A musical ménage-à-trois of three composers from three cities.

What a journey it’s been. Since 1987, Australian classical group Guitar Trek has been at the forefront of commissioning new works for guitar quartet, as well as working with luthiers to develop different-size guitars to form a true guitar family: treble, standard, baritone and bass (steel as well as nylon string guitars are utilised). This recording, actually made in 2007, has been released to celebrate 25 years of Guitar Trek and features works by some of Australia’s best-known composers for the instrument: Nigel Westlake, Phillip Houghton, Richard Charlton and Martin Wesley-Smith. The Guitar Trek line-up here features Timothy Kain, Minh Le Hoang, Daniel McKay and Harold Gretton (it’s since changed, with Bradley Kunda and Matt Withers replacing McKay and Gretton). If Westlake’s Six Fish scintillates with shimmering water, pointillistic textures and playful melodies, Houghton’s Nocturne, originally for piano, is a study in meditative if occasionally ruffled calm and moonlit passages. Charlton’s Capricorn Skies is “an attempt to capture in sound the mood or resonance of a variety of Australian skies and landscapes”. It’s a tour-de-force of sound-painting that finds Guitar Trek at its most dramatically expansive. The following non-linear Wave Radiance by Houghton, who describes it as a “sonic event”…

Thanks to the wholesale appropriation of popular song by court and church composers, there’s something at once vibrant and austere about the early Baroque music of Spain and Portugal. The program on this new recording by Australian period instrument ensemble La Compañia comprises mostly villancicos (rustic songs) in vocal and instrumental settings by 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese composers such as Pedro de Cristo, Manuel Machado, and Francisco Guerrero. Some travelled to take up positions in churches and cathedrals in the New World, where their music was inflected by indigenous and African rhythms. The anonymous pieces included here are all taken from the Cancioneiro de Paris manuscript of c1523. Under their director Danny Lucin, La Compañia perform these works on period wind instruments such as cornetti, sackbuts and dulcians, as well as the viola da gamba, vihuela, guitar, cavaquinho and percussion. Joining them is young Australian soprano and early music exponent Siobhan Stagg, winner of the 2012 Australian International Opera Award. Throughout, La Compañia’s relaxed and improvisatory yet passionate and precise playing is a delight, recalling the best of Hespèrion XXI, The Harp Consort and L’Arpeggiata in similar repertoire. Listen to the rich textures of De Cristo’s Ay mi Dios,… Continue…

In one of the most singularly gorgeous recordings to have come across my desk in recent months, Zurich-born cellist Christian Poltéra and British pianist Kathryn Stott explore some of Dvořák’s greatest melodies in new transcriptions by Poltéra. Silent Woods was arranged by the composer himself from the original version for piano four hands; in fact, the only compositions originally written for cello here are the Rondo in G Minor and the Polonaise in A. It seems extraordinary now to think that Dvořák wasn’t immediately enamoured of the cello’s sound, finding it “nasal” in the upper register and “grumbling” in the lower, as the booklet notes recall. But how he would have adored the warm, emotionally expansive playing of Poltéra – and Stott for that matter: a superb soloist in her own right and an ever-sensitive accompanist.  The opening Sonatina in G, originally for violin and piano and dedicated to Dvořák’s children, is all brightness shot through with pentatonic flavours; Poltéra and Stott animate the music with the perfect balance of poise and exuberance. And if, in the following Rondo in G, the players seem for the most part simply to be letting… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4…

Australian guitar duo Slava and Leonard Grigoryan have always strained against the boundaries of the classical guitar world.

Italian conductor, harpsichordist and organist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his versatile period-instrument ensemble Concerto Italiano have for many years possessed a reputation for over-the-top yet technically precise performances of Renaissance and Baroque vocal and instrumental music. Their high-octane recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has to be heard to be believed, while their ability to communicate the eroticism, febrile intensity and innovatory chiaroscuro of the madrigals of Monteverdi and Gesualdo is treasured amongst connoisseurs of that repertoire. Here they apply their considerable interpretative skills to Italian chamber music written at a time of musical transition, when the polyphonic textures of the Renaissance were giving way to a more homophonic language enlivened by soloistic flights of fancy. Using the Italian string quartet format, which would eventually lead to the classical string quartet, aand filling out the harmonies with theorbo, harpsichord and/or organ, Alessandrini and his fellow musicians explore music written by travelling Italian composers including Frescobaldi, Torelli, Bononcini, Marini, Zanetti, Merula and Castello. Here are the dances, canzones and fantasias long favoured by Renaissance composers, streamlined and then re-embellished, the resulting sonatas and sinfonias electric with virtuosic passages and sometimes belligerent “conversations” among the instruments. A good example of the latter is Castello’s…

