Baroque Festival The third disc in the Naxos Baroque series is devoted principally to music by Telemann, Handel and Vivaldi. The collection opens, however,...
Baroque Festival
The third disc in the Naxos Baroque series is
devoted principally to music by Telemann, Handel and Vivaldi. The collection
opens, however, with music that has won enormous popularity in recent years,
the Canon and Gigue by the Nuremberg composer Johann Pachelbel. The Canon
consists of a series of 28 variations over a short repeated bass figure, scored
for three violins and basso continuo. Pachelbel, among the most distinguished
Protestant composers of his time in Germany, was born in Nuremberg and returned
there in 1695 as organist of the principal church of the city, having rejected
an earlier invitation to move to Oxford.
Giuseppe Sammartini, brother of the better
known Giovanni Battista Sammartini, was one of the eight sons of a French
oboist and his Italian wife and was born in Milan in 1695. With his brothers he
performed as an oboist and after 1728 made his home in England, where he was
well known as a performer and as a composer, serving as music master to the
Princess of Wales and her children from 1736. He had a strong influence on
English oboe-playing and his compositions, published posthumously, were held in
great esteem for a considerable time. The slow movement of his F major Recorder
Concerto, in the key of A minor, is a gently pastoral Siciliano.
It is in relatively recent years that Antonio
Vivaldi has been given something of his due. Born in Venice in 1678, the son of
a musician, he became a priest, teaching the violin and later serving as master
of music at the Ospedale della Pieta, one of the tour charitable foundations
established in Venice for the
education of girls, whether orphans, illegitimate or indigent, and boasting the
strongest musical traditions. Vivaldi's employment at the Pieta was
intermittent, but involved him, by an agreement of 1723, in the provision of
two concertos a month for his pupils, further swelling a body of work that was
already considerable. He was, at the same time, involved in work in the
opera-house, as composer, performer and manager, and added significantly to the
repertoire of church music. As a violinist he possessed a phenomenal technique,
the wonder of all who saw and heard him, and may be credited with significant
developments in the form of the solo concerto.
The present collection includes five excerpts
from longer compositions by Vivaldi. The first is taken from a concerto for solo violin, strings and
continuo published in Amsterdam in 1729/30 as the first in a set of six such
concertos. The second is the slow movement of one of the four A minor concertos
Vivaldi wrote for the cello, and the third a movement from a C major concerto
written for flautino, now generally thought to be a sopranino recorder. The
fourth excerpt is taken from a C minor concerto for alto recorder and the fifth
from a concerto for oboe now transcribed for trumpet.
Georg Philipp Telemann, god-father of Bach's
son Carl Philipp Emanuel, was director of music in Hamburg for the greater part
of his career, controlling the music in the five principal city churches and
providing a prolific supply of further compositions for sacred and secular,
professional and amateur use. The first of the four excerpts included in the
present collection consists of the first and fourth movement of the concerto he
w rote for solo trumpet and the second is the third movement of a G minor
concerto for two violins. The third excerpt is the first movement of a B flat
concerto for trumpet and the final one an Allegro from a concerto for two horns
included in the Musique de table published in Hamburg in 1733.
The first of two items by Handel is an
arrangement of a recorder sonata published in London in 1730 and the second is
a movement from the first of his twelve Opus 6 Concerti Grossi, scored for
strings and continuo and written in 1739 for immediate publication, unlike
earlier sets of concertos and sonatas that represent more haphazard forms of
anthology. By the 1730s Handel was firmly established in London, after
childhood and adolescence in his native Halle, followed by a brief period of
work as a musician at the opera in Hamburg and a longer time spent in Italy,
where he had first-hand experience of Italian opera. It was as a composer of
Italian opera that he had first visited London in 1710, after taking immediate
leave of absence from his new master, the Elector of Hanover, and it was in the
same capacity that he settled there in 1712. From 1739 he turned his attention
more fully to English oratorio, a happy combination of Italianate music with
words and stories eminently satisfactory to Protestant England. It is the same
felicitous and melodic Italian style that prevails in his instrumental
compositions.
Johann Sebastian Bach, a movement from whose
Brandenburg Concerto No.1 for two horns, three oboes, bassoon, strings and
continuo is included in the collection, like Handel went some way towards
combining the musical influences of Italy, France and Germany, the last, in his
case, predominating. An organist by early training and family background, he
was employed from 1717 to 1723 as Court Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of
Anhalt-Coethen, a period devoted largely to the composition of instrumental
music, before moving to Leipzig as Cantor at the Thomasschule, where he spent
the rest of his life. The Brandenburg Concertos, a set of six orchestral works
for varied forces, were completed by 1721 and dedicated to Christian Ludwig,
Margrave of Brandenburg, in Berlin, a prince from whom Bach might have hoped
for preferment. The second movement of the first Brandenburg Concerto, marked
Adagio, makes use only of three oboes, a solo violin, intended for the violino
piccolo, a smaller form of the instrument, strings, bassoon and continuo.
Capella Istropolitana
The Capella Istropolitana was founded in 1983
by members of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, at first as a chamber
orchestra and then as an orchestra large enough to tackle the standard
classical repertoire. Based in Bratislava, its name drawn from the ancient name
still preserved in the Academia Istropolitana, the historic university established
in the Slovak and one-time Hungarian capital by Matthias Corvinus, the
orchestra works principally in the recording studio. Recordings by the
orchestra on the Naxos label include The Best of Baroque Music, Bach's
Brandenburg Concertos, fifteen each of Mozart's and Haydn's symphonies as well
as works by Handel, Vivaldi and Telemann.
Richard Edlinger
The Austrian conductor Richard Edlinger was
born in Bregenz in 1958 and directed his first concerts f t the age of
seventeen. He completed his studies at the Vienna Academy in conducting and
composition in 1982, by which time he had already acquired considerable
professional experience. He was the youngest finalist in the 1983 Guido
Cantelli Conductors' Competition at La Scala, Milan. Since 1986 Richard
Edlinger has been Artistic Director of the Capella Istropolitana, an orchestra
with which he has undertaken regular tours in Europe.