The Stabat Mater Dolorosa first appeared in the second half of the 13th century as a lengthy poem set to music, generally attributed to Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), an Umbrian Franciscan friar. It is one of the countless expressions of the affective piety that characterised Western late-medieval Christianity, encouraging intense and emotional identification (as fellow suffers) with Christ, his mother and other characters in the Christian story, often in minute detail. The Stabat Mater focuses closely on Mary’s abject sorrow as she stands at the foot of the cross, on which hangs the crucified body of her son. It has received many musical re-settings over the centuries, most famously by Palestrina in around 1590, and Pergolesi (1736), but also by Dvorˇák and Rossini, and in the 20th century, by Szymanowski (1926), Poulenc (1950) and Pärt (1985). James MacMillan (b. 1959) has a long history of writing in religious musical forms, and his 21st-century Stabat Mater is scored for choir and string orchestra. It was written with the particular strengths of Harry Christopher and The Sixteen in mind. It’s an intense, personal and captivating work, beautifully recorded in the Church of St Augustine’s in Kilburn, London. The interplay between voice…

Great respect has characterised Marc Minkowski’s decision to allow some 30 years of his career to pass before recording the St John. In choosing to use only eight singers he is at pains to create an intimate but intense reading of this most powerful work. This performance is based on the original 1724 version, but appends two arias from the revisions Bach made a year later, as well as employing later additions to the original orchestration (contrabassoon and theorbo) and a harpsichord in the continuo. Minkowski is intent on bringing out the radical musical drama that must have shocked, or at least perplexed, the good burghers of Leipzig that Good Friday afternoon in 1724. Eschewing the textural contrast between soloists and chorus, Minkowski differentiates between the various musical elements by adopting brisk tempos for choruses and deftly connecting them to recitatives, creating an almost frenetic telling of the story, in which Evangelist Lothar  Odinius plays an impressive role. The arias offer varied meditations on the action. Australian countertenor David Hansen delivers an impassioned account of the aria Von der Stricken. Fellow alto, Delphine Galou, sings the more famous Es ist vollbracht with great empathy. No one performance will ever have…

Move over John Cage and Henry Cowell. Chance music, it seems, existed long before last century. How surprising and intriguing to discover that the roll of the dice may well have determined the compositional method of a Mass that could have been written by the great polyphonist, Josquin des Prés. (Josquin was employed by the Sforza family, some of the biggest gamblers in 15th-century Milan.) Movements of the Missa Di Dadi (Dice Mass) are preceded by images of dice showing different numbers. These indicated to the tenors the proportional length of the base melody (a chanson by Robert Morton) to the other parts. As Peter Phillips points out in his engaging notes, these indications are a bit haphazard and fortunately the publisher (presumably not a gambler) wrote out the actual tenor part to avoid confusion. While all of this is quite amusing – and despite not knowing for certain the Mass is by Josquin – the music is certainly worthy of attention. The customary precision and blend of The Tallis Scholars is in evidence throughout, but the final Agnus Dei is particularly moving. Missa Une mousse de Biscaye also lacks firm evidence of authorship by Josquin. Based on a secular…

In his day, Giaches de Wert (1535-96) was the foremost composer of madrigals, most notably serving in the musically progressive Gonzaga court at Mantua and influencing the young Monteverdi. He had a considerable 12 books of madrigals to his name. What is less well known is that he also produced three books of motets which also display his madrigalian prowess. Many of the texts he set were not standard liturgical texts, but rather biblical stories that lent themselves to more programmatic treatment. Wert’s music was not the only colourful aspect of his life. Early on he married Lucrezia Gonzaga and produced at least six children. His appointment to Mantua was full of intrigue: several moves were made to discredit him, but he stuck to his work, despite being labelled a cuckold. (His wife had been having an affair with the composer who was passed over for Wert’s job.) Lucrezia came to a sticky end some years later when she was involved in a murderous plot to seize a noble title. Wert eventually had an affair of his own, with the widowed noblewoman and poet, Tarquinia Molza. Such was Wert’s musical worth that when this scandal was discovered, Tarquinia was banished…

If the musical night sky could be said to be littered with the glittering trails of falling stars, perhaps no single composer has fallen quite so far and so fast as Jacob Liebmann Beer (1791-1864), or Giacomo Meyerbeer as he came to be known. The darling of the Paris Opéra for 25 years as a result of the enduring success of Robert le Diable with its infamous ballet in which a graveyard full of deceased nuns rise up to cavort in the moonlight, the German-born Meyerbeer went on to dominate the French opera scene with a string of romantic and historical blockbusters such as L’Africaine (where the heroine expires from the scent of a deadly tropical tree), Les Huguenots (in which the three principals are simultaneously shot by a chorus of murderers), and Le Prophète (where the final scene calls for the entire cast to be blown up with gunpowder!). Within a decade of his demise, however, Meyerbeer began to suffer an almost total eclipse, a victim of his over-the-top plots, the new music of Wagner and his followers, and, some would suggest, prey to the nasty brand of anti-Semitism that came to a head in the dying days of…

Kats-Chernin and Cislowska re-team in dreamy homage to Satie.

