Maßstabsetzend perfekt musiziert lässt sich die Kunst Johann Ernsts auf der Debüt-CD des Thüringer Bach Collegiums entdecken. Sieben Solokonzerte für ein und zwei Violinen sowie ein Trompetenkonzert wählte das glänzend disponierte Ensemble für eine begeisternd virtuos und kontrastreich eingespielte Hommage an diesen zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Barockmeister. Ein Wurf!

Maßstabsetzend perfekt musiziert lässt sich die Kunst Johann Ernsts auf der Debüt-CD des Thüringer Bach Collegiums entdecken. Sieben Solokonzerte für ein und zwei Violinen sowie ein Trompetenkonzert wählte das glänzend disponierte Ensemble für eine begeisternd virtuos und kontrastreich eingespielte Hommage an diesen zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Barockmeister. Ein Wurf!

Maßstabsetzend perfekt musiziert lässt sich die Kunst Johann Ernsts auf der Debüt-CD des Thüringer Bach Collegiums entdecken. Sieben Solokonzerte für ein und zwei Violinen sowie ein Trompetenkonzert wählte das glänzend disponierte Ensemble für eine begeisternd virtuos und kontrastreich eingespielte Hommage an diesen zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Barockmeister. Ein Wurf!

Maßstabsetzend perfekt musiziert lässt sich die Kunst Johann Ernsts auf der Debüt-CD des Thüringer Bach Collegiums entdecken. Sieben Solokonzerte für ein und zwei Violinen sowie ein Trompetenkonzert wählte das glänzend disponierte Ensemble für eine begeisternd virtuos und kontrastreich eingespielte Hommage an diesen zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Barockmeister. Ein Wurf!

Rinaldo Alessandrini’s new recording of Bach’s Orchestral Suites may well be the danciest ever. Thirteen years after his joyful account of the Brandenburg Concertos (11/05) blasted its way to a Gramophone Award, he has turned to these four noble creations and infused them with a choreographic shape and swing that ought to make it hard for listeners to keep still. His long booklet note is full of the evidence of much consideration of the natures of all the different dance types Bach embraced across these 24 movements, but yeah, plenty of people have done that and made claims for the end result before. What makes the difference here is that Alessandrini has not come up with a blanket, one-style-suits-all tempo or manner for each dance, but treated each one on its own merits. Compare, for instance, the three Menuets: Suite No 1’s has a buoyantly motoring one-in-a-bar; No 2’s bustles and twitters; and No 4’s twirls frilly cuffs at us.

Elsewhere Alessandrini shows that he has no auto-pilot for these pieces, only lively ideas in plenty. Normally racing dances such as the Réjouissance and Badinerie are calmly measured, as are the Ouvertures, though never in the same way twice. The First Suite’s Courante flaunts a rather deliberate inégal while the Forlane stamps like a snorting horse. The Second Suite’s Rondeaux is surprisingly brisk, while its Sarabande refuses to allow itself to fixate on its treble-bass canon, concentrating instead on light and natural phrasing. The Third Suite’s famous Air is presented not as a melody with subservient accompaniment but as an intricate and lovingly drawn contrapuntal web.

Any performance with as many ideas as this will invite dislikes (I have a bit of a problem with the intermittently clodhopping bass in the First Suite’s Passepied), but overall I’m sure the lasting impression for many will be of a joyous and refreshing encounter with familiar music, served with a meticulous and constantly imaginative attention to details of phrasing and articulation, a crispness of ensemble and a bright and bracing transparency of texture, that may not have been matched since Musica Antiqua Köln’s brilliant but less yieldingly human Archiv recordings in the 1980s.

Alessandrini augments the four Bach Suites on this two-disc set with a suite each by two of his slightly older cousins, Johann Bernhard and Johann Ludwig, both of them more Telemann-like and closer in manner to the form’s French origins than their more famous counterparts. They are welcome in themselves, but also have the effect of emphasising just how contrapuntally rich Sebastian’s suites are.

Ludwig’s Suite is the only one of his to survive, as it happens, but we are luckier with Bernhard, for there are four of his left to us, mainly thanks to the interest taken in them by Sebastian, who had three of them copied out to perform alongside his own at the Leipzig Collegium Musicum in the 1730s. All four appear in their own right on a disc from the Thüringer Bach Collegium, a newish group formed to explore just this kind of Bach hinterland and who, led by the violinist Gernot Süssmuth, engage fully with the music’s bright mix of movementtypes, including some – such as its Caprice, Fantaisie and a couple of French-style character-pieces – not used by Sebastian. Playing one-to-a-part, they find all the nimble energy needed for the likes of the Rigadons and Passepieds, as well as the soulful melody installed in the sweetly rapt Sarabandes and Airs, including one in the G major Suite that is in real ‘Air on the G string’ territory. The sound is intimate, transparent and not always ideally blended, but it is altogether more present and engaging than in the recording made a little while ago by L’Achéron (Ricercar, 2/17), whose larger forces sound squidgy and distant by comparison. The Thuringians also give us a bonus in ‘La Tempête’, the little encore – actually a short overture composed in 1691 by Steffani – which Sebastian added to the G major Suite for his Leipzig listeners’ entertainment.

Concertos date from the early 1900s. They were so well received, so we are told, that they had to be reprinted only two years later. Who was buying them? I can’t believe they were intended for musical suburban husbands and wives so they had a bit of Bach to belt out on their Bechstein. The technical demands are well beyond the reach of the average amateur but, like many another duet arrangement, offer a completely new perspective on the originals.

