Aapo Häkkinen - Bach: Sonatas For Flute & Harpsichord - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

La Venexiana - Terzo Libro Dei Madrigali [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/24/2008

Andreas Romberg explored new musical territory when he got the idea to include Turkish color in his fourth symphony. It was not until the romantic era that Oriental or Arabian color very deliberately was incorporated into symphonic music, whether in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (1888) or in Engelbert Humperdinck's Maurische Rhapsodie (1898). Right in the first movement of his symphony Romberg used the title InchA la turcaInch to get his audience to anticipate Turkish color. The gradually intensified initial part goes over into a passage with the expected percussion accents and swiftly whirling violin figures. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Violin Concerto in A major, the last of his five violin concertos, is also regarded as a concert piece with Turkish color. In the rondo finale there is a famous interlude in A minor in which the violoncellists and double bassists beat the rhythm on the strings with their bow sticks. This too produces the popular InchAlla turcaInch flair. Our soloist is the young Swiss musician Julia Schroder, and it is not least in the swift main part of the Haydn overture that things sound InchTurkishInch; here not only the timpani but also the bass drum and cymbals accentuate the rhythm. This album also marks the inauguration of our complete recording of the symphonic music of Andreas Romberg.

[Bach] speaks to us in his work in such clear terms that we may quite well call these fugues poems. (...) These have warmth, quiet joy, love. And running through all the poems, dressed in different guises, is the main theme, creating order, binding the work as a whole together it is a safe bond in all it's diversity. Over all lies the proximity of death. (Enzio Forsblom) In this new recording, Bach's final magnum opus is played by Aapo Häkkinen on a harpsichord built in 1614 by Andreas Ruckers the Elder (1579-?1652) and which belonged to the composer John Blow (1649-1708), organist of Westminster Abbey and former teacher of Henry Purcell. A tradition exists that G.F. Handel had also played this harpsichord.