ROBERT HUGILL’S MUSIC
LOG – April 2007
Princess Maria Walpurga of Bavaria
is not someone I'd come across before;
daughter of the Elector of Bavaria,
married into the Saxon Royal Family,
she lived her married life in 18th
century Dresden. Perhaps the fact that
we'd just come back from a visit there
meant that I was more likely to spot
the fact that she cropped up on two
different recordings.
Giovanni Ferrandini taught her singing;
he was appointed court musician to the
Elector of Bavaria at the age of 17
and delivered one opera per year. He
went on to dedicate music to the Princess
and when she married, music by Ferrandini
was in her luggage. Perhaps it was Ferrandini's
rather old-fashioned use of gambas which
appealed to her, he was certainly gifted
at creating lovely textures. review
The Princess was also an amateur composer
and her opera, Talestri,
was one of the earliest projects of
the Batzdorfer Hofkapelle, an instrumental
ensemble based at the medieval Batzdorf
Castle, near Dresden. Their disc of
Vesper Psalms by Lotti also exploits
a Dresden connection. Despite his many
years in Venice, Lotti spent time in
Dresden in charge of the music at the
Catholic Chapel - in a converted theatre
in the Taschenberg Palace – now a very
fine hotel.
Lotti is mainly associated in my mind
with his unaccompanied masses, useful
fodder for the Sunday morning services
at the Catholic Church where I sing
at Latin mass. But Lotti's Vesper Psalms
are on a gloriously bigger scale and
deserve to be better known. They were
obviously too large-scale for general
use in Dresden and were later used in
cut down versions. review
Naxos continue to be a mine of interesting
recordings of lesser known composers.
Simon Mayr has cropped up before both
here and elsewhere - his opera Medea
in Corinto was recorded by Opera
Rara with Jane Eaglen. Naxos's latest
offering is from Ingolstadt, the Bavarian
town where he was born. The disc offers
up two cantatas. Whilst listening I
could not help feeling that this was
another case of choosing pieces for
the suitableness for recording rather
than picking the composer's finest works.
review
In the case of flautist Cesare Ciardi,
the modern flautist Robert Fabbriciani
has gone to the trouble of orchestrating
and editing the music. Devotion indeed.
review
I am a great devotee of the one-voice-to-a-part
school of performance for Bach and treasure
the recordings of his works which follow
this Lutheran tradition. As an aside,
I was recently reading of research which
suggested that the church for which
Mozart's Requiem was commissioned continued
this tradition; certainly an interesting
line of performance practice to pursue.
Of course it does not pay to be too
dogmatic. But performances like that
of Helmut Müller-Brühl and
the Cologne Chamber Orchestra on Naxos
are very much in what I think of as
the Handel oratorio tradition; performances
which use the type of forces Handel
might have done if he'd included Bach
passions in his Lenten oratorio seasons.
The trouble is that performing Bach's
St. Matthew Passion with just eight
singers requires a group of outstanding
and well balanced singers, there is
great potential for disaster if the
performance does not work. Using a choir
and the traditional line-up minimises
risk and is far easier to bring off
in the end, regardless of the theoretical
basis for the performance.
Hyperion's re-issue of Her Majesty's
Sagbutts and Cornetts disc of Andrea
Gabrieli's motets and Missa Pater
Peccavi is a welcome opportunity
to hear scholarship in action. The group
use just one voice to a part and in
the motets mix and match voices and
instruments on different parts, just
as Gabrieli's contemporaries would have
done. A lively and informed disc.review
By contrast, the New London Chamber
choir's 1985 disc of De La Rue's Requiem
and Josquin's Mass: Hercules Dux
Ferrariae, is very definitely in
20th century choral territory,
rather than authentic single voices.
The results are musical however; with
James Wood in charge, how could they
not be. And neither work is exactly
common in the catalogue. review
Projecting our contemporary medium-scale
choral view onto works from the past
is a useful way of enabling people to
experience great music. I have no time
for dogmatism; there should be room
for performances of Bach's St. Matthew
Passion by just eight singers or
even 800 singers. For me, the key is
that the work’s musical origins must
be acknowledged and the conductor solves
the problems arising from performing
a work with large-scale forces when
it was written for a far smaller group.
The failures occur when conductors fail
to acknowledge that there is a problem
to be solved.
Performance practice issues of an entirely
different sort crop up in Wagner. With
the 20th century development
of the sheer power of the orchestra,
sopranos and tenors have had to be increasingly
iron-lunged - or fatally alter the balance
between voice and orchestra. So it is
always a pleasure to dip into recordings
of the past where such problems are
more likely to be absent. Beecham was
a fine Wagner conductor whose recording
career does not really reflect the place
the composer held in Beecham's repertoire.
His early 1950s recordings with Flagstad
(on Somm) are not a replacement for
more substantial fare, but they are
enjoyable nonetheless. Anyone interested
in what they could achieve together
should try and obtain a copy of their
pre-war live recording of Tristan.
The problem with Handel's Italian cantatas
- such as those on the new disc from
Veronika Winter on Capriccio - is that
they were written for some of the finest
singers of the day. They not only show
up technical weaknesses, but require
the singer to go beyond mere technique
to use the virtuoso vocal lines for
expressive means.
The same is true of the operas; but
perhaps their greater scale means that
individual singers are less under the
microscope, so that one singer’s weaknesses
are balanced by another's strengths.
But the issue of personal taste come
in here; often I find myself objecting
to a particular voice or the way a singer
tackles the music, only to find them
commended in another review. Alan Curtis's
reconstruction of Handel's Fernando
- basically Sosarme with
the cuts in recitative opened up - is
on balance a fine recording and usefully
allows us to hear Handel's first thoughts.
But Curtis's cast is not one of his
strongest and this is definitely one
where some weaknesses are balanced by
other strengths.
Sometimes CDs come my way because I
have an interest in the music as a performer
myself. The disc of Schumann's secular
choral music is one such; here is repertoire
which I don't normally review but with
which I am familiar as a singer. Also,
there still seems to be something a
little un-sexy about unaccompanied choral
music, the great 19th century
examples don't seem to generate the
same wow factor in people the way other
genres do. review
The Orpheus Vocal Ensemble, as listed
on this disc, gave me a curious conundrum;
their listing gives 4 sopranos, 7 altos,
6 tenors and 6 basses – can they really
perform like this. I'd be interested
to hear more on how they achieve such
a well-balanced sound with so few singers
on the top line.
It is the singers who are the main
interest on How can I keep from
singing, a showcase for the
trebles of St. Paul's Cathedral. There
are all sorts of things on the disc,
many solos sung by all the trebles.
It shouldn't always work, but it does
thanks to the superb musicianship shown
by the boys. review
Finally two more contemporary discs.
Naxos are issuing more music by Laurent
Petitgirard, following up on the success
of his Elephant Man opera. The
latest disc is a compilation of recordings
from 1992 and 2005, some of which must
have been sitting in someone's attic
awaiting release by an enterprising
record company. review
The BBC and Signum have followed up
their Tippett song recital from John
Mark Ainsley with a wonderful disc of
Tippett's choral music: unaccompanied
and with organ accompaniment. I was
amazed how much had fallen out of the
catalogue. Let us hope lots of people
buy it to encourage them to continue
this profitable collaboration. review
Robert Hugill
