The Lully Effect
Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra/Barthold Kuijken
Naxos 8.573867
Total Time:  62:47
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

French Baroque music tends to be overshadowed by the work of German and Italian composers.  When the latter has a composer with 600+ concertos to his name (Vivaldi) and the former is considered the homeland of one of the greatest composers of all time (Bach), it is hard to get beyond this to the other composers of the time.  Often the regional styles of playing and the overall sound of this music can be lost in the mass wash of familiarity.  When we overlook one of these “regional” colors we can lose sight of how they were adapted and changed until they become the more International style we tend to associate with Handel.  In this new Naxos release, the early music conductor and performer Barthold Kuijken hopes to help listeners regain a sense of the impact of French Baroque music.  He is currently the artistic director and conductor of the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra which performs on period instruments here.

The recording helps us see this progression and development of the French sound using music that has tended to be more popularly recorded.  The album opens with two selections from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s (1632-1687) opera Armide (1686).  There is a brief overture and then the “Passacaille” from the second scene in Act V.  Most noticeable here are the many ornamental additions that help bring the music alive.  It is also the first time one will begin to notice the unique sound of the ensemble.  The operatic forces are scaled back a bit to allow for a clearer textural sound.  One will notice the outer edges of the sound to be stronger which has to do with the way the doubling of winds for the violin and bass lines.  Violas meanwhile are assigned the middle textures.  This creates interesting shifts from three to five parts with the basso continuo helping fill things in as one might expect.

Ornamentation, with its little turns and twists, is one of the hallmarks of the French court style and it is then a great treat to hear how this is applied to the Overture Suite in e, TWV 55:e3 (1716) by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).  Telemann is really one of the great masters of Baroque music whose work is often far more adventurous than Bach’s.  The opening movement is a French overture, an approach attributed to Lully, with its slow opening and dancelike faster section.  This concept though would make its way into the opening movement of the symphony (especially Haydn).  The requisite period dances are included: Menuet and hornpipe.  More fun are the two descriptive movements.  The first titled “Les Cyclopes” referring to the monster Odysseus encountered.  The other is the “Galimatias en rondeau” which essentially translates as a “nonsensical” rondeau.  Rather unique departures for the genre.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) tends to be remembered solely for his Treatise on Harmony (1722).  He would have great success writing opera, or more specifically musical tragedies, and stage works.  The suite here from Dardanus (1739/44) is one familiarly recorded, though not always with this sort of attention to period practice.  It takes its story inspiration from Greek mythology.  The suite is a blend of dances and airs creating a variety of shades and styles to help the listener hear how this French orchestral style continued toward mid-century.  At a little over thirty minutes, it represents the more substantial work on the disc.

The Indianapolis orchestra is on excellent display here with great energy.  The music really sparkles here where it needs to and adds a great sense of drama.  Also worth noting is how the music continues to spin along coming to nice dramatic cadences.  While the music of Lully and Rameau could benefit from more exploration of this ensemble, the release does include a few other suggestions from the Naxos catalog that can continue to guide one’s interest.  This is, though, an excellent way to begin one’s exploration of this music.

Bach : Goldberg Variations
Wolfgang Rubsam, lute-harpsichord
Naxos 8.573921
Total Time:  78:24
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is filled with the core stylistic expressions of the Baroque Period.  For many of us who grew up in the late 20^th Century, this music went from being performed on the instruments of our time to a burgeoning exploration of recreating, or using, instruments of the Baroque to try and hear how the music might have sounded at the time.  The argument over whether period or contemporary instruments are necessary continues to be an issue among musicologists.  What can happen is that with music that has become familiar we might become accustomed to the way it sounds.  Wanda Landowska’s classic recording on harpsichord gave us the chance to hear the Goldberg Variations on a “period” instrument at a time when it was mostly performed on piano.  Piano versions abound in the catalog with Glenn Gould’s more clinical, and cerebral, performance revealing much about the inner workings of Bach’s lines and harmony.  This new release gives us a chance to experience this music on another type of instrument of the period, the lute-harpsichord.

The lautenwerck was a more mellow keyboard instrument that allowed more cantabile style playing.  It has gut strings and some of the strings are used to add sympathetic vibration.  Keith Hill is one of the modern makers of this instrument and constructed the one used on this new recording by Wolfgang Rubsam.  Over the past few years, Rubsam has been recording Bach’s keyboard works, albeit on piano, to great critical acclaim.  Here he then turns to this unique keyboard, the one preferred by Bach in his later years.

The Goldberg Variations were published by Bach in 1741 who paid for it himself.  After a moving “Aria”, Bach begins one of the greatest explorations of variation technique in music.  Thirty variations explore the bass line, itself a rather unique choice, and the work concludes with a repeat of the opening aria.  What makes the collection important is that it gives the performer an opportunity to learn and explore a number of Baroque forms (canons, fughettas, a final quodlibet) and different intervals and a host of the sorts of dances popular common to the Baroque suite (French overture, corrente, gigue, minuet, passepied, polonaise, sarabande).  Some of the music also has that quality of an “exercise” that expands upon the keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.  Thus, it is a grouping of music that has German, French, and Italian styles to discover.  Some of this is lost on a modern listener who is unfamiliar with how unique these regional styles were and how people at the time would recognize this far more than we could today without some guidance.

The goal of Rubsam’s performance is to help us experience this music anew.  The transparency of the instrument thus helps do this from the start.  The best way to describe this is as if the work was being performed on a lute with its more distinct ability to iterate each pitch in the line.  As such then, the ornamentations that occur also then help provide a clarity of line that is a hallmark of this music.  Rubsam also follows period practice here by adding ornamentations and appropriate variations within repeated sections.  The extended time allowed on CD gives him room to do so. What is striking is that the right and left hand lines are so crystal clear, but the sound of the instrument still allow there to be a little resonance that warms the music.  This is essentially what appealed to Bach and which help Rubsam’s more singing style in this new release.  Often, Bach can be performed such that it feels distant, or “cold”, and that is gone from this performance.  Each of the variations, and some are obviously more interesting than others, really does make on pay attention and feels like more than just an exercise.  This is in part to Rubsam’s style of playing here and the way the instrument is responding to it.

At nearly 80 minutes, this is a rather full album of variation technique and again the piece itself is one more for study than one you might sit and listen to, but it is consistently engrossing and Rubsam’s recording will certainly be one worth adding to the collection of Bach aficionados.  By studying the way this music is approached on different keyboards we get a sense for the technical compositional skill Bach used.  How we appreciate the sheer pleasure of listening to this unfold is going to take some getting used to, but this new release will certainly have much to recommend repeated play.

Sound quality is quite beautiful and the performance, recorded at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Valparaiso, Indiana, is captured well on this release.  Rubsam has recorded the Well-Tempered Klavier on the lute-harpsichord and that may be an even more revealing set of pieces to hear how the instrument’s response assists clarity in fugal writing.