Machaut, The Dart of Love, The Orlando Consort (Hyperion); Veracini, Violin Sonatas, Valerio Losito, Federico Del Santo (Brilliant Classics).I thought we were in the same area as the Gothic Voices' Castle of Fair Welcome with Guillaume de Machaut, but not really. Machaut died in 1377 whereas the stars of the other album are Robert Morton, born c 1430, Gilles de Binchois, born c 1400, and Guillaume Dufay, 1397. But I hope it's fair to say that stylistic change between generations was not quite as rapid as it has become six hundred years later.
Machaut, or at least the account of these ballades and motets by the Orlando Consort, takes a more rarified account of love than the sensual Le Souvenir de vous me tue of Morton or the general tenor of the Castle. It would appear to be a more academic and studied business for Machaut, which is not to say that these pieces are necessarily cold but they have a more monastic air about them.
Why I was interested in it was the quartet setting of countertenor, two tenors and baritone. I was expecting something more like string quartets for voices but that was my mistake since the string quartet was still 400 years ahead of Machaut. So it is something much barer that we get here, sometimes almost forbiddingly so, but greater familiarity and closer listening reveal harmonies and interplay weaving their pattern of expression, most unusually in the one piece questionably attributed not to Machaut but to Denis Le Grant.
Track 11, Ballade 17, Sans cuer, m'en vois/Amis dolens/Dame, par vous, creates a hypnotic, glowing bell-like cantus firmus, full of conventional complaints of sorrow but ending in some resolution that the lady being addressed comforts the poet, quite possibly Machaut himself, 'for all the miseries it has been his lot to experience' and that he is 'brought to life again by her, transported to paradise from the hell he formerly inhabited'. It doesn't always work but it's worth a try. Such a gambit is always likely to backfire, though, if she was looking for someone with a bit more adventure in them.
I'm not disappointed in the album but these pieces are not going to displace Robert Morton as favourites from this distant epoch, all of which comes to us sounding so clear and clean and wholesome.
Whereas I am utterly exhilarated by Veracini, who I heard twice on the radio two weekends ago by some odd quirk of programme planning, never having heard of him before. It is said that when Tartini heard Veracini play in 1716, he was so impressed that he retreated from Venice to Ancona to further improve his own technique. And that is the Tartini famous for his own 'devil's trill'.Accompanied by a harpsichord that is always doing its bit without being intrusive, Valerio Losito must be quite some player, too, to take on the challenge of these sonatas 'from unpublished manuscripts'.
As so often proves to be the case with these virtuoso players and composers, Veracini has some extraordinary biographical notes to add to his musical ones, he
survived a fall from the second floor window of a house, and lost all that he had in a shipwreck.
The recording, in a chiesa in Rieti, is captured perfectly with a close-up of the baroque violin's string tone but also a sense of space around it. As it moves through its ever widening themes, slow, fast and ultimately, at times, flamboyant, I had to eventually stop and concentrate a bit harder, knowing that this was the first time I'd ever heard these pieces. I'm not sure if great music is more impressive the first time you hear it or when you know what's coming but I'm sure that the best things are impressive first time out and it was immediately apparent that Veracini belonged in that top bracket of baroque violin music with the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, the Heinrich Biber, and then the Buxtehude, the Westhoff and Thomas Baltzar I only found out about in recent years and, of course, Corelli and Vivaldi. I am ashamed it took me so long to find out.
It is, by now, a slightly specialist area and not everybody in Europe in the first half of the C18th knew about this music. They needed to be affluent enough to be able to hear it played live and couldn't return to whichever composer they wanted to listen to on a CD. So, one great advantage of technological progress and a genuine improvement in the way we live now is that even a lowly clerk like me can listen to it whenever they want.
This is the most impressive music I have found out about, and one of the best discs I have bought, in recent years.
John Peel used to say he was always more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that which he had. I never agreed with that. I wasn't prepared to swap the Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tallis, Shostakovich, Sibelius and the Motown, reggae, T. Rex, Jesus & Mary Chain and the Magnetic Fields for a whole pile of stuff I had not yet come across, no matter how widely I had been looking.
But on Track 12 here, the Allegro from the prosaically entitled Sonata in A, it is just pure showing off, without even any contribution from the harpsichord, and one begins to wonder if Peel had a point.
But, thank heavens, we don't have to choose. If you didn't have what you knew already, you would have nothing to judge the rest by to know how brilliant this is. I've no idea how much it cost, probably less than a tenner, but it was worth all of that and all of it a few more times over.
Absolutely sensational. It is a shame it is dated 2014 or it would be long odds on to be the best disc of this year.