Reger’s main preoccupation as a Bach transcriber was, of course, with the organ works and it is his profound knowledge of counterpoint that makes these Brandenburg arrangements so successful. Moreover, while a couple of Brandenburgs is usually quite enough at one sitting (for this writer, at least), here, once I started I couldn’t stop. It’s many a long year since I enjoyed this marvellous, life-enhancing set so much. Who knew that Reger could be such fun?

A great deal of this is down to the immaculate pinpoint ensemble of Norie Takahashi and Björn Lehmann and the rhythmic buoyancy of their execution. With properly brisk tempos, the outer movements bubble along with an insatiable joie de vivre. They use a minimum of pedal, too, so the complex voicing is always crystal-clear, underpinned by a springy, resonant bass line, while the upper treble, which so often in present-day recordings flies off into a different airier acoustic, here is firmly linked to the lower registers. The piano sound is, to my taste, ideal. All the concertos are recorded on a splendid Yamaha with the exception of No 5. That is played on a Steingraeber in a barely noticeably different acoustic/location.

As far as Reger’s organ transcriptions are concerned, Takahashi and Lehmann offer us two works (the ubiquitous Toccata and Fugue in D minor and the St Anne Prelude and Fugue) which Reger also arranged for piano solo, together with his (only) version of the mighty Passacaglia, BWV582. These provide a judicious contrast to the boisterous Brandenburgs.

Here, in short, is a pair of discs to return to often. In fact, my one complaint about the whole enterprise is the deathless prose of its prolix booklet.

Coincidences like this are rare indeed at the high modernist end of the music spectrum. Two new CDs of Kurtág’s works for solo voice each begin with Scenes from a Novel (1979-82), the follow-up to his first collection of Rimma Dalos settings, Messages of the Late RV Troussova (1976-80), the composition that did most to make his name in the West as a Hungarian-born talent equal (if not superior) to Ligeti. Like Messages, Scenes is a fine example of later 20th-century expressionism – more like an explosive operatic monodrama (setting Dalos’s tersely impassioned verses in their original Russian) than a gently lyrical song-cycle; and its instrumental accompaniment, scored for violin, double bass and cimbalom, provides brilliantly graphic contexts for the protagonist’s agonised narration.

Both singers, Susan Narucki and Viktoriia Vitrenko, give persuasive performances, ensuring that the shrieks and swoops with which Kurtág underlines the extreme emotions involved do not get in the way of the soaring, immersive eloquence that is the music’s strongest suit. Maybe the Avie recording for Narucki is just that bit more spacious and smoothly balanced than the Audite version. But there are more obvious differences that may make it easier to choose one over the other. Audite expects you to download the crucial texts, rather than providing them in the booklet as Avie does, and Audite’s English versions of the German notes are not ideally idiomatic. Also in Avie’s favour is the rest of the programme, which offers the mesmerising monodies of the Attila József Fragments (1981) as the main complement to Scenes from a Novel. Audite opts for the 22 often tiny aphorisms setting German texts taken from the scrapbooks of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1999).

These were originally drafted as vocal monodies, Kurtág eventually adding the double bass accompaniments included here. Given the quirky character of Lichtenberg’s texts – sometimes teasingly abstract, sometimes gnomically whimsical – the role of the accompaniment is inevitably less expressively transparent than with the more atmospheric Dalos or József settings, and the overall effect is rather less rewarding. Yet even if the programmes as a whole are not sufficiently complementary to encourage an unqualified recommendation for buying both, Audite’s inclusion of two purely instrumental works, the early set of Duos for violin and cimbalom and the tiny Hommage à Berényi Ferenc, which ends the disc with Kurtág in unusually gentle, even nostalgic mood, are difficult to resist.

Среди новых записей, приходящих в редакцию...

Das Streichtrio, und das wird leider immer noch nicht wirklich wertgeschätzt, erfordert eine nuanciertere Aufführungspraxis als diejenige des Streichquartetts. Im Trio liegen alle Stimmen gewissermaßen offen da, und das erfordert von den Musikern höchste Konzentration und nicht nachlassende Anspannung, die sich aber als solche nicht aufdrängen sollte. Hinzu kommt noch die oft konzertant-virtuos gesteigerte Spieltechnik: Jeder spielt im Triosatz für sich und ist doch immer in ein partnerschaftliches Musizieren eingebunden.

Das Trio Lirico, bestehend aus Franziska Pietsch, Sophia Reuter und Johannes Krebs, erweist sich in diesen Einspielungen nicht nur als ein mit makelloser Technik bestens eingespieltes Trio, sondern verwandelt auch die besondere Intensität des Triospiels in eine Intensität der Ausdrucksgestaltung. Sie färbt hier Werke ein, die ohnehin schon abgrundtief melancholisch, ja schwermütig gestimmt sind.

Im Trio von Mieczyslaw Weinberg, dessen Musik zu Recht endlich beachtet wird, drückt sich Einsamkeit und Verlassenheit aus, wie man sie sonst nur noch aus dem Spätwerk von Schostakowitsch kennt. Und in den Trios von Penderecki und Schnittke erweist sich in der Lesart des Trio Lirico die mitunter atemlose, auch lauernde Stille als Kehrseite schroffer, rüder musikalischer Attacken. Das alles macht das Trio Lirico ohne eingreifende musikalische Gestaltung erfahrbar. Es spielt aus der Musik heraus: bezwingend, ergreifend, empathisch; es fühlt sich nicht in die Musik ein oder belädt sie mit Emotionen, sondern interpretiert mit "objektivierender" Geste, die zwanglos betroffen macht.

Dirk Wieschollek: "Kurtág: Scenes; Viktoriia Vitrenko, David Grimal, Luigi Gaggero, Niek de Groot (audite). Kurtágs aphoristische Vokalzyklen in mustergültig intimer Darstellung. Kleinode kompositorischer Konzentration auf das Wesentliche."