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Product Description
BBC Music Magazine
Seldom can performance be so indebted to scholarly investigation as here, and scholarship so rewarded, in turn, by inspired performance. After the stylistic revolution in northern Italy, the Mecca of string instruments, around 1600, most solo violin music remained handwritten. Peter Allsop's booklet notes explain that Venetian publishing houses were technologically ill-equipped to reproduce complex idiomatic violin notation, and their commercial initiative was devastated by war and plague. But as this disc reveals, the relatively little music exhumed is extraordinary - intensely passionate, light-footed and frolicsome by turn. Farini's extended Capriccio stravagante is a potpourri of remarkable string effects - the pattering of the wood of the bow on the string, forceful playing near the bridge creating dog-barks, whining glissandi imitating cats, and moments of excruciatingly dissonant harmony sending tingles up the spine.
Subsequent shorter pieces include glorious melodic contours in trio sonatas by Turini and Merula and, in a canzona by Picchi, the august sonority of four trombones first alternating, then joining, with string quartet. Three organ toccatas, 'touch pieces' which again rely heavily on the interpretative imagination of the performer, capitalise too on the sonorities and strange melodic intervals of mean-tone tuning.
The playing is infectiously uninhibited and technically immaculate - a programme of unqualified pleasure.
Performance *****
Sound *****
© BBC Music Magazine 2001
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This is the first of two excellent discs of Italian music of the 17th Century. The music is characterised by the "Fantastic" style of the time which, as Peter Allsop explains in the excellent notes, combined virtuosity and experimentalism and it is wonderful stuff. Some composers like Frescobaldi and Biaggio Marini are fairly familiar (largely through the excellent work of ensembles like Romanesca and the Palladian Ensemble) but others were completely new to me. All the music, however, is terrific; it features a variety of combinations of instruments from solo pieces to large ensembles and is thrilling in places and tenderly moving in others. The whole programme is a delight and often a revelation.
It is greatly helped by the brilliant performances. The Purcell Quartet have been making first-rate discs for many years and these both sand with the very best of them. They are joined by the wonderful His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts (and the excellent Jakob Lindberg on chittarone) and together they produce something really special. The play with an apparently effortless virtuosity, terrific verve and a real joy in what they are doing.
The recorded sound is excellent with a perfect acoustic and balance, the presentation is attractive and the notes readable and very informative. Both volumes of this set have given me a lot of pleasure and continue to do so, and I recommend them very warmly.
It is greatly helped by the brilliant performances. The Purcell Quartet have been making first-rate discs for many years and these both sand with the very best of them. They are joined by the wonderful His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts (and the excellent Jakob Lindberg on chittarone) and together they produce something really special. The play with an apparently effortless virtuosity, terrific verve and a real joy in what they are doing.
The recorded sound is excellent with a perfect acoustic and balance, the presentation is attractive and the notes readable and very informative. Both volumes of this set have given me a lot of pleasure and continue to do so, and I recommend them very warmly.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A Gem of a Baroque Album
5 Mar 2003
Format:Audio CD
I must disagree almost completely with the previous reviewer. This is one of my favorite 17th-century albums-to a great degree because the sounds of the instruments are so expressive. If I may be permitted to speculate, I think that the reviewer's ear is unused to the characteristic sound of `period' instruments (gut strings and so forth). The sound is undoubtedly grittier, reedier and more insistent than the smooth, homogeneous sound that we associate with more recent music. In fact, the development of modern instruments was driven mainly by the desire to produce a harmonious blend in large orchestral ensembles. But to achieve that sonic homogeneity, instruments such as the violin were profoundly denatured-with a consequent loss of the expressive potential exploited by earlier composers. Far from being an exercise in `archeology,' period-instrument performance makes this repertoire more vibrant and exciting than it could ever be on modern instruments! My only small reservation about this album concerns the pieces for solo organ: in my opinion, they are a bit too harsh by comparison with the rest of the program.
Excellent
16 Aug 2011
Format:Audio CD
This is the first of two excellent discs of Italian music of the 17th Century. The music is characterised by the "Fantastic" style of the time which, as Peter Allsop explains in the excellent notes, combined virtuosity and experimentalism and it is wonderful stuff. Some composers like Frescobaldi and Biaggio Marini are fairly familiar (largely through the excellent work of ensembles like Romanesca and the Palladian Ensemble) but others were completely new to me. All the music, however, is terrific; it features a variety of combinations of instruments from solo pieces to large ensembles and is thrilling in places and tenderly moving in others. The whole programme is a delight and often a revelation.
It is greatly helped by the brilliant performances. The Purcell Quartet have been making first-rate discs for many years and these both sand with the very best of them. They are joined by the wonderful His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts (and the excellent Jakob Lindberg on chittarone) and together they produce something really special. The play with an apparently effortless virtuosity, terrific verve and a real joy in what they are doing.
The recorded sound is excellent with a perfect acoustic and balance, the presentation is attractive and the notes readable and very informative. Both volumes of this set have given me a lot of pleasure and continue to do so, and I recommend them very warmly.
It is greatly helped by the brilliant performances. The Purcell Quartet have been making first-rate discs for many years and these both sand with the very best of them. They are joined by the wonderful His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts (and the excellent Jakob Lindberg on chittarone) and together they produce something really special. The play with an apparently effortless virtuosity, terrific verve and a real joy in what they are doing.
The recorded sound is excellent with a perfect acoustic and balance, the presentation is attractive and the notes readable and very informative. Both volumes of this set have given me a lot of pleasure and continue to do so, and I recommend them very warmly.
2 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Lovely music ruined by the sound of "old instruments"
15 Oct 2002
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
The music on this CD is beautiful, or at least it would be if played on instruments capable of making beautiful sounds. The music is almost all from the seventeenth century, and much of it was unknown to me before listening to this recording. So the producers and performers are to be congratulated for making the music available at all. However, the entire CD is, to me, wrecked by the wretched sound of "original instruments".
The fact is that since the invention of modern stringed instruments, not a single serious piece of music has been composed with the specification that it should be played with old instruments. The reason is easy to understand, once you have heard both the old and the modern instruments playing the same piece. The old instruments have a whining, thin, nasal, wiry sound that is decidedly unpleasant. It lacks the sweetness, depth, and sheen that we have become accustomed to in modern times. Thus, nobody ever writes pieces for those instruments any more.
The argument that there is something about music from the earlier era that lends itself more appropriately to the old instruments is nonsense. The fact is, that as soon as modern stringed instruments were developed, all composers and performers switched to those modern instruments as soon as they could afford to do so - regardless of their style. And I know of no historical evidence that any composers CHANGED their style to any noticeable degree so that their music was more conducive to the new instruments. They just used the new instruments because they were objectively better.
So this CD is recommended only for people who believe that music is a historical or archeological exercise (i.e., people who don't know what music is in the first place), or people who don't care or notice what kind of instruments are being played (i.e., people with tin ears).
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