Handel / Mertz / Gangi / Telemann - Through the Centuries - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Guglielmo Pellarin - French Music for Horn & Piano [COMPACT DISCS] date 07/26/2011

The three works on these recordings seem to traverse, in sequence, three of the primary realms of human experience Body, Spirit and Mind. However, as Carl Nielsen pointed out in relation to his second symphony, The Four Temperaments, the principal characters of each movement are, at times, interspersed with hints of the other temperaments. The same is the case with Bumerang, Rabalder and Svev, the three remarkable compositions by Knut Vaage on this album. There are elements of the intellectual in the very physical Bumerang. Rabalder gives the impression of being the most physical of the three, until we realize it is set out as a spiritual journey from noise to silence and their attending emotional states. The physical and the spiritual visit themselves upon the predominantly cerebral Svev.

This new recording includes four Handel organ concertos, among them the famous Concerto Op. 7, No. 3 in B flat major, the so-called InchHallelujah ConcertoInch (with a theme excerpt from InchMessiahInch). The works were played in Dresden's Kreuzkirche (Church of the Holy Cross) at the Horizontal Organ, making the situation comparable to Handel's new Horizontal Organ at the Royal Theatre, Covent Garden (1739).