A Mass shot through with fire

Bach: Mass in B Minor

In this new version of Bach's great B Minor Mass, Jeannette Sorrell's Apollo Fire utilises twenty-four instrumentalists and twenty-two choristers, including the five soloists. But rather than sounding thin, this recording is shot through with light and energy, indeed, with the eponymous fire. I have three much beefier B Minor Masses in my LP collection: Peter Schreier's 1982 recording on Eurodisc, Herbert Karajan's 1974 set on DGG, and a well-loved 1962 version with Ifor Jones conducting the Bach Festival Orchestra and the Bach Choir of Bethlehem (that's Bethlehem, Pa., my old stomping ground).

"Bach provides us", writes John Eliot Gardiner in his indispensable book Music In The Castle of Heaven, "with the most monumental music we have heard so far to convey the majesty of God, and he does so with a kind of Byzantine or Venetian splendour." Monumental needn't mean heavy or earthbound; the great sculptures of Michelangelo or Bernini, hewn as they are out of tonnes of marble, can seem weightless. In his long chapter on the B Minor Mass, Gardiner provides a rationale for the Historically Informed Performance of the work:

"An ensemble of period instruments played by expert virtuosi - a whole orchestra, no less, accompanying equally accomplished solo singers stepping out from a choir - carries with it a colossal element of excitement and zing. The performance then becomes a communal rite, one built on complicity and trust; a willingness to adjust and blend on the part of all the participants must be present for it to succeed and for the shared vision to be realised."

Gardiner recorded the Mass twice, first for Archiv in 1985, and, complete with his second thoughts, in 2016 on SDG, from a private concert performance at LSO St Luke’s in London. It's the second recording that this new Apollo's Fire release reminds me of. This is a profound and spiritual performance, with wonderful solo and choral singing, and stylish, exciting instrumental playing.

Jeannette Sorrell conducts a performance of the B minor Mass at St. James Cathedral, Chicago, April 11, 2025

Jeannette Sorrell, in a fine essay in the liner booklet, ends with this message:

"Bach leads us to overflowing joy – with blazing trumpets and thrilling choral virtuosity. We hope this recording brings you light, hope... and peace."

The album cover shows a detail from John William Brown's "Musical Angels, Te Deum", the East

Window of the Parish Church of Saint Mary and All Saints, Plymstock, UK, c. 1888.

 

Think of England

Haydn: Symphonies 76, 77 & 78; J. C. Bach: Symphony in G minor

I've been following Giovanni Antonini's Haydn 2032 series for a long time; this is the fifth disc I've reviewed, out of the twenty that have been released so far. I love everything about this series: Antonini's superb scholarship, his use of two crackerjack ensembles - Il Giardino Armonico and the larger Kammerorchester Basel, the introduction of works by other composers to provide context, the illuminating documentation, and, finally, the inclusion of pictures by a different Magnum photographer for each release.

Haydn's home in the second part of his career, after he left Esterhazy, was London. The theme of this disc is "For English Gentlemen", and it's a perfect vehicle for the photography of the late, great photographer Martin Parr, who died last December. Included is this wonderful shot from Ascot, from Parr's series Think of England, 1999. One of my favourites!

While the three Haydn symphonies included here - no. 76 in E♭ major, no. 77 in B♭ major and no. 78 in C minor, all from 1782 - come before the composer's move to England, they were written for the English. Haydn was aware of English taste through his familiarity with the works of composers of London residents like Johann Christian Bach. He says in a letter that he wrote the symphonies "for the English gentlemen, ... easy and not too concertante". But these are not pot-boilers, and nor are they without interest for the erudite connoisseur. Antonini and his Basel musicians judge this balance between light and serious fare perfectly; these are sparkling, highly enjoyable performances. 

Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian's youngest son, spent so much time in London that he was known as "the English Bach". His G minor Symphony, op. 6 no. 6, dates from 1769, and while one can see similarities with the three later symphonies, especially #78 in C minor, this is generally more tempestuous and theatrical than the more placid, more assured Haydn works.

So another triumph on the road to Joseph Haydn's 300th birthday: March 31, 2032!
 

