Here, in all it’s lengthy glory, is my roundup of seven favourite CDs of 2011.
Click on the album cover images for all the album details.
A skeptic might accuse me of local boosterism. I admit I would rather applaud than jeer local artists, but my favourite album of 2011 is, I’m convinced, a standard of reference — and just happens to star a Toronto musician.
The first listen was a revelation, and each subsequent visit with these interpretations has revealed new layers of craft from both performer and composer.
Here is what I wrote about it in my Toronto Star review, in August:
Toronto violinist Julia Wedman, a member of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra for six seasons, has pulled off an astounding feat in this two-CD set of all 15 Mystery Sonatas (also known as the Rosary Sonatas) by Baroque composer Heinrich von Biber. This music is at once beautiful, provocative and profound, guaranteeing years of listening pleasure. It would take hundreds of words to describe the powerful yet transparent textures that Wedman and her cohorts have conjured out of Biber’s minimal musical instructions. It would take hundreds more to describe the intensely spiritual significance of each sonata, which corresponds to a section of the Rosary. And that doesn’t even touch on the weird and wonderful alternate violin tunings that most of the sonatas require. The world is a better place for Wedman’s interpretation of this remarkable music.
CHAMBER MUSIC
In my review, which ran in my old Toronto Star blog, I wrote:
Clarinettist Jane Booth and Toronto’s Eybler Quartet, one of the few such ensembles in the world to work on period instruments (violinists Aisslinn Nosky and Julia Wedman, as well as violist Patrick Jordan belong to the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and cellist Margaret Gay is a frequent guest), bring an affecting elegance to this album that features two quintets by Johann Georg Heinrich Backofen (1768-1839) — one for basset horn and strings, the other for clarinet and strings (where Max Mendel sits in as extra violist) — and Mozart’s A-Major Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581. Booth’s seamless, silken woodwind solos glide over the strings with uncommon grace. The combined effect on is an almost supernatural translucence. This is music of the ether, not the earth.
From concert programs or classical CD offerings, you’d hardly know that Irish-born composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) was the toast of the British Empire in his day. But thanks to dedicated enthusiasts like England’s Gould Trio (pianist Benjamin Frith, violinist Lucy Gould and cellist Alice Neary), we can roll around in some of his most engaging music through gorgeous interpretations. The highlight on this CD is the Piano Quartet No. 2, first performed in 1914, then abandoned, unpublished. After listening to the Goulds (joined by violist David Adams) elegantly serve up the four-movement outpouring of late-Romantic musical pudding, I can’t understand why the Quartet isn’t part of chamber-music concerts everywhere. Other treats on the album are the sparkling, spacious Piano Trio No. 1 and some light stuff — a Legend and two of a set of six Irish Fantasies — that serves as the whipped cream, with cherry on top.
PIANO SOLO
Two albums stand out in a crowded field:
VOCAL/OPERA
Fabio Biondi and his period-instrument orchestra Europa Gallante are joined by a Mount Olympus of today’s opera gods and goddesses in this two-CD, world-premiere recording of Ercole (Hercules), a long-forgotten, 2 1/2-hour opera by Antonio Vivaldi 1678-1741). The composer presented this work during Carnival season in Rome, in 1723, as a supersized sampler of his compositional skills. As was the habit of Baroque composers, much of the music here is adapted — with great skill — from earlier works. The opera was such a hit that Vivaldi became the toast of the former imperial capital. This recording, created from a reconstruction from a variety of sources, features long stretches of recitative, but the all-star vocal cast (tenor Rolando Villazón in the title role, along with Joyce Di Donato, Diana Damrau, Philippe Jaroussky and Topi Lehtipuu) never ceases to dazzle. The booklet includes much background history, as well as the full libretto (with translations) by Antonio Salvi.
ORCHESTRAL/NEW MUSIC
Here is a bit of what I posted on my Star blog:
Muhly has interwoven his own works (Elizabeth II) with instrumental arrangements (enriched with the young composer’s own embellishments) of works by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons (Elizabeth I).
The aesthetics are, of course, vastly different, but they share the trait of pre-dating and post-dating J.S. Bach’s conventions of harmony and counterpoint. As “new” alternates with “old” on the disc, it quickly became apparent to me how much devotion and love Muhly has for the Renaissance masters. His composerly interventions (an extra shimmer of piano or celeste here, an embroidery of clarinet or oboe or English horn there) are elegant and respectful while making the music sound fresh and beguiling. The vast majority of listeners will have no idea that these pieces started off as motets — and, in the case of Muhly’s arrangements, it hardly matters.
John Terauds