The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Our thanks to all those who have responded to our recent pieces about the problems currently facing the arts – and classical music in particular – during a period of unprecedented uncertainty. Some of you felt that we were being unduly pessimistic, and in some areas of local musicmaking there is certainly cause for celebration. Others thought that the blame for any long-term disconnect between classical music and wider audiences lay squarely at the door of musical modernism: a subject that is close to our hearts and to which we hope to turn in the near future.

Yet virtually all respondents felt that education lay at the heart of the matter, and particularly the access of all children – whatever their circumstances and background – to high-quality musical education and tuition. Many of you recalled your own formative exposure to music, and such opportunities are evidently fundamental in fostering a passion for the subject and need to be nurtured and encouraged. This, too, is a matter to which we’ll undoubtedly return very soon.

This week, however, in order to lift the mood, we welcome some new recordings which would normally feature in one of our early music roundups. All set for release this Friday, they straddle the Baroque and Classical periods, and each in its way offers plenty of food for thought and a feast for the ears.

For her latest release on Channel Classics, star violinist Rachel Podger together with her Brecon Baroque ensemble visits an under-represented period of chamber music: the period of English music from the Jacobean to the early Georgian era. Entitled ‘The Muses Restor’d’, her programme ranges from John Jenkins, William Lawes and Matthew Locke to Handel, and encompasses both consort-style and more virtuosic solo music. The variety of music on offer is as enthralling as the musical artistry of the performers. Locke is represented by the eight-movement Little Consort in C minor-major ‘for Severall Friends’, but no less fascinating are the more compact three-movement Fantasia-Suites by his older contemporaries Jenkins and Lawes.

Purcell is represented by his four-movement Sonata in G minor, Z780, recovered from obscurity by the late Thurston Dart. Chamber music from this period can imply a rarified atmosphere, but John Blow’s Ground in G minor is given a thrumming accompaniment every bit as redolent of folk music as the medley of folk tunes from the likes of Barsanti, Geminiani and James Oswald, which also includes Purcell’s version of the well-known ‘Lilliburlero’ and a solo Prelude from Thomas Baltzar’s The Division Violin (1688).

The programme opens in high Baroque style with Handel’s Violin Sonata in D major, op.1 no.13, but it is capped by the dazzling virtuosity of Richard Jones’s three-movement Chamber Air in A minor, op.2 no.4, with which the disc closes. Jones was clearly a violinist of formidable artistry and technical ability, and Podger and her colleagues deliver a performance whose infectious spirit is impossible to resist.

For a while in the 1720s a serious rival to Handel for the crown of London’s most celebrated foreign composer was Giovanni Bononcini, whose activities centred on the Academy of Ancient Music which met in the upper hall of the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand. The Academy’s modern-day reincarnation has teamed up with the Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford, to present a programme of Bononcini’s choral music, ranging from a compact, ‘learrned’ setting of the Marian hymn Ave maris stella to an ambitious thirteen-movement Te Deum. Unlike Handel’s Te Deum settings, Bononcini’s offers far more opportunities for the soloists, and the increased number of movements also affords more by way of textural and expressive contrasts.

Bononcini’s seven-movement setting of Psalm 113, Laudate pueri, is just as dazzling, while the disc closes with a fascinating anthem, When Saul was King, composed for the lavish Westminster Abbey funeral of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, in 1722. At the anthem’s heart are a recitative and aria for solo alto (the superb Helen Charlston) which would melt a heart of stone. The disc’s other soloists are headed by soprano Rowan Pierce, and Owen Rees’s direction brings out all the vitality and Italianate grace of Bononcini’s unjustly neglected music, which once rivalled Handel’s in critical and popular acclaim.

London was far from being the sole musical centre in the 18th-century British Isles. Across the Irish Sea, Dublin had a thriving musical scene, and one of its more elusive figures is the focus of a new disc from the Irish Baroque Orchestra and Peter Whelan for Linn Records. Rachel Baptist was a soprano of African heritage (possibly via slaves freed from a French Caribbean colony) who won wide acclaim in the early 1750s with her performances in performances at Dublin’s Marlborough Green pleasure gardens. After a period in England, she returned to Ireland, where she continued to perform until the mid-1770s.

Together with sparkling-toned soprano Rachel Redmond, Whelan has devised a programme of orchestral and vocal music that reflects the music and composers with which Rachel Baptist was most associated. It includes Handel’s  bracing solo hunting cantata ‘Diana cacciatrice’, HWV79, as well as an air from a work which Baptist is known to have sung, Niccolò Pasquali’s The Triumphs of Hibernia, and also features Geminiani’s Concerto grosso based on Corelli’s celebrated Violin Sonata ‘La Folia’, op.5 no.12. This is an unusually interesting release that further cements Whelan’s reputation for imaginative, enterprising programming.

Finally, we can’t resist giving a heads-up for a new disc of Schubert dances for piano from an unlikely figure. Pierre-Laurent Aimard is more usually associated with 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, but his latest release on Pentatone presents a mouthwatering selection Ländler, waltzes, German dances and ecossaises, performed with just the right degree of Gemütlichkeit. The instrument used is a 1956 Steinway (no. 353018) with a tanginess that suits this music down to the ground, and imparting an unexpectedly period flavour. Like all these discs, it’s highly recommended!

The Recordings:
The Muses Restor’d (Podger / Brecon Baroque) CCS46324
Bononcini - How Are the Mighty Fallen: Choral Music SIGCD905
Rachel Baptist: Ireland’s Black Syren CKD740
Schubert - Ländler (Aimard) PTC5187034