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Gramophone Awards Shortlist 2016 K O B Y L A R Z I N M A R T : p h o t o g r a p h y the composer’s two anniversaries in 1994 and 2004! Of all his music, it is surely the Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas – 15 sonatas for violin and continuo, each representing an episode from the lives of Jesus and Mary corresponding to the sacred devotional ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary, with a solo passacaglia to finish – that not only provide the most stimulating listening but also the most fascinating insights into his way of thinking. Indeed, one could go further and claim them as one of the most profound and coherent instrumental cycles of the entire Baroque period. Approaches among players differ on a scale from seeking out all the descriptive detail they can find to relying more on the subliminal effects of the music’s symbolic and rhetorical gestures and constant scordature (each of the sonatas requires a different tuning system for the violin). All the successful ones, however, draw power from their depth of personal response, which is surely as it should be. This, after all, is music by a composer for whom the violin was a natural means of expression, a part of his being. Of the new recordings of the Rosaries, perhaps the most keenly anticipated will be that by Rachel Podger, ever a glorious example of someone who lives life through her violin. Yet although her booklet-note makes clear that she appreciates how the violin is made literally to ‘suffer’ through the dark retunings associated with Jesus’s death, she also states that she sees her own role as that of evangelist. This may, I suppose, be why her performances (in which she is joined by lutenist David Miller and keyboard player Marcin S ´ wia˛tkiewicz) are less directly involving than might have been expected. Of course she can play with grace and beauty – at the opening of ‘The Carrying of the Cross’, for instance, in the smooth Canzona of ‘The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin’ and throughout the Passacaglia (not a new recording, by the way, but taken from her ‘Guardian Angel’ solo disc – 11/13). There are also many subtleties of articulation and timing, almost as if there are words and pauses lying behind the notes, though sometimes these develop into lingerings that stretch the boundaries of continuity. Those used to Podger’s habitual natural exuberance may well find this recording surprisingly inward, even cool. Lindsay Kemp Lawes The Royal Consort. Three Consorts to the Organ Phantasm with Elizabeth Kenny theo Emily Ashton tenor viol Daniel Hyde org Linn F b Í CKD470 (144’ • DDD/DSD) William Lawes’s 10 Royal Consort sets (or suites) were probably composed for the Caroline court during the 1630s. Unswerving royalist loyalty cost him his life at the Siege of Chester in 1645, but not before he had made six-part rearrangements for two violins, bass viols and theorbos. This later version has an eminent discography but Phantasm instead present the first complete recording of the original pieces for four-part viol consort and theorbo. Performer-scholar Laurence Dreyfus begins his 14-page booklet essay in bold fashion: ‘One mustn’t mince words. To put it frankly, this is one of the greatest collections of ensemble dance music ever composed.’ He argues that Lawes’s sets are on a par with Bach’s Orchestral Suites and Rameau’s ballet music but criticises that the later expanded versions ‘offer a clear case of how artists can spoil their work by an excess of fussing’. Phantasm’s playing brims with imaginative fantasy and dance-like momentum, although from time to time Lawes’s unpredictable liberties with irregular phrase lengths would not have suited actual dancers (eg an Aire and Corant at the core of Set No 7). Every shift in imitative contrapuntal detail, rhythmical emphasis and melodic direction serves a conversational discourse between the pair of treble viols (Dreyfus and Emilia Benjamin) and the tenor and bass viols (Jonathan Manson, Mikko Perkola and Markku Luolajan-Mikkola); Elizabeth Kenny’s theorbo continuo realisations are a model of tasteful clarity. Concise individual pieces often display rare sophistication, such as the seemingly floating Paven that begins No 9 and a song-like Galliard in No 2. A vividly accentuated ‘Morriss’ folk dance follows hot on the heels of an elegant Corant (No 6) without any hint of formulaic articulation. Strong doses of Jacobean melancholy are abundant in a few longer pieces such as the Paven in D minor that starts No 2; this is one of several pavans that quotes from Dowland’s Lacrimae but the inclusion of an extra short set for four-part viols dating from earlier in Lawes’s career suggests that Dowland’s influence cast a subtler shadow later on. A pleasing broadening of textures is injected into this beguiling survey by the additional tenor violist Emily Ashton and organist Daniel Hyde in some denser six-part sets that could not be squeezed on to Phantasm’s 2012 recording of Lawes’s Consorts to the Organ (2/13). David Vickers Selected comparisons (six-part versions with violins): Purcell Qt (11/95) (CHAN) CHAN0584 Voix Humaines (9/12) (ATMA) ACD2 2373 Vivaldi The Four Seasons, Op 8 Nos 1-4a. Concertos for Violin ‘in tromba marina’a – RV221; RV311. Bassoon Concertosb – RV496; RV501 b Peter Whelan bn La Serenissima / Adrian Chandler avn Avie F AV2344 (74’ • DDD) To celebrate its 21st birthday, one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries has finally recorded a work that has rarely been out of its repertoire since this fine period instrument band’s inception. In doing so, La Serenissima, whose previous recordings have likewise rarely been out of the Gramophone Awards shortlists, gives us a Four Seasons for all seasons. The group’s founder and violinist/ director Adrian Chandler is not only steeped in the musical language of Baroque Italy, both vocal and instrumental; he is also fully conversant with its humanist wellsprings. Vivaldi’s sonnets and consequent programmatic signposting throughout the score are thus filtered through a more nuanced rhetorical vision that is more stage than page. The result is an intensely dramatic account that will add new spice to what has for many listeners perhaps come to resemble a dreary domestic relationship. Take, for example, the spacious birdsong, surging waters and thumping rustic dances of ‘Spring’; the languid heat and raging storms finding echoes in the cuckoo’s urgent call and the goldfinch’s stratospheric sweetness in ‘Summer’; the drunkard’s erratic progress mirrored in the hunters’ ebullience and the hunted’s tragic flight in ‘Autumn’; and the elements’ implacable indifference in ‘Winter’. All – and this also goes for two superb bassoon concertos featuring the outstanding Peter Whelan and the two concertos for the three-stringed violin ‘in tromba marina’ – are realised in vivid colours through the agency not of gimmicky extremes of tempo and overly percussive effects but through an intelligent, imaginative approach to bowing, articulation and ornamentation across the board that both binds and differentiates. Despite having not yet recorded The Four Seasons, Rachel Podger is for my money the only Vivaldian who can challenge Chandler at the moment. Then again, they say geniuses often appear in pairs. William Yeoman 6 GRAMOPHONE AWARDS 2016 gramophone.co.uk
