SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Symphony Orchestra - Les Ballets Russes 2 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Stravinsky / Swr Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden - Stravinsky Les Ballets Russes Vol 10 [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/09/2016

John Ernst Galliard (Celle, 1687 - London, 1747) was a German composer, oboist, flutist and keyboardist active in England in the first half of the 18th century. The son of Jean Galliard, a French wigmaker, he learned to play the flute and oboe from Pierre Maréchal, a French member of Celle's court orchestra. He himself joined the orchestra in 1698 and, shortly afterwards, studied composition in nearby Hanover with Agostino Steffani and Jean Baptiste Farinelli. In 1706 Galliard went to London (like his compatriot Georg Friedrich Händel), where he became court musician to Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne of Great Britain, and later also chapel master at Somerset House. Galliard enjoyed an excellent reputation as an oboist, and so joined the orchestra of the Queen's Theatre, playing in various performances of works by Handel, who wrote oboe parts especially for him. The Six Sonatas for Recorder and Harpsichord were published in London in 1711. In this collection there is an elegant and smooth fusion of styles from the orderly counterpoint of the youth in Hannover to the virtuosity and brio of the Italian baroque, from the flavor of the English tradition that only occasionally transpires to the nuances of French taste that are evident in several movements. Played by Fabio Martignago, who learned his art with specialists like Dan Laurin, Kees Boeke, Han Tol, Stefano Bagliano, Lorenzo Cavasanti, Manuel Staropoli and Alfredo Bernardini. Angelica Selmo studied with Luca Guglielmo and followed master classes with Pierre Hantaï, Roberto Loreggian, Skip Sempé and Bart van Oort.

In 1910, the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote a play about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He enlisted Claude Debussy as the composer and the InchMystere en cinq mansions compose en rhythme francaisInch already premiered in 1911. The text combines and overlaps Christian and pagan traditions, playing with both the flair of antiquity and the fascination of the exotic. The Catholic Church took offense concerning the portrayal of Sebastian, who was played by a female Russian Jew, the dancer Ida Rubinstein, and the audience also reacted hesitantly, so that neither D'Annunzio's play nor Debussy's music to it remained in the repertoire of the concert halls. Debussy himself was very fond of his work and soon put together an orchestral suite, the InchFragments symphoniquesInch, which adapts some of the central numbers of the incidental music for orchestra. Additionally, Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht created a kind of concert version that radically shortened the text and reduced it to around 15 minutes of recitation in addition to Debussy's music. The same applies to the present recording, which juxtaposes Debussy's original music with texts by the writer Martin Mosebach. These texts do not necessarily reflect the course of D'Annunzio's piece, but rather summarize central aspects of the Sebastian legend, sometimes more directly, sometimes more abstractly.The present version, a studio recording form 2005, is enriched with (German) text additions by the writer Martin Mosebach, making it thus unique among other recordings of Le Martyre.