There are many beautiful things about these recordings of Bach's Magnificat and Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis Cantata, but beauty isn't really the ultimate point. With Sigiswald Kuijken leading four totally dedicated soloists plus La Petite Bande, truth is the point, the kind of incontrovertible, unrelenting, and unyielding truth that wakes you up in ...
If the orchestrally lush, star-studded recordings of Georg Solti represent one end of the Mozartian taste spectrum, then this 1999 Così fan tutte by René Jacobs, the Concerto Köln, and a less well known cast surely represents the other. In the pursuit of period authenticity, Jacobs employs a greatly downsized original-instrument ensemble, ...
No matter how many times you've heard Le nozze di Figaro, you owe it to yourself to hear this Le nozze di Figaro. It is fresh and funny and silly and moving and enchanting and as wise and as knowing as the work itself. The singers are the ideal kind of opera singers who make you forget they're singing because their acting is so good and their ...
Embodying the highest ideals of the Enlightenment, Die Jahreszeiten is surely Haydn's supreme masterpiece and the greatest secular choral-orchestral work of the second half of the eighteenth century. It's pantheism at its grandest and the pathetic fallacy at its most glorious, with the whole of nature given voices to sing God's praises. It's ...
René Jacobs' performance of Handel's 1750 version of Messiah is remarkable for the fresh insights he brings to such a familiar work. His reading is fleet but never hurried, and movements flow fluidly from each other, virtually without pause. This Messiah is an integrated whole, whose ebbing and flowing move it inexorably toward its climaxes, ...
René Jacobs is an acknowledged master of informed period performance practice, and he turns his considerable arsenal of research, insight, and experience to Don Giovanni, which he maintains has become so mired in misguided nineteenth century interpretive traditions that most modern performances badly misrepresent Mozart's intentions. He points out ...
René Jacobs is an acknowledged master of informed period performance practice, and he turns his considerable arsenal of research, insight, and experience to Don Giovanni, which he maintains has become so mired in misguided nineteenth century interpretive traditions that most modern performances badly misrepresent Mozart's intentions. He points out ...
The reason to get this 1980 Virgin recording of three Bach cantatas is obvious: René Jacobs is singing the contralto parts. Although all three of the works have been recorded many times in the past with many different singers, Jacobs performances are truly special because they are truly different. The Flemish Jacobs pioneered the revival of the ...
There are folks out there who never care to attend another Measure for Measure, who never care to watch another Modern Times, and who never care to hear another Le Nozze di Figaro because to them, comedy is obviously a lesser art form than tragedy. To them one can only say: "too bad!" because as this immensely musical and enormously humorous ...
La Clemenza di Tito, Mozart's final Italian opera, was composed in a hurried 18 days for the coronation of Leopold II in September 1791. In presenting Leopold, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, with an opera about Titus, the Emperor of the Pagan Roman Empire, Mozart was not so subliminally advising the current Emperor to emulate the actions of ...
Heinrich Schütz is the Rodney Dangerfield among the great masters; despite his enormous output and unchallenged status as the father of the German Baroque, Schütz is truly only popular in German-speaking lands and to a lesser degree in England. Although Schütz's music is recorded with frequency and by ensembles of the highest caliber, the Schütz ...
This two-disc set introduces the listener to the passionate, agitated, even troubled world of Monteverdi's (1567-1643) extraordinary eighth book of madrigals, consisting of Canti guerrieri (Warrior songs) and Canti amorosi (Love Songs), and performed with exquisite taste, imagination, and passion by the vocal soloists and instrumentalists of ...
Even 20 years ago, shelf space devoted to Bach's Christmas Oratorio was decidedly limited. The work was regarded as minor in comparison with Bach's Passion settings and other large choral pieces. For one thing, it isn't a "work" as today's listeners understand the term, but a linked set of six pieces intended for performance on six nights over the ...
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