SUNDAY MARCH 3RD Rameau, NaisIt's remarkable the attention that's being paid now in the twenty first century to opera of the French baroque. There were some very fine historically informed recordings of those antique works in the discography by the end of the twentieth century. They are being supplanted by even better ones. Consider Nais (1749), a pastorale heroique by Jean Philippe Rameau. In 1980 the French Erato label released an LP recording of Nais, as it was staged at the 1980 English Bach Festival with the eminent baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan conducting the period instrument players and festival chorus. The live-in-performance tapings were made at the Opera Royal, Versailles. This modern revival of the opera observed cuts in the score made during Rameau's lifetime. I broadcast the Erato LP's on Sunday, December 8, 1991. After Erato reissued Nais on two CD's in 1995 I broadcast the opera again (Sunday, January 23, 2000). Now along comes a new, much more musically complete Spanish Glossa label recording made in Budapest in 2017 in co-production with the Center for Baroque Music at Versailles. Gyorgy Vashegyi directs the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra with an international cast of vocal soloists. Glossa released their Nais in 2018 on two generously timed compact discs. The opera was originally commissioned in 1749 in celebration of the peace treaty concluding the War of the Austrian Succession. It contains some of Rameau's most beautiful music for the stage. The orchestral music of the prologue is a particularly powerful stroke of dramatic genius. The story of the opera concerns the sea god Neptune's infatuation with the nymph Nais. After reading Cuthbert Girdlestone's definitive biography of Rameau I became convinced that he is one of the greatest of all baroque composers, one who should rightly be ranked alongside Bach and Handel. He was certainly the greatest composer of French opera in the eighteenth century. Rameau's lyric theaterworks represent the culmination of almost a century of development of the operatic model established by Lully.

 

SUNDAY MARCH 10TH Doyle, Heresy This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday in the traditional church calendar, beginning the forty day penitential season of Lent: the time when good Catholics are supposed to devote themselves to fasting, prayer and the contemplation of the doctrines of the Faith. On the first Sunday of Lent, 2019 this program gets off entirely on the wrong foot with an opera (God forbid!) about heresy. Irish electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle (b. 1949) stumbled into the composition of his first and only opera Heresy (2013) because of a friend of his in the recording industry who had an independent label of his own called Heresy Records. Eric Fraad suggested the topic of heresy and Doyle picked out the name of a famous heretic, the Italian Renaissance intellectual Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). He was a pantheist at the wrong time in history. Bruno's concepts of the cosmos go beyond Copernicus to prefigure the understanding of the universe we have today through the science of astronomy. After a nine year-long heresy trial by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, he was burned at the stake, a martyr for the truth. The Irish literary genius James Joyce idolized Bruno and referred to him obliquely in Finnegan's Wake. That Joyce connection gave Doyle the impetus to compose his electronic opera Heresy in 2013, with Bruno as its tragic hero. The official premiere of Heresy took place at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2016 and it was broadcast the following year over Radio Ireland Lyric FM. The 2018 release of the opera on two Heresy Records CD's conflates the 2016 recorded production with tracks from a previous tryout staging in 2013. Doyle also thinks of Heresy as his 'Space Opera" because it ends in outer space.

 

 

SUNDAY MARCH 17TH Dvorak, Saint Ludmila On this second Sunday in Lent I'm bringing out for a fourth airing our station's old Supraphon recording of Antonin Dvorak's oratorio St. Ludmila. I had presented this same three-LP set on three previous occasions during the Lenten/Paschal period in 1986, 2007 and 2013. A thousand years ago the pagan Czechs received Christian missionaries from the West, representing the Roman Catholic faith, and from the East, bearing with them Slavonic Orthodoxy. A Bohemian princess Ludmila sided with the proselytizers from the East. A power struggle ensued within the royal house of Bohemia over the conversion of Ludmila to Orthodox Christianity. She was assassinated and soon came to be revered as a holy martyr. The cult of St. Ludmila served in later centuries as a rallying point for Czech nationalism. Her martyrdom was exactly the right subject for the leading nineteenth century Czech nationalist composer to set to music. Dvorak's St. Ludmila premiered in Birmingham, England in 1886 with considerable success. (The English public have welcomed new oratorios since the time of Handel, and the Victorians also very much liked Dvorak's music.) Supraphon, the old Czechoslovak state record label, recorded this masterwork in 1965, when Vaclav Smetacek conducted the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, with five native Czech speaking vocal soloists.

 

 

SUNDAY MARCH 24TH Porpora, Il Gedeone Oratorio as a musical genre is Italian in origin, and the development of the Italian sacred oratorio paralleled that of the Italian baroque opera seria. They were twin sisters stylistically, so when Lent came and Italian opera houses closed for the duration, the staged sister artform simply switched places with the unstaged form of the same music. One excellent specimen of the Italian baroque oratorio is Nicola Porpora's Il Gedeone, which was commissioned for performance during Holy Week of 1737 before the Imperial Court of the Hapsburgs in Vienna. The oratorio tells the Old Testament story of Gideon, the righteous judge and military hero of the Israelites. Porpora's musical handling of the libretto is as emotional and dramatic as what he did for any opera seria. Il Gedeone was recorded in Vienna for release in 1999 through the German cpo record label. Martin Haselbock directs the Wiener Akademie period instrument ensemble and the Vokalensemble Nova, with countertenor Kai Wessel heard in the title role. I last broadcast Il Gedeone on Sunday, April 2, 2000.

 

 

SUNDAY MARCH 31ST Handel, Deborah In his early years as a composer, during his sojourn in Italy (1706-10) George Frideric Handel wrote an Italian language sacred oratorio, La resurrezione

(1708), which you have heard on this program around Eastertime in 1994 and 2012. Deborah (1733) is Handel's first full-scale oratorio in English language. It was the highly successful revival of Esther that stimulated the composition of Deborah. Composed in 1718 for private performance, Esther was a much less ambitious choral work than Deborah. Bernard Gates' production of Esther showed the English public the potential grandeur of Handel's unique oratorio style. Eventually Handel reworked Esther on a larger scale, but from the first he crafted Deborah in his truly grand manner. The Old Testament heroine of that name is an Israelite woman who assassinates the leader of an invading army. Conductor Robert King, a specialist in baroque performance practice, collaborated with Handel scholar Anthony Hicks in putting together a complete performing score of Deborah, drawing upon previously unavailable manuscript sources. They restored the splendid overture, with echoes of the Royal Fireworks Music, that was used in revivals of this oratorio in 1744 and '49. Deborah was recorded in 1993 for the British Hyperion record label. King leads his own King's Consort of period instrumentalists, the Choir of New College, Oxford and the Choristers of Salisbury Cathedral, with soprano Yvonne Kenny featured as the Jewish prophetess. That Hