a variety of standards and basic material arranged by Bill Holman, who plays baritone with the octet. Also heard from are trumpeters Conte Candoli and Ed Leddy, trombonist Frank Rosolino, pianist Vince Guaraldi, bassist Monty Budwig, and drummer Stan Levey. The music, although based on the West Coast, is not as cool-toned or as laid-back as one might expect. High points of the consistently swinging session include "Blue Jazz" (a Kamuca blues), "Star Eyes," "Linger Awhile," and "(Back Home Again In) Indiana."
Peter Holman is a conductor known particularly for his interpretations of post-Renaissance English music, but he has also received acclaim for his performances of the works of European masters of the Baroque period, including Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, and Monteverdi. He has recorded extensively for the English label Hyperion and has established parallel careers as a harpsichordist, organist, teacher (Royal Academy of Music and Colchester Institute), and music journalist.
Although accorded a substantial article in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, the German-born composer John Frederick Lampe (1702/3-51) remains largely unknown except to connoisseurs of 18th-century English music. Yet on the evidence of this disc, such neglect is hardly deserved, since Lampe possesses a rare gift for writing genuinely comic opera. The basis for his Pyramus and Thisbe of 1745 (subtitled ‘a mock opera’) is the famous play-within-a-play sequence from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Praetorius devoted most of his life to church music: he published more than twenty collections, mostly of settings of Lutheran chorales, and a number of others are known to have existed in manuscript. He also planned a series of collections of secular music named after the various Greek muses, including Euterpe (Italian and English dances), Thalia (toccatas and canzonas) and Erato (German secular songs). Unfortunately, in the event he managed to publish only one, Terpsichore, musarum aoniarum quinta (1612), consisting of 312 dances in four, five and six parts.
Under the expert guidance of Peter Holman, as formidable a scholar of the period as he is experienced executant, these performances by the Parley of Instruments remain as fresh and incisive as on their first appearance over a decade ago. With no special interpretative axe to grind, they remain classic accounts, deserving of a place in anyone’s CD collection, specialist and general listener alike.
Handel arrived in Hamburg in 1703, aged eighteen. He spent four years in the city and wrote several works for the town's opera house. Hamburg opera was a rather eclectic beast at the time, drawing on Italian and French language and instrumental style alongside the native German. Handel fell happily into this genre; this CD brings together a selection of the delightful orchestral music (which tends to be in the French style) that Handel wrote there, some of it recorded for the first time.