Considered, mature Schoenberg

Schoenberg: Piano Works

Schoenberg's works for piano conveniently fit on a single disc. It begins with the Brahms-inspired op. 11, three pieces from 1909. The Six Little Pieces op. 19 of 1911 are brief, enigmatic works, short but hardly slight. The sixth piece includes the bells from the funeral of Gustav Mahler, who had died in May of 1911.

Mahler on his death-bed murmured "Who'll take care of Schoenberg now?"

Gustav Mahler supported Arnold Schoenberg in non-material & financial ways. In his will he provided a stipend for him. Schoenberg kept this 1911 photograph of Mahler’s grave until his own death in 1951.

The Five Pieces, op. 23 and the Suite for Piano, op. 25, were written at a pivotal point in the composer's career. They are some of the first works in which Schoenberg put into practice his revolutionary 12 tone system. The first of the op. 23 pieces was dedicated to Debussy, while the op. 25 suite invokes the spirit of Bach.

The programme ends with the two Op. 33 Klavierstücke, dating from 1929 and 1931. Looking back again to Brahms, these two pieces are also forward-looking. And for Schoenberg, the future would not be Nazi-run Germany, but the United States.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard has impeccable avant garde credentials; he was the principal pianist for Pierre Boulez's Ensemble intercontemporain for 18 years. But his repertoire is also firmly grounded in earlier German music: his Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of the Fugue recordings are outstanding, and his Schubert is wonderful. The 69-year-old pianist has put off recording the Schoenberg piano works, and this recording represents the considered, mature view of a very fine musician who knows the composer and his world backwards and forwards. Very highly recommended!

The album cover photo is by Richard Dumas.

Outstanding violin music from Vienna

Aurora Germanica: music by Biber, Capricornus, Schmelzer, Krieger, Vilsmayr, Westhoff

I've spent a lifetime as a classical music lover on the lookout for the next obscure composer who's about to make it big. It happens occasionally: Florence Price is starting to get attention, which is very much deserved. Before that there was CPE Bach, Clara Schumann, Heinrich Biber, Carlo Gesualdo. The early Baroque is a good place to look, and this new disc on the Chateau de Versailles label has a number of composers that are new to me. One of them, the Bohemian Samuel Capricornus (1628-1675), has struck my fancy. 

Now Capricornus has his own Wikipedia page, with more than a few recordings listed, so this is on me for not recognizing his value before. On the evidence of the sonata from the second book of his Prothimia Suavissima played here, Capricornus is an imaginative composer who indeed could become as well known as his contemporary Heinrich Biber (1644-1704). Works by Capricornus can be found on albums by Chatham Baroque, Agave Baroque and the baroque string ensemble ACRONYM. There's even a group named Capricornus Ensemble Stuttgart. Pay attention, Dean!

Biber is the best-known name in the group on Aurora Germanica, a fine collection of music by composers closely connected with the court at Vienna. He was one of the composers who imported from Italy a new way of using the violin as a solo instrument. Virtuosity is an important part of the innovations of the German violin composers, but just as important are the expressive capabilities of the instrument, which in Biber's case can go beyond the purely musical, becoming transcendently spiritual.

Biber is joined here by one of his pupils, Johann Joseph Vilsmayr, whose Artificiosus Concentus pro Camera for solo violin points the way to J.S. Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin. This is a work that deserves to be played much more often, perhaps in a Bach concert to demonstrate how first steps can evolve into works of genius.

Otherwise we have music by Johann Paul von Westhoff, Johann Philipp Krieger and the much better-known Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. All of these works are played beautifully on a lovely sounding violin made by Christian Liebel in 1758 by Louise Ayrton. She has fine support from her continuo group: Salomé Gasselin, alto de viole; Lucie Chabard, harpsichord & organ; Sergio Bucheli, archlute & guitar; and Gauthier Broutin, cello. A highly recommended release!

The photo of Louise Ayrton on the album cover is by Hubert Caldaguès.

Here is the Samuel Capricornus sonata; isn't this wonderful? And lest you think of him as a One Hit Wonder, there's also a very fine Ciaconna from his Partiturbuch Ludwig. I love me a Chaconne! Enjoy!

Music of passion, passionately played

Sturm Und Drang 4: music by Benda, Mozart, Kraus, Traetta & Haydn

Let's start with that awesome painting on the cover: it's Fire on the Tiber, painted by Claude Joseph Vernet, in the collection of MUŻA, the National Community Art Museum of Malta. Lots of storm and stress going on here!

I love music that's often categorized as Sturm und Drang: the minor key orchestral and chamber works and fraught opera arias of Haydn, Mozart and their colleagues working in the Galant International Style of the 1760s and 70s. But is it a true contemporary movement of composers and their patrons, or rather a modern marketing strategy of concert promoters and record companies? Robert O. Gjerdingen is skeptical; this is from his book Music in the Galant Style (Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 439):

"Frequently invoked terms like Sturm und Drang ('storm and stress') or 'the learned style'... may partly reflect the modern tendency to attribute acts of personal artistic expression to what in many cases were merely musical behaviors typical of the church or theater making an appearance in music for the chamber."

As so often happens in musical discourse, category discussions often become tedious and circular, so I'll stop being tedious and circular, but I will push back against Gjerdingen's "merely musical behavior". There's no reason to think that "personal artistic expression" didn't take place in the 18th century. It was just hidden by the social structures of the ancien regime. Haydn and Mozart, we know from the full documentation of their lives, were artistically on the same plane as the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment: Schiller, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson. Judging by the music they left, Kraus or Benda must have been more than mere craftsmen using the galant schemata as if it were a saw or a plane.

Ian Page makes the best case for Sturm und Drang as a proper musical movement by including two outstanding minor key symphonies (indeed, two of the greatest symphonies of the century): Joseph Martin Kraus's C minor Symphony and Joseph Haydn's Symphony no. 45, "Farewell". Just as important, though, are the three operatic arias/scenes Page has included here, especially the fantastically dramatic scene from Georg Benda's Medea. After all, Sturm und Drang as a term originally came from German drama, specifically Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play of the same name.

I have no German, but I was blown away by Alexandra Lowe as Medea. "Peitscht ihn her! Peitscht ihn her!" ("Whip him here!"), she cries, having Jason whipped and brought to her to complete her revenge. Again, the storm of Medea's anger is clear, and the whips bring the stress.

The passion in the scores of these composers requires passionate playing, and we have that here in spades. The Mozartists is a tight band; they're bold, stylish and exciting. Ian Page has curated a wonderful programme for us; wrapping the dramatic core of Sturm und Drang opera with the C minor and F sharp minor masterworks gives us the essence of the movement in an hour of music.

Staring at the future of the past

Almeida Prado: Piano Trios; Cello Sonata, Balada

The Music of Brazil series from Naxos has been so important for the dissemination of the wonderful world of Brazilian classical music throughout the world. Here's another first class album, from one of the country's greatest composers since Heitor Villa-Lobos, played by three excellent instrumentalists.

Though José Antônio de Almeida Prado began his composing career in a Villa-Lobosian nationalist mode under the tutelage of Camargo Guarnieri, he soon latched on to the more progressive musical events in Europe. He studied with Gilberto Mendes, who had just returned to Brazil from Darmstadt, and was strongly influenced by the Polish composers Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1969 Almeida Prado moved to Europe, studying at Darmstadt under György Ligeti and Lukas Foss, and then in Paris as a pupil of Villa-Lobos's close friend Olivier Messiaen. At the same time, he worked with every modernist's favourite Parisian teacher, Nadia Boulanger.

It was while he was working with Boulanger during the summer of 1970 at the Château de Fontainebleau that Almeida Prado wrote his Trio de Fontainebleau, a wonderful work for piano, violin & cello. Almeida Prado would have known Villa-Lobos's Third Piano Trio, written in 1918, and one of the stars of Brazil's modernist coming out party, the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922. Both Villa's and Almeida Prado's trios can trace their lineage to Maurice Ravel's landmark Piano Trio of 1914, with its rich textures and colouristic effects. By the way, the cover of the album shows a watercolour painting entitled "Nadia Boulanger", by Almeida Prado himself!

Almeida Prado's second piano trio, the Trio Marítimo, was written in 1983, and dedicated to the memory of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Each section of the work illustrates a poem from Pessoa's cycle Mensagem (Message), a conversation with Luís de Camões’ epic poem Os Lusíadas, which celebrated the voyages of discovery by Portuguese sailors (including, of course, Brazil).

1. The Fields

First / The Castles

Europe is lying propped upon her elbows:
From East to West she lies, staring
Out, reminiscent, – Greek eyes from the shelter
Of romantic hair.

Behind her back the left elbow is cast;
The right has the angle place.
That one says Italy in its repose;
This one says England where, gathered apart,
It holds the hand up to support the face.

She stares, her gaze doom-heavy, sphingical,
Out at the West, the future of the past.

The face with which she stares is Portugal.

(trans. Jonathan Griffin)

Almeida Prado's Cello Sonata was commissioned in 2003 by Sonia Rubinsky & Antonio Meneses, two of Brazil's greatest instrumentalists. It's played here, beautifully, by Rubinsky and Rafael Cesario. In this work Almeida Prado acknowledges his debt to Johannes Brahms, evident in its dense musical textures and formal architecture. The Balada for cello & piano which opens the recording is from 1985. The composer notes that it forms "a chromatic spiral where the accumulation of resonances creates a mystical aura," which connects it to much of Almeida Prado's oeuvre, especially his towering master work, the Cartas celestes for piano.

Three neoclassical symphonies

Simone Menezes: Music by Prokofiev, Villa-Lobos & Poulenc

The up-and-coming Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes has matched three symphonic works in an album about neoclassicism, one of the most interesting and important components of the modernist revolution in the music of the first half of twentieth century. As a musical lens neoclassicism offered a new way to look at the past, sharpening and bringing into focus at times, distorting at others. But more important is what it illuminates about the modern world and the composers that lived in it.

The revolution of the new, modern music of Stravinsky, Debussy & Ravel was just as frightening as the fractured visual arts ushered in by Picasso & Braque. It's no wonder that in 1917 both Sergei Prokofiev and Heitor Villa-Lobos should throw a lifeline back to 18th century Vienna to help keep their bearings as they wrote their music of the future. Prokofiev's model was Haydn's symphonies, while Villa-Lobos looked to Mozart's operatic music. The former created a masterwork in his "Classical" Symphony, while Villa's First Sinfonietta, "In Memory of Mozart" has made much less of a stir in the century since. It's a nice little piece, a clever piece, which shows how quickly the Brazilian composer could pick up an entirely new musical vocabulary thousands of miles away from its Parisian epicentre. Villa-Lobos spent years playing the cello in the pit of the Rio de Janeiro opera house, and his Sinfonietta is a deconstruction of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. But Villa had a different European forebear; his true personal voice didn't emerge until he came to terms with the music of Bach.

Simone Menezes has been pondering the similarities between the Classical Symphony and the Sinfonietta #1 for quite a while. Here's a video from back in 2018 where she explains how similar the two works are, though one was written in Rio, the other in St. Petersburg/Petrograd:

The Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc, meanwhile, was written thirty years later, in 1947. A decade younger than Villa-Lobos & Prokofiev, Poulenc was actually more closely aligned with the musical avant garde, writing modernist works beginning in the late 1910s. As the post-WWII era began, his own neoclassical symphony adds a second layer of looking back: to the 18th century Viennese masters, but also to the younger Poulenc himself, writing such works as the Concert champêtre for harpsichord & orchestra in 1928. His Sinfonietta is suffused with nostalgia, but unsentimental in nature. Earlier I called neoclassicism a lens; in this work Poulenc is using it as a kaleidoscope. Scenes shift, and the ostensibly trivial work becomes a sophisticated compendium of earlier times. As Simone Menezes says in her excellent liner note essay, "... the work transcends its apparent lightness, approaching a symphonic dimension not through development, but through accumulation and contrast."

This recording is greater than the sum of its three parts; each symphonic work is enhanced by its relationship with the others, and the place of each in musical history makes listening as instructive as it is enjoyable.

The cover design is by Jimena Estíbaliz.