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Click on a CD cover to buy or stream from qobuz.com Baroque Vocal Gramophone Awards Shortlist 2016 JS Bach JS Bach Cantata No 63, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag. Magnificat, BWV243a. Organ Preludes – Fuga sopra il Magnificat, BWV733; Gott, durch deine Güte, BWV600; Puer natus in Bethelehem, BWV603; Vom Himmel hoch, BWV606 G Gabrieli Hodie Christus natus est Julia Doyle, Joanne Lunn sops Clare Wilkinson mez Nicholas Mulroy ten Matthew Brook bass-bar Dunedin Consort / John Butt Linn F Í CKD469 (78’ • DDD • T/t) We have got used to the idea now that, coming from the Dunedin Consort, core works will not be quite as they first appear. The Bach Magnificat here is not the piece in its familiar D major version but its original manifestation, cast in E flat and with some slight textual differences, while further potential surprises are that the disc starts with a Gabrieli motet and that the Magnificat doesn’t appear until track 13. The reason, of course, is that this is another of director John Butt’s liturgical reconstructions, this time of Vespers in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche on Christmas Day 1723, Bach’s first in the job of Kantor. The Magnificat thus gains four delightful little Christmas interpolative movements and sits within a longer programme of congregational chorales and organ preludes (shared between Butt and Stephen Farr on the marvellous organ of Greyfriars Kirk), the Gabrieli and the lyrical, lithe, trumpetbright Cantata No 63. A full reconstruction would have been too long for the CD, so some extra preludes and a clutch of chantprayers are downloadable free from the Linn website, where you can also read Butt’s scholarly booklet‑notes. As usual the forces are small-scale, save for two lusty congregational hymns (adorned with enjoyably headstrong organ improvisations). The Magnificat itself is exciting, fresh and faultlessly paced: the crystal stream of the first chorus, the ‘Et exultavit’ taking just enough time to allow Joanne Lunn to shape her phrases, the compelling build in ‘Fecit potentiam’ to a timpani-powered conclusion – so many interpretative decisions here seem the right ones. The sound (helped perhaps by the low pitch of A=392Hz) is a treat for the ear; the vocal soloists are lucid and distinctive, so that altogether this vital performance is not just a genuinely fascinating new slant on a familiar masterpiece – as the Dunedins’ St John Passion was (3/13) – but a joyous re-encounter with an old friend. As for those good churchpeople of Leipzig hearing it for the first time, how they must have marvelled at the man they had hired! Lindsay Kemp JS Bach Mass in B minor, BWV232 Hannah Morrison sop Esther Brazil mez Meg Bragle, Kate Symonds-Joy contrs Peter Davoren, Nick Pritchard tens Alex Ashworth, David Shipley basses Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists / Sir John Eliot Gardiner Soli Deo Gloria M b SDG722 (106’ • DDD • T/t) The degree to which conductors are more or less synonymous with particular works is a largely subjective matter, though few would argue that the Mass in B minor captures with special pertinence the flavour of John Eliot Gardiner’s distinctive contribution to music-making over 50 years of professional life. While he has only recorded the work once before, in 1985, performances of the work have peppered his career in all four corners of the globe. That recording was something of a yardstick at a time when the pioneering compact disc coincided with the second birth of the ‘early music movement’ in tsunami mode: Gardiner let rip, in short, with a towering performance of blazing choruses and oratorian solos, firmly planting his feet in the DG space that Karl Richter had vacated with his early death four years earlier. If that performance now seems uncontained in a bristling vigour of varying durability, the intervening 30 years have transformed Gardiner’s B minor with his consistently impressive Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists from something less culturally reactive and adrenalin-driven towards a more contained, pictorial and inhabited ideal, though no less energised. If there was anything Gardiner learnt from the monumental traversal of the cantatas during that great millennium year, it was to take longer-breathed interpretative positions with Bach and to know when to let the singers, especially, and the music do the work. From the outset here, Gardiner’s meticulous grasp of the detail and architecture in tandem is almost terrifyingly auspicious. The Kyrie has never felt more naturally contrasting in both that respect and in the etched placement (some might find it a touch too articulated) of the fugal entries; it’s a ‘melos’ – an unbroken evolution of line – which becomes especially evident from the tautly conceived ‘Et in unum’ and the most luscious ‘Et incarnatus’, each underpinned by skilful dynamic contouring. Indeed, the idea of the Mass as Bach’s ‘summa’ anthology (a work that may never even have been conceived as a single piece) has often inhibited that elusive golden ‘arc’ where the culminating ‘Dona nobis’ feels magnetised to all before it. How can it be uncovered without pressing too hard on the tempi or under-curating those reflections of discrete stillness? If Brüggen’s first reading with its purity of abstraction comes close in its controversially instrumentheavy recording and, more recently, Jonathan Cohen’s elegant and generous account asks further questions – albeit in the difficult acoustic of Tetbury Church – we have a further vision here with Gardiner’s extraordinary, single-minded, quasi-mathematical proof. It starts with peerless choral singing, the trumpet-led movements bolted into an unerring tactus and purring through the gears; the ‘Et exspecto’ with its luminous lead-in is quite miraculous, as is the shining portal of the Sanctus. Such is Gardiner’s dramatic placement that the predominance of D major never palls. Less consistent are the solo movements. Gardiner’s policy of showcasing young vocal talent inevitably leads to occasional gaucheness and some hints of tiredness, but the price is small: there is much that is winning, and the ‘Laudamus te’ (Hannah Morrison) is one of several examples of fresh tenderness. Out of this youthful paradigm emerges an especially corporate endeavour, one that challenges pre-conceived ideas on vocal and instrumental ‘role-play’, and celebrates Bach’s endlessly sophisticated relationship gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE AWards 2016 7

