Category: Recordings

Perhaps the best-known of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, the Fourth also benefits from a
number of fine recordings.

Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c.1700-1775) belongs to that shadowy generation of Italian composers who no longer composed in the high Baroque style, but had adopted the clarity, simplicity and regularity that would serve as the building blocks for the Viennese masters of the late eighteenth century, and thus were tagged with the rather pejorative label “pre-classic” (a plague on all those music historians who can only see musical style in terms of progress leading to their particular figure of veneration!).

The duo of gambist Vittorio Ghielmi and lutenist Luca Pianca even has its own domain name
(www.pianca-ghielmi.com), as well as several previous releases, of which the first has perhaps my favorite CD title ever (Bagpipes from Hell).

The English, though fundamental to the early music revival of the last half-century, have been rather remiss in exploring their native music dating from after the death of Purcell, and particularly that produced after the death of Handel.

Sorry my friends, but this rich-looking DVD has a feature that disqualifies it for me.

During any recital by an aging divo there comes a moment of truth when he sings an operatic aria
(usually E lucevan le stelle , as the highest note is an A). That is the defining moment when he no longer can hide behind idiosyncratic interpretation, expressive breathing and a lot of clever transpositions.

This disc is a reissue of a 1993 recording made at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California, but new to me.

I suppose you will find this quite an addition to the Melchior legacy if you are a collector of every sound Melchior ever uttered.

Neither of these late works (the Judicium Salomonis is from 1702) is new to disc – the former
has two recent recordings, from ten and from twenty years ago, and the latter one, by Herreweghe, released in 1985.

The title Walewska i przjaciele, “Walewska and friends,” reflects the intention of the mezzo soprano Małgorzata Walewska, one of the foremost contemporary Polish singers to present herself and some of her colleagues in recording of various kinds of music.