GRAMOPHONE Magazine: Disc of the Month - April 2016. With the 2005 release of his first recording for BIS Records, Yevgeny Sudbin catapulted into the pages of the international music press. The disc was a Scarlatti recital that prompted reviewers worldwide to compare the then 24-year old pianist in the most flattering terms to Scarlatti experts such as Horowitz and Pletnev. It went on to receive a long list of distinctions, including an Editor's Choice in Gramophone, where the accompanying review described it as 'among the finest, certainly most enjoyable of all Scarlatti recitals'. Since then, Sudbin and BIS have enjoyed a highly successful collaboration, resulting in numerous acclaimed recordings of both solo programmes and concertos. To celebrate the past 10 years, a new Scarlatti recording seemed the obvious choice for an anniversary present - to ourselves, and of course to all Sudbin fans and Scarlatti lovers. Said and done: Sudbin met up with Marion Schwebel, the recording producer with whom he has collaborated from the very beginning, for recording sessions in the silken acoustics of St George's in Bristol.

"The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said." Taking a cue from these lines of Philip Larkin, pianist Simone Dinnerstein casts her album of the music of J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert in poetic terms. Her understanding of the composers is summed up in her own words: "The music of Bach and Schubert share a distinctive quality, as if wordless voices were singing textless melodies." Of course, Bach and Schubert were masters of setting texts to profoundly expressive music, so it is fruitful to look for the lyrical impulse in their keyboard works and appropriate to find songful interpretations. Yet Dinnerstein doesn't merely serve up rhapsodic renditions or treat the music as some kind of tuneful vehicle for idiosyncratic or personal reveries. Her playing is quite in character for both composers, and her treatment of the material is far from self-indulgent.

With this second contribution to the Vivaldi Edition, Fabio Biondi and his ensemble Europa Galante sign here the recording of the twentieth opera of the collection - a pasticcio in which Vivaldi ‘recycles’ hit tunes from the ‘World of Warcraft’ operas of his contemporaries.

Pietro Paolo Bencini (1675? -1755) was one of the most important figures in the musical life of Rome in the eighteenth century. His sacred music is on the same level as that of Alessandro Scarlatti. This is evident from the fact that much of his music can be found in copies even outside Europe. The most important part of his oeuvre is in the collection of the 'Cappella Guilia', now the library of the Vatican. Bencini worked as 'maestro di cappella' in the basilica of San Lorenzo in Damaso and from 1743 in St. Peter's of Rome; an important job. His style is festive, full of contrasts and smooth melodic lines.

Francisco Lopez Capillas was born in 1608 in Mexico City, and studied plainchant and polyphonic composition at the Royal and Pontifical University before assuming the post of chorister and second organist at Puebla Cathedral in 1641. Although most of his significant works were composed toward the end of his life–and thus well into what is generally regarded as the baroque period–the Messe de la Bataille is, like many of his other works, ambiguous in its relationship to the musical innovations that were taking place in the old world at the time.

Newcastle-born and -based, Charles Avison issued his string arrangements of harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti in 1744. Forty-two of Scarlatti's sonatas had been published by Roseingrave in London five years earlier and it was these which, by and large, provided Avison with his material. 'By and large', since, as Stephen Roe remarks in his note, the sonatas included only two slow movements and Avison, planning 12 concertos in the slow-fast-slow-fast scheme favoured by his teacher, Geminiani, required 24.

World-premiere recording: Pietro Gnocchi was not only cathedral chapel master in the northern Italian city of Brescia, and indeed for over a half a century until his death at the advanced age of eighty-six, but also a priest, archeologist, geographer, and fluent in many languages. Apart from sacred vocal music, this impressive polymath also left behind several instrumental works: surprisingly, the present concertos for stringed instruments and basso continuo are heavily contrapuntal, much is inspired by the stilo antico.

Everything that could be desired in a historically informed performance of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos is presented in Philip Pickett's brilliant set with the New London Consort, released in 1993 on L'Oiseau Lyre. This version with period instruments and an ensemble of a size according to Baroque norms is much more than a dry run-through of these beloved works. It is a clever and highly expressive re-creation of Bach's most popular concertos, re-imagined through the artistic and philosophical connections and conventions that likely were found in them by Bach's contemporaries, most probably by Bach and the Margrave of Brandenburg himself.

‘A thoughtful, well-recorded performance of one of the great monuments of Western music, on an instrument for which the composer conceived it, played by a dexterous, sympathetic, and well-informed musician.’ – FANFARE
‘This set shines revitalizing light on music we may have thought we knew inside out, but which is always loaded with surprises.’ – SOUND STAGE

We sometimes forget how closely the didactic aspect of The Well-Tempered Clavier is bound up with the various upheavals of the 1720s which refocused Johann Sebastian Bach on his roles as father and teacher. His ambitious scheme for associating a prelude and a fugue with each of the major and minor keys could easily have become something of a tedious chore. But, on the contrary, it reveals Bach’s highly personal genius for constant creative renewal within the framework of two fixed forms. Richard Egarr presents the complete First Book on a copy by Joel Katzman of a 1638 Ruckers, using the temperament which recent research suggests Bach himself advocated.

The setting by Alphonse D’Eve (1666-1727)‚ born in Brussels and Kapellmeister at the church of Our Lady in Antwerp‚ of the motet for the dead‚ O acerbi‚ is not without its moments. The plangent opening is striking‚ as is the use of high voices at the beginning of the final chorus‚ presumably to represent the heavenly hosts referred to in the text. If the music‚ thoroughly Italianate in style and often reminiscent of Vivaldi‚ is somewhat predictable – the cadences are rather formulaic and the sequential patterns overused – it is certainly worth dusting down: it represents the kind of work that must have been heard in so many of the larger musical institutions all over Europe in the early part of the 18th century.

George Philipp Telemann was a composer whose creative powers continued undiminished through his old age of eighty six years. The last decade of his life witnessed an astonishing creative surge, perhaps comparable only to that of Verdi. It was then that the eighty-year-old, with all the benefits of mature mastery at his command, penned some of his most beautiful vocal works. The oratorio "The Delivered Israel" is a work from this period.

Naxos have stepped in enterprisingly and chosen a programme that is not only most attractive in its own right, but which also includes the key items used in the fascinating film about the conjectural relationship between Marin Marais and his reclusive mentor, Sainte-Colombe (Tous les matins du monde). Spectre de la Rose consists of a first-rate group of young players, led by Alison Crum, who plays in a dignified but austere style which at first seems cool by which is very effective in this repertoire. Le Badinage is perhaps a little stiff and unsmiling, but the key item, Marais’s eloquent lament for his teacher, Tombeau pour Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, is restrained and touching. Good, bright, forward recording, vividly declaiming the plangent viola da gamba timbre.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This Encore release features William Boyce's 8 Symphonies, performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, lead by Sir Neville Marriner.

This splendid and authoritative recital by Elissa Edwards and Richard Kolb of arias and cantatas from Barbara Strozzi’s last published opus showcases the dramatically coloured, highly charged power of the composer’s expressive toolkit, lit by the emerging harmonic language of the Baroque, influenced by Monteverdi through her teacher Cavalli, as a serious precedent for the future of opera. In his booklet notes Kolb comments that in Strozzi’s time a taste for ‘indulgence in the sensual pleasure of vocal melody or as an esoteric manifestation of nothingness’ was growing – the future indeed.