A Celebration Of Woman

Like many of the offerings from Jordi Savall's Alia Vox label, this is a lavishly produced concept album by his wife Montserrat Figueras entitled Lux Feminae. It takes music from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance ( 900 - 1600 ) that pertains to the light of woman. There are seven aspects of womanhod that are considered, from the sacred to the sensual and from Christianity, Judaism and Islam ( a familiar theme of the Savall family )as well as ancient mythology. The disk follows that hybrid of early music and world music and the several talented performers appearing reflect this. here are contributions from such as Pierre Hamon on flutes, Andrew Lawrence-King on harp, Rolf Lislevand on lute and guitar, Driss El Maloumi on oud and Jordi Savall himself on viola da gamba. Montserrat Figueras's soprano is ideally suited to this repertoire with a light ethereal touch and she is occasionally augmented by a fellow soprano in her daughter Arianna and by mezzo Begona Olavide, contralto Laurence Bonnal and another soprano Tina Aagaard. Many of the songs featured are anonymous, others by little known names from Spanish or Moorish traditions and the disk is bookended by two glorious extracts from the Codex de las Huelgas.

Another Of Stalin's Victims

Nikolay Roslavets was another of those composers trying to pursue a career under the impossible strictures of Stalinist Russia. He was not as successful as more established names in doing this but the music on this disk indicates that we are the poorer for that. It is a disk by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov and the main piece featured is the Chamber Symphony. Only published in 2005, this is the first recording. It is almost an hour long and perhaps shares a soundworld with Schoenberg but there are echoes of others, the use of recurring leitmotifs that could be found in Shostakovich and Myaskovsky. There is a long and extremely atmospheric slow movement and the scherzo is in a wild dance form with folk tinges that may have been picked up in exile in Uzbekistan. The ecstatic feel of much of the finale shows Roslavets admiration for Scriabin and this is also apparent in the filler, a piece entitled In The Hours Of The New Moon. Contemporaneous with Stravinsky's Firebird, it also shows the orchestral palete of Rimsky-Korsakov and spotlights the playing of the BBCSSO's leader Elizabeth Layton.

Mementoes In Sound

This disk is described as a single, in olden times it would perhaps have been on a vinyl EP. It in fact contains a substantial 25 minute orchestral piece by contemporary British composer Richard Barrett entitled Vanity. It is performed here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Tamayo. The piece is in three movements ( Sensorium, Memento and Residua ) which are played through in one complete span. It is a piece built on the structure of a chamber music piece with the expanded forces of the orchestra used as discrete blocks whereby whole sections play en mass as if they were one instrument. Part of the inspiration comes from 17th century still life vanitas paintings ( hence the work's title ) where each seprate detail must be exquisitely portrayed and is of equal importance to the whole and this applied here to individual and group musical conributions. The strings play an important underpinning role, occasionally moving to the foreground. There are also parts for braying brass interludes, notably trombone, while the piano and cimbalom often augment the mutltiple percussion instruments which come to the fore in the final segment Residua and give the work a continual forward momentum. The piece ends mysteriously with a brief and ghostly quote from Schubert's Death And The Maiden. A disk that repays repeated listening where more detail and structure is revealed.

More Homespun Values

Another disk evocative of the open spaces of the American west and showing the acceptable face of the region with honest homespun values and gimmick free well crafted musicianship. It is a disk called The West Was Burning by Martha Scanlan, another for which the term Americana was suitably coined some years back. The disk features a mix of more or less solo acoustic sings and those with a small band backing containing exemplary playing from the likes of ex Band member Levon Helm on drums together with his daughter Amy. Multi instrumentalist Dirk Powell handles many of the chores, with fiddle and banjo being well to the fore and understated support coming from pedal steel and dobro. Most of the songs are self penned by Scanlan although there is a cover of Bob Dylan's Went To See The Gypsy and a fine country instrumental Call Me Shorty. There is an obvious gospel feel to Get Right Church but the overall mood is one of gentle resignation and delight in simple beauty and companionship. The live recording of Seeds Of The Pine is a standout with fine banjo accompaniment and there is no hint that it is a live concert recording until the applause burts in at the end. The title track and Up On The Divide could be looked upon as keynote tracks and the disk finishes with the moving and spiritual hymn Ten Thousand Charms.

Touching The Spanish Soul

In a recent BBC Radio 3 Building a Library feature, this disk was considered to be the pick of recordings of Manuel De Falla's El Amor Brujo. It is by the Orchestre Poitou-Charentes under the direction of Jean-Francois Heisser and it is a performance of the full masque, complete with dialogue and with the central part sung by flamenco artist Antonia Contreras, De Falla was a flamenco enthusiast who did much to ensure the continued health of that art form and it was always his intention that the work be performed in this way, albeit that he also arranged an orchestral suite and it is often sung with a regular soprano soloist. The recording quality is superb, the orchestra capture the idiom of the piece perfectly and the whole is wonderfully atmospheric. The disk comes with two substantial fillers. Heisser himself plays the piano piece Fantasia Baetica which owes an obvious debt to Debussy but which provides a perfect interlude between El Amor Brujo and a second masque, El Retablo de Maese Pedro which relates the trashing of an unfortunate entrepreneur's puppet show by a delusional Don Quixote. The sound world has similarities to El Amor Brujo but perhaps without the same memorable melodies and this time with standard operatic soloists in soprano Chantal Perraud, baritone Jerome Correas and tenor Eric Huchet.

See Naples And Make Music

The chamber music of 17th and 18th century Naples is an area of early music where research is only beginning to unearth items of quality and interest. The ensemble Accordone, led jointly by the inimitable voice of Marco Beasley and by harpsichordist Guido Morini, are mining this field and do so to great effect on this disk entitled Il Settecento Napoletano. The ensemble is completed by violin, cello, archlute, guitar and theorbo. The seven works featured here consist of five chamber cantatas featuring Beasley and two instrumental sonatas, one for two violins and continuo by Matteis and another for three violins and continuo by Ragazzi. As can be gathered, these are hardly household names, composers of the cantatas include Porsile, Rubino and Liguori with the only well known name being Alessandro Scarlatti. Guido Morini himself also contributes a song cycle which is a pastiche of the Neopolitan style. The Liguori piece is a charming Nativity song but the other four vocal pieces all tell of the treachery and perfidy of love as well as the joys. They are not profound texts, more playful and in the form of court entertainment. The sonatas are charming baroque settings and the whole disk has a feelgood factor supplementing superb musicianship.

The Voice Of The North

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Paul Hillier completed their sampling of selected survey of the choral work of contemporary composers from the region with Baltic Voices 3. I've already posted about the first in the series and hope to catch up with the second in due course, chronology has never been my strong point. There are some names here that I am familiar with ( Saariaho, Tuur and Gorecki )while the others are totally new to me ( Gundmundsen-Holmgreen, Augustinas, Mazulis, Bergman and Martinaitis ) Three pieces are premiered on the disk with composition dates ranging from 1969 to 2003. The disk is mainly acapella with the exception of the folk like The Stomping Bride by Augustinas which has harpsichord, recorder, viola da gamba and percussion accompaniment and Meditatio by Tuur which benefits from the particiaption of the Rascher Saxophone Quartet. The other works cover a variety of styles from the theatrical Saariaho, the almost spoken singspiel of Bergman, the bouncy and rhythmic Martinaitis and Mazulis and the elegiac Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and Gorecki. The texts set range from the folk to the sacred to the poetic. It goes without saying that the choir's singing throughout is outstanding, showing great control, feeling, clarity and empathy with the music.