For Los párajos perdidos: the South American Project, lutenist, harpist and director of early music band L’Arpeggiata Pluhar takes as her starting point two ideas: that unlike their modern European equivalents, Latin American plucked instruments differ little from their common Baroque ancestors; and that South American dances and songs still exhibit rhythmic and harmonic structures that would have been recognisable to a Baroque musician. Pluhar thus combines a period ensemble of lutes, harps, guitars, cornett, double bass and percussion with a smaller group comprising instruments still played in Latin America such as the cuatro, charango, arpa llanera and maracas. Her vocalists include classical singers Philippe Jaroussky, Luciana Mancini and Raquel Andueza, as well as Italian folk singer and researcher Lucilla Galeazzi and the extraordinary singer and ballet dancer Vincenzo Capezzuto. Despite their different performing traditions, all show the same remarkable ability to really loosen up and go with the often sensual, sometimes totally wild rhythms in these traditional and contemporary zambas, golpes, polcas, joropos and boleros from Latin America. Yes, there’s very little “early music” as such – though there is an arrangement of Soler’s famous Fandago that will really knock your socks off. What you do get… Continue reading…

This new Christmas disc from superb Danish choir Ars Nova Copenhagen and its smaller cousin the Theatre of Voices must surely contain some of the most gorgeous choral singing ever committed to disc. Not only that – by taking the traditional English Nine Lessons and Carols format and adapting it for a continental audience by including chant, motets, dialogues and traditional folk carols, Dorset-born conductor Paul Hillier, who has been resident in Denmark for nearly ten years, creates a “Christmas oratorio” of truly universal and indeed secular appeal. Here are classics known to all – including Veni veni Emmanuel, In dulci Jubilo, We Three Kings and We Wish You a Merry Christmas – some in attractive new arrangements by Hillier – together with lesser-known works and dialogues taken from the early 17th-century Italian oratorio repertoire by Biasio Tomasi, Alessandro Grandi and Giovanni Francesco Anerio. The narrative structure is further strengthened by the works – all from Italian, German, Danish, English and American sources – being grouped together under headings such as Advent, Annunciation, Nativity and Epiphany. Hillier, himself an accomplished singer, formed the Theatre of Voices in 1990 and has been conducting the Grammy Award-winning… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

It’s fitting that this exciting new release from classical guitarist Karin Schaupp and the Flinders Quartet should end with Australian composer Phillip Houghton’s In Amber. As Houghton writes in his booklet note, “I drew parallels between a fossil ‘frozen/suspended’ in amberstone and the sound frozen/suspended inside the stringed instruments waiting to be brought to life.” One can just as easily talk about music being frozen/suspended inside a score, waiting to be brought to life, as well as living, breathing performances being frozen/suspended inside a shiny CD. Moreover, Houghton’s In Amber – its first movement filled with characterful miniature dances; its second with drones and melodies like “perfumes in a jungle” and its third with a compelling motoric intensity – summarises the whole program’s moods and ideas, bound by the sounds of plucked and bowed strings. Take Máximo Diego Pujol’s Tangata de Agosto (“August Tangata” – the latter word a conflation of “tango” and “sonata”), which recalls Piazzolla in its earthy sophistication; or Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet No 4 Fandango, which fills the Viennese salon with the raucous sounds of guitar and castanets; or the anonymous arrangement of Haydn’s String Quartet No 8 in E for lute (in this case, guitar), violin, viola and… Continue reading…

A striking musical chiaroscuro born in part out of the agony and the ecstasy of profound spiritual experience. 

Palestrina’s name was synonymous with musical perfection even before his death in 1594, and his reputation as one of the great masters of late-Renaissance, post-Tridentine church polyphony is still as great as it ever was. The Sixteen’s name could equally be said to be synonymous with musical perfection, and the UK choir’s recordings of English, Spanish and Italian Renaissance masterpieces are prized for their combination of passion and precision. This first volume in a projected series dedicated to a selection of Palestrina’s 104 masses and great motet cycle of the biblical Song of Songs takes as its theme the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. The centrepiece is the Missa Assumpta Est Maria; also included are a selection of shorter works such as the motet on which the mass is based and three of the Song of Songs most closely associated with Marian devotion. The performances are, as one would expect, first-rate, and an antidote to the sometimes bloodless approach to this music by The Tallis Scholars. Palestrina’s music moves swiftly and seamlessly between densely woven yet sharply delineated polyphony and rich homophony; furthermore, each part hovers or trembles, drops in or out, plunges or soars according… Continue reading…

A hugely satisfying release from a musician with talent and technique to burn.