Carl Czerny was a piano student of Beethoven, and played his teacher’s sonatas as they appeared. As a composer he was responsible for many pieces designed to address specific aspects of piano technique. In time, Czerny taught Liszt and possibly influenced his writing; hence the CD title, Master & Pupil. Melvyn Tan first came to prominence as a proponent of the fortepiano, recording the Beethoven concertos on that instrument in the early 1990s with period-style conductor Roger Norrington. Here Tan plays a modern Steinway, but his classical sensibility remains in terms of polish over profundity. Having said that, he employs appropriately Romantic rubato in both the Beethoven Sonata No 30 and Liszt’s B Minor Sonata, and his overview of those two masterpieces contains much lovely playing, while always remaining in scale. In the Liszt we are probably used to more sheer heft, but Tan’s subtle detail proves engrossing. Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles (his final piano composition) benefit from the simplicity of Tan’s approach; he does not push them out of shape by being over-emotive. To my mind, the pianist is most impressive in the Czerny works: the Variations on a Theme by Rode, and the Funeral March… Continue reading Get unlimited…

To record Bach’s “48” complete – 96 intensely-crafted miniatures spanning nearly five hours – is an immense undertaking. Ian Holtham arranges the movements not in the traditional chronology – Book I (1722) then Book II (1742) – but by key. Each key pair has Book I before Book II, save at the half-way point (F minor) and the end (B minor), where he puts the lighter Book II before the profound Book I. His unique ordering exposes many correspondences and relations between the pairs not heard before. Holtham plays Bach insightfully, adding personal ornamentation, tonal shading and articulation. His fugue voicing is always crystal clear, while his delicacy in some of the most archaic fugal types is almost subdued for such grandeur.Rapid pieces are given virtuosic renditions, difficult problems are gracefully solved. In Book II he makes sense of often rambling structures with clever contrasts of articulation and tonal shading: the G Sharp Major Prelude – the only one with f/p marks, almost unrecognisable as Bach – is exquisitely given, bound to the vast triple fugue that follows, a total contrast of introverted chromaticism. Closing with the Book I B Minor Fugue, its subject the first 12-tone row in music,…

Six volumes into Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s tour through the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas, listeners will have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Neither Bavouzet nor his instrument (a contemporary Yamaha concert grand) are particularly interested in authenticity. Instead you get a witty, urbane, slightly French-accented take on repertoire that has long cried out for a contemporary champion. This is Haydn for, and of, a new generation. Wisely ignoring chronology, each volume is a musical lucky dip, throwing together a diverse grouping of works. Volume Six is built around the spacious Sonata in B Flat Major, No 11. Gone is the limpid Bavouzet of his Debussy recordings, and in its place an assertive, rhetorical voice whose lines emerge with such clarity that the effect is of a piano reduction of a comic operatic ensemble. The more sedate E Flat Major Sonata No 43 feels, by contrast, rather anonymous, despite Bavouzet’s frisky ornaments. This gives way with calculated shock to the expansive grace of the central Minuet and Trio. Bavouzet makes his slow movements sing in silky tone and legatos, but it’s the livelier, comic movements where he really comes into his own. I defy anyone to listen to the irrepressible…

Melnikov's gripping mastery: The Russian pianist's 'Prok' will knock your cotton socks off.

Australian trumpet player Paul Terracini is an experienced soloist, chamber and orchestral musician, as well as a conductor and teacher. His decision to focus more on composition is borne out by the excellence of the five works for brass ensemble recorded here. The instrumentation is mostly trumpets/horns/trombones/tuba, with the two multi-movement works including timpani and percussion. The odd man out is the Exaudi Orationem Nostram for eight trumpets. Gegensätze contrasts two sections, one lively, the other reflective. In Behind the Shining Door, based on one of Terracini’s choral works, a gentle trumpet melody with accompaniment builds to a climax before sliding into repose. If the outer movements of Concerto for Brass are portraits of a bustling contemporary world, its central movement, based on the medieval chant Pange Lingua, is a serene oasis of contemplation. Its cousin Exaudi Orationem Nostram is a ‘prayer’ in which a multi-faceted motif based on ascending and descending sixths picks up the light as it rolls onwards, delighting in its own beauty. Winmalee Mourning was inspired by a bushfire that destroyed nearly 200 homes in the Blue Mountains village of Winmalee, west of Sydney, in 2013. The first movement, Inferno, paints a picture of paradise lost,…

Germany’s Dorothee Oberlinger has released a golden new offering with Ensemble 1700, Rococo – Musique à Sanssouci. The album is filled with baroque gems, which unveil the charms of the recorder in a chamber setting. Oberlinger opens with a sense of longing in Gottfried Finger’s A Ground. Her performance is so enchanting that a minute passes before I notice the continuo on a conscious level. The recorder’s airy timbre competes with Oberlinger’s audible breaths, captured with clarity and honesty.The balance with the ensemble is well considered – particularly in Handel’s Concerto Doppio in C Minor for recorder and bassoon. Here Oberlinger merges into the strings and becomes a different player; spirited and concise. A Johann Gottlieb Graun concerto evolves to a fuller sound: the robust string presence hails this new mood before returning the focus to Oberlinger in a Quantz recorder solo from Fantasien und Präludien. In skillful programming, the harpsichord returns in the CPE Bach piece, and the recorder is further layered with viola and continuo in the music to follow.   Oberlinger shares the spotlight with the music itself, in contrast to albums from leading Australian recorder players Genevieve Lacey and Alicia Crossley, whose releases – though magnificent…