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Gramophone Awards Shortlist 2016

K O B Y L A R Z

I N

M A R T

:

p h o t o g r a p h y the composer’s two anniversaries in 1994 and 2004! Of all his music, it is surely the Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas – 15 sonatas for violin and continuo, each representing an episode from the lives of Jesus and Mary corresponding to the sacred devotional ‘mysteries’ of the Rosary, with a solo passacaglia to finish – that not only provide the most stimulating listening but also the most fascinating insights into his way of thinking. Indeed, one could go further and claim them as one of the most profound and coherent instrumental cycles of the entire Baroque period. Approaches among players differ on a scale from seeking out all the descriptive detail they can find to relying more on the subliminal effects of the music’s symbolic and rhetorical gestures and constant scordature (each of the sonatas requires a different tuning system for the violin). All the successful ones, however, draw power from their depth of personal response, which is surely as it should be. This, after all, is music by a composer for whom the violin was a natural means of expression, a part of his being.

Of the new recordings of the Rosaries, perhaps the most keenly anticipated will be that by Rachel Podger, ever a glorious example of someone who lives life through her violin. Yet although her booklet-note makes clear that she appreciates how the violin is made literally to ‘suffer’ through the dark retunings associated with Jesus’s death, she also states that she sees her own role as that of evangelist. This may, I suppose, be why her performances (in which she is joined by lutenist David Miller and keyboard player Marcin S ´ wia˛tkiewicz) are less directly involving than might have been expected. Of course she can play with grace and beauty – at the opening of ‘The Carrying of the Cross’, for instance, in the smooth Canzona of ‘The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin’ and throughout the Passacaglia (not a new recording, by the way, but taken from her ‘Guardian Angel’ solo disc – 11/13). There are also many subtleties of articulation and timing, almost as if there are words and pauses lying behind the notes, though sometimes these develop into lingerings that stretch the boundaries of continuity. Those used to Podger’s habitual natural exuberance may well find this recording surprisingly inward, even cool. Lindsay Kemp

