Scarlatti, Melani, Zelenka: Arias & Cantatas

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CD Details

Orchestra: Parnassi Musici
Performer: Parnassi Musici
Performer: Dorothea Wirtz - soprano
Performer: Wolfgang Basch - trumpet
Composer: Alessandro Melani
Composer: Alessandro Scarlatti
Composer: Jan Dismas Zelenka
Conductor: none
Performer: Parnassus
Performer: Martin Lutz
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Import
CD Release Date: 2006-04-04
Music Label: Etcetera
Soundtracks:

Scarlatti: Il Giardino di Amore -- Sonfonia
Scarlatti: Il Giardino di Amore -- Recitative and Aria of Adone
Melani: Qual memorio giocondo, cantata
Zelenka: Laudate pueri
Scarlatti: Concerto no.3 a Quattro in F major for strings & continuo
Melani: Quai bellici accenti, cantata
Scarlatti: Su le sponde del Tebro, cantata

Music reviews of Scarlatti, Melani, Zelenka: Arias & Cantatas

Music Review: Exhilarating Performance!
Rating: 5 Stars

The combination of high soprano voice and trumpet was briefly in fashion, both in opera arias and in secular cantatas, from about 1650 to 1750. Listening to this performance, it's easy to hear why. It's an exciting sound. But why was it so popular just then? I'll venture a guess that the impetus was the development of the Baroque trumpet as a virtuosic ensemble instrument. In earlier generations, trumpeters had mostly stuck to their own roles as privileged specialists - town pipers or court heralds - within their own guilds, playing their own repertoire. But the flamboyant musical 'acrobatics' of the middle- and high Baroque demanded a singing technique that became more 'instrumental' than ever before or after, and that vocal technique matched well with the capabilities of the trumpet. There were other factors, iconic and philosophical associations of the trumpet with specific affective expressions, but the ringing affinity of the high soprano voice, the 'white' voice preferred by Baroque singers, and the clarino brilliance of the trumpet must have been red-hot entertainment for 17th C listeners, enraptured as they were with any virtuosity.

The four cantatas for soprano and trumpet on this CD - two by Alessandro Melani, one by Jan Dismas Zelenka, and one by Alessandro Scarlatti - are indeed red-hot barn-burners. Zelenka's 'Laudate Pueri' is a setting of the celebratory Latin Psalm CXIII; the others are settings of passionate Italian love poems. Scarlatti is alos represented by a Sinfonia and a Concerto a Quattro for strings and continuo, as emotion-claering intermezzi between the cantatas.

I'm quite familiar with the Scarlatti and Zelenka works, which I've never heard better performed than this, but the music of Alessandro Melani (1639-1703) is new to me. Melani was not universally admired in his own era, and has scarcely been given much attention by performers today, but the two compositions on this CD are marvelously lively and persuasive. The imitative interactions between the soprano and the trumpet are full of musical wit and craft. Melani's cantatas are not as profound as Scarlatti's or Zelenka's but they're delightfully entertaining as display pieces.

That's what this CD is about: musical display! Soprano Dorothea Wirtz isn't as well known as Emma Kirkby, for example, but she has the perfect voice and vocal technique for this repertoire. Her tuning is superb, her highest coloratura register remains beautiful in timbre ... why, she's a veritable human clarino. Likewise trumpeter Wolfgang Basch achieves impressively voice-like clarino timbres, no mean feat on his modern valved trumpet. Would his parts sound better on an authentic baroque natural trumpet? Maybe marginally so - the natural trumpet has an intrinsically cleaner timbre - but Basch plays so flawlessly and with such impeccable HIPP technique that I can't regret his choice of instrument. The four string instruments and keyboard of Parnassi Musici are all elegantly HIPP as well.

Zelenka's Laudate Pueri is the gem of this recital, a work of intense rhythmic and structural originality, both richly ornamented and harmonically complex. Zelenka's intense chromaticism is never merely tacked on to his melodies; it's always precisely developmental and expressive. Laudate Pueri can stand comparison with the most intellectually rigorous works of JS Bach. Scarlatti's operatic Su Le Sponde Del Tebro, composed in 1707, belongs more alongside the Italian cantatas of GF Handel, in its kaleidoscopic flux of emotions, its almost painterly musical coloration. These are both spectacular pieces by very great composers.