Flora Fabri - Wolf: Selected Works for Clavier - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

On her solo debut album, Muffat Meets Handel, the successful young harpsichordist Flóra Fábri performs harpsichord pieces by precisely these two composers. Although the dates of the two musicians overlap for a period of almost seventy years, the same thing happened in this case as with many of Handel's contemporaries the two never met personally. However, unlike Bach and Mattheson, here musical awareness of the other did not operate in accordance with a »one-way-street principle« it was not only Muffat who admired Handel and arranged his music; the process also functioned the other way around. In contrast to Handel's Muffat arrangements, in his Handel arrangements Gottlieb Muffat dealt much more gently with the originals and left many parameters unchanged. Something like a relationship of Inchsoul matesInch can be detected in their mutual inclination to arrange each other's works. This in turn forms the essential prerequisite for the dialogue of minds on which the program on this album draws the adventure of a conversation between two exceptional musical talents without the use of language, without any direct physical contact, and over a distance of at least 1, 593 kilometers (as the crow flies). It is first when the creative production of the one flows into the other's work that it has the chance to grow beyond itself.

The at hand presents musical portraits of two influential composers of the Baroque era through a selection from their oeuvre for violin and harpsichord Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644 - 1709) and Georg Muffat (1653 - 1704). Their first meeting in Salzburg was unfortunately not documented. However, it is known that both talents arrived with differing previous musical experiences before spending years in the service of the Archdiocese of Salzburg. Thanks to economic growth and financial strength in this sovereign Catholic principality, all the arts, including music, enjoyed considerable support. Like in all other Baroque centers, music was an integral part of courtly representation, and in Salzburg, it also became an important channel of communication for the Counter-Reformation. A fabulous violinist, Biber preferred his favorite instrument in his compositions and wrote two sonata collections that belong to the basic repertoire of Baroque solo literature the InchRosenkranzInch or InchMysteryInch sonatas (c. 1674) and the Violin Sonatas (1681). Two pieces from each of these collections can be heard on the album at hand, rounded off with a passacaglia from Georg Muffat's collection InchApparatus Musico-OrganisticusInch, which holds as much significance for Baroque keyboard literature as Biber's collections for the violin mentioned above, and last but not least a unique piece Muffat's only surviving violin sonata. The instruments that meet in this recording come from two worlds Flóra Fábri performs on a harpsichord built in 2015 by Detmar Hungerberg according to Italian models; the violin played by Dóra Szilágyi was built in 1765 by Sebastian Klotz in Mittenwald.

The title InchSeelen-MusicInch (Soul Music) refers to the first complete collection of all the extant Cantatas by Johann Theile for soprano solo with viol accompaniment, presented here with the recording premieres of Sacred Concertos by Theile's fellow Northern German Christian Flor and Instrumental Suites by the Gottorf violinist Gregor Zuber. The composer Johann Theile is of great significance in music history inasmuch as he is held to be one of the last pupils of Heinrich Schütz, who was the most important German-language composer of the seventeenth century. Theile presumably was appointed to the post of chapel master in Gottorf at the suggestion of Duchess Marie Elisabeth, the daughter of Prince Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony and in her youth a Schütz pupil in her own right. From 1673 to 1678 he worked at this court under her son Duke Christian Albrecht. When Gottorf was under Danish occupation, Theile accompanied the duke into exile in Hamburg, where both contributed to the establishment of the first public opera house in Germany and it's opening with Theile's singspiel Adam und Eva. In Dorothee Mields we have found a dream soloist for these mostly contemplative works, and her bright, sublimely balanced soprano voice lends them breathtaking depth.