Lawes The Royal Consort. Three Consorts to the Organ Phantasm with Elizabeth Kenny theo Emily Ashton tenor viol Daniel Hyde org Linn F b Í CKD470 (144’ • DDD/DSD)

William Lawes’s 10 Royal Consort sets (or suites) were probably composed for the Caroline court during the 1630s. Unswerving royalist loyalty cost him his life at the Siege of Chester in 1645, but not before he had made six-part rearrangements for two violins, bass viols and theorbos. This later version has an eminent discography but Phantasm instead present the first complete recording of the original pieces for four-part viol consort and theorbo. Performer-scholar Laurence Dreyfus begins his 14-page booklet essay in bold fashion: ‘One mustn’t mince words. To put it frankly, this is one of the greatest collections of ensemble dance music ever composed.’ He argues that Lawes’s sets are on a par with Bach’s Orchestral Suites and Rameau’s ballet music but criticises that the later expanded versions ‘offer a clear case of how artists can spoil their work by an excess of fussing’.

Phantasm’s playing brims with imaginative fantasy and dance-like momentum, although from time to time Lawes’s unpredictable liberties with irregular phrase lengths would not have suited actual dancers (eg an Aire and Corant at the core of Set No 7). Every shift in imitative contrapuntal detail, rhythmical emphasis and melodic direction serves a conversational discourse between the pair of treble viols (Dreyfus and Emilia Benjamin) and the tenor and bass viols (Jonathan Manson, Mikko Perkola and Markku Luolajan-Mikkola); Elizabeth Kenny’s theorbo continuo realisations are a model of tasteful clarity. Concise individual pieces often display rare sophistication, such as the seemingly floating Paven that begins No 9 and a song-like Galliard in No 2. A vividly accentuated ‘Morriss’ folk dance follows hot on the heels of an elegant Corant (No 6) without any hint of formulaic articulation. Strong doses of Jacobean melancholy are abundant in a few longer pieces such as the Paven in D minor that starts No 2; this is one of several pavans that quotes from Dowland’s Lacrimae but the inclusion of an extra short set for four-part viols dating from earlier in Lawes’s career suggests that Dowland’s influence cast a subtler shadow later on. A pleasing broadening of textures is injected into this beguiling survey by the additional tenor violist Emily Ashton and organist Daniel Hyde in some denser six-part sets that could not be squeezed on to Phantasm’s 2012 recording of Lawes’s

Consorts to the Organ (2/13). David Vickers Selected comparisons (six-part versions with violins): Purcell Qt (11/95) (CHAN) CHAN0584 Voix Humaines (9/12) (ATMA) ACD2 2373

Vivaldi The Four Seasons, Op 8 Nos 1-4a. Concertos for Violin ‘in tromba marina’a – RV221; RV311. Bassoon Concertosb – RV496; RV501 b Peter Whelan bn La Serenissima / Adrian Chandler avn Avie F AV2344 (74’ • DDD)

To celebrate its 21st birthday, one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries has finally recorded a work that has rarely been out of its repertoire since this fine period instrument band’s inception. In doing so, La Serenissima, whose previous recordings have likewise rarely been out of the Gramophone Awards shortlists, gives us a Four Seasons for all seasons.

The group’s founder and violinist/ director Adrian Chandler is not only steeped in the musical language of Baroque Italy, both vocal and instrumental; he is also fully conversant with its humanist wellsprings. Vivaldi’s sonnets and consequent programmatic signposting throughout the score are thus filtered through a more nuanced rhetorical vision that is more stage than page. The result is an intensely dramatic account that will add new spice to what has for many listeners perhaps come to resemble a dreary domestic relationship. Take, for example, the spacious birdsong, surging waters and thumping rustic dances of ‘Spring’; the languid heat and raging storms finding echoes in the cuckoo’s urgent call and the goldfinch’s stratospheric sweetness in ‘Summer’; the drunkard’s erratic progress mirrored in the hunters’ ebullience and the hunted’s tragic flight in ‘Autumn’; and the elements’ implacable indifference in ‘Winter’.

All – and this also goes for two superb bassoon concertos featuring the outstanding Peter Whelan and the two concertos for the three-stringed violin ‘in tromba marina’ – are realised in vivid colours through the agency not of gimmicky extremes of tempo and overly percussive effects but through an intelligent, imaginative approach to bowing, articulation and ornamentation across the board that both binds and differentiates. Despite having not yet recorded The Four Seasons, Rachel Podger is for my money the only Vivaldian who can challenge Chandler at the moment. Then again, they say geniuses often appear in pairs. William Yeoman

6 GRAMOPHONE AWARDS 2016

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