Roberto Loreggian - Secondo Libro Di Toccate 5 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The second limited edition volume of Sir Adrian Boult's Decca legacy brings together the conductor's Messiah recordings of 1954 and 1960, plus Baroque and sacred music recitals from Kenneth McKellar, Kirsten Flagstad and Kathleen Ferrier. While hardly a 'period-instrument' pioneer, Sir Adrian Boult had a much surer sense of authentic Handelian style than most of his contemporaries. Editions and performances of Handel's masterpiece were still often cut and loaded with Romantic trappings in 1935 when Julian Herbage prepared the most complete version of the score yet made, with Handel's original instrumentation. Boult began performing this version in 1942 and it was the obvious choice for a new, refreshing perspective on the piece when he came to record it for Decca in 1954. Listeners and critics alike were struck by the energy of Boult's direction, the purity and simplicity of the solo singing and the vivid Decca engineering. These qualities also distinguished the stereo remake, made with similarly slimmed-down forces and featuring Dame Joan Sutherland on the top line. She also contributed to the success of Boult's Acis and Galatea from 1959, and the box is completed with a series of glorious vocal recitals, from the tenor Kenneth McKellar, the soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, all accompanied by Boult in Baroque repertoire with the sensitivity to line that made him so underrated and underused as an opera conductor. Ferrier recorded this selection of Bach and Handel arias a year before her death in 1952, but eight years later Boult and the LPO returned to the studios to produce a stereo accompaniment for the album, which the Decca producer James Walker mixed with Ferrier's part from 1952 an early and remarkably successful example of the technology later used to 'update' classic recordings of Caruso and Callas.

L'Ame et la Danse (1921) is the title of a fictitious dialogue where the French poet Paul Valéry portrays Life as a dancing woman. Valéry, through an ethereal mixture of sound and sense, creates Music for a body in continuous vital transformation. The musical path presented in my latest recording aims at exploring a kaleidoscope of sounds that belongs to extremely diverse musical and poetic worlds. Some of the pieces interpreted do not have a close thematic connection with dance instead they have a relationship with the soul. After all, this essential component of the human being has an inner and silent rhythm, an inextinguishable movement. The Dialogue between Couperin's musical personifications and their twofold essence at times is ironic and stylised as in Castiglioni, Benjamin, Filidei and Pesson and at times is oneiric, as in Chopin, Busoni and Faurè. This imaginary journey is framed by Ravel's sublime reinterpretations of the Pavane and Waltz genres, summarized by Henri de Régnier's epigraph InchLe plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutileInch.

Gottlieb Muffat's oeuvre, dedicated almost in it's entirety to keyboard instruments and skilfully straddling the stile antico and stile moderno, deserves more detailed attention than it has ever been afforded. The majority of sources containing music by Muffat are unpublished, with only two collections published at the composer's own behest during his years in the Emperor's service in Vienna. One of these is the Componimenti Musicali per il Cembalo (Augsburg, 1739). This collection contains 6 Suites and a Ciacona with 38 variations for solo harpsichord. The composer describes these seven works as capricci or galanterie to be performed in the stile moderno and to suit modern tastes. Although arranged in the conventional order of Allemande-Courante-Sarabande-Gigue, Muffat also added various optional dances, displaying no shortage of innovation. The first movements are introductory in nature, often fugal in form and varying in style and pace Ouverture (Suites 1 and 5), Prelude (Suite 2) and Fantaisie (Suites 3, 4 and 6). The seventh piece in the collection, the Ciacona con 38 Variazioni, is a special case. As Christopher Hogwood suggests in his introduction to the modern edition (Orpheus, 2009), the Ciacona could be another tribute to the imperial family, as the number of variations matches the age Charles VI's niece, Maria Amalia, would have been on 22 October 1739. Muffat's interest in contemporary harpsichord composition is most clearly evident in his transcription and reinterpretation of works by George Frideric Handel, based on a manuscript copy of the Suites des pièces pour le clavecin he held in his library. Muffat reworked the suites in Handel's collection, suggesting new ornamentation, distributing the notes differently between the hands, changing the clefs and sometimes note values, and adding slurs and cadenzas. He then applied everything he had observed whil