C.H. Graun - Grosse Passion - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Carmen Braden is a composer and performer from Yellowknife Northwest Territories. In her music Carmen explores elements of the sub-Arctic environment (and humans as one of those elements) through her human senses and imaginings, seeking beauty and transformation in small details, vast landscapes and subtle soundscapes. Her works have been played by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, James Ehnes, the Gryphon Trio, the Penderecki Quartet, the Elmer Iseler Singers, Stratford Theatre Festival, Canadian Chamber Choir, the Land's End Ensemble, and the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition. As a performer, Carmen has played intimate theatres and main stage festivals, and is Inchgrowing into the role of acoustic ambassador of the Canadian SubarcticInch (Musicworks). She released her first studio album, Ravens, in 2017 on Centrediscs with the Canadian Music Centre.

Spectacular Baroque Opera with the BEMF. The prizewinning Boston Early Music Festival, joined by the choicest soloists, once again presents a spectacular Baroque opera discovery with Christoph Graupner's Antiochus and Stratonica. Graupner composed the musical play L'Amore Ammalato, Die kranckende Liebe, oder Antiochus und Stratonica during his time as the harpsichordist at the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg. The core subject of the opera is the love of the Seleucid prince Antiochus for his stepmother Stratonica. This match brings with it highly dramatic moments as well as deeply sad ones inasmuch as Antiochus is supposed to have an incurable illness - but then at the end three old and new romantic couples appear on the stage and everything comes to a happy ending. Graupner's opulent orchestral ensemble, which prescribes three recorders and four oboes in addition to strings and a large continuo apparatus, offers the most highly nuanced tonal manifoldness - and during his later decades as the Darmstadt court chapel master the composer would continue to expand this element.

On occasion of the 300th anniversary of the first performance of Handel's Brockes Passion in Hamburg (4 April 1719), Accent presents a 2017 live performance at the Göttingen Handel Festival with Laurence Cummings conducting the Festivalorchestra Göttingen, the NDR Chor, and an excellent cast of singers such as the Dutch soprano Johannette Zomer and the young German tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp (as Evangelist). Barthold Heinrich Brockes' passion text is one of the most frequently set in the history of music, and was the only German text used by George Frideric Handel as the basis for a large-scale sacred composition. The original score was lost, but the surviving version, which was hand-copied by Johann Sebastian Bach, makes it possible for us to hear this 1719 oratorio today.