The Right Stuff in 18th Century Music

 The Age of Extremes: Music by W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach & G. Benda

"We were exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits...."

- Neil Armstrong

The 18th century was a period of enormous change, with wild swings between reason and emotion, or, as Jane Austen had it, sense and sensibility. These swings are obvious in the music that came after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750 and George Frideric Handel nine years later. It was Bach's son Carl Philip Emmanuel (CPE) who perhaps best exemplifies the new Empfindsamkeit (take your pick of sensibility, sentimentality or sensitivity) in German music. But CPE didn't reject the craft of his father to explore new emotional opportunities in music; rather, he adapted established forms but tested their limits.

Harpsichordist and conductor Francesco Corti has put together a fascinating programme of music by CPE, his brother Wilhelm Friedemann, and their Bohemian colleague Georg Anton Benda, that shows musical and emotional envelopes being pushed. There are hair-raising moments in this music: the Allegro second movement of WF Bach's Sinfonia in D minor begins with a fugal passage that explodes with energy, especially since it follows a melting Adagio that's almost the definition of Empfindsamkeit, looking back at Corelli and ahead to Mozart. And in his Variations on Les Folies d'Espagne, CPE becomes a musical test pilot and breaks the supersonic barrier. Corti shows his virtuoso chops here! Georg Benda's Harpsichord Concerto in B minor has its own surprises amidst its many felicities. Even the pretty and proto-romantic slow Arioso movement is revolutionary in the way it wears its heart on its sleeve. And the flighty Allegro finale, which ends this programme, wraps everything up. Barriers are down, genres are busted. And a good time was had by all.

The orchestral playing on this album is exemplary, as one would expect from the wonderful group Il Pomo d'Oro, who I know from their new complete Mozart symphonies project with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. Corti plays a harpsichord made in 2001 by Keith Hill in Manchester MI, after an anonymous German instrument from around 1700. It has a robust sound, and is well balanced, not too forward but much easier to hear than in the bad old days of wimpy Early Music recording. This is such an enjoyable release, and highly recommended.

Here is the repertoire on the disc:

The great photo of Corti on the cover is by Leonardo Casalini.

Music of awakening sensibilities

Dresden: Chamber music by Califano, Fasch, Heinichen, Lotti, Quantz, Telemann, Vivaldi

Zefiro's very fine oboe and bassoon players come to the fore again in this album of chamber music from the Dresden court of Friedrich August I around 1720. Music in the Italian style at this stage in musical history meant virtuosity, yes, but more importantly expressiveness and sparkle. These are highly entertaining sonatas, trio sonatas and quartets, which occasionally attain something close to the profound, especially in works by Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Friedrich Fasch.  This music from these two fine composers stands out from any hint of background court music as routine elevator music. Don't think of the lounge pianist playing under sightly drunken conversations and waiters dropping trays, but rather Bill Evans' Trio playing Live At the Village Vanguard, with a mainly rapt, largely musically engaged audience. There's a sense of awakening sensibilities that moves toward the pre-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement later in the century. The stylish playing is a sign of Alfredo Bernardino's group's completely secure Historically Informed Performance tradition. Having singled out the playing of the winds, I should not forget to praise the excellent continuo players, who provide solid support with the occasional sparkling, and historically informed, insertion of their own.

This album is due to be released on October 20, 2017.

Fireworks

Back in September 1999 six musicians from the Kuijken family and a harpist friend took a break from their Baroque and Classical musical diet and recorded most of the important works that Debussy wrote for chamber ensembles: the string quartet of 1893, Syrinx for solo flute from 1913, and the three late sonatas (for cello & piano, violin & piano, and flute, viola & harp). It's just now been released (or re-released) on the Arcana label with a cover that features the amazing Whistler painting Nocturne in Black and Gold - the Falling Rocket, in the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Tom Service wrote a short article in the Guardian back in 2012 which resonates with me today. He warns against the idea of reducing Debussy's music to a pretty "impressionism". Looking back on this music a century later we maybe miss out on how new it was, how revolutionary. From today it perhaps seems easier to see the radical nature of Wagner before Debussy, Stravinsky at the same time, and Schoenberg after him. For Debussy, and this is where there is a real connection with the art-for-art's-sake advocate Whistler, his music was radically about one thing: the music itself. As Service says:

The basic point is that Debussy uses music as thing-in-itself. It's not a metaphor for something else, but an experience in its own right. And with Debussy, those are experiences that music hadn't created before, and are, therefore, experiences that the human imagination hadn't had before.

So how do the Kuijkens present this important subset of Debussy's music? Very well, I'd say, though it doesn't always sound like the Debussy we're used to. The string quartet, which of course has a list of rival recordings a mile long, may not sound as polished or as tightly controlled as some versions, but it has a relaxed charm that escapes even highly-rated performances by other groups. Not that they're using gut strings and cutting back on vibrato, by any means, but the Kuijkens come to this music as something new, and that counts for something. The late sonatas were all written during Debussy's significant health problems which began with his first diagnosis with rectal cancer in 1908. Though there is no decline in quality, this music is stripped down, serious without being morbid. It looks, perhaps, to places Debussy hadn't explored in his life before. This seriousness is well communicated by the musicians. I was especially impressed with the contributions of Piet Kuijken in the two pieces featuring the piano, and his cellist uncle (I believe) Wieland.

Chamber music is a quiet art form, well suited to the family circle. But within its circumscribed limits it can still pack a wallop and and set off rockets. Here is Whistler's entire painting; I think it was well chosen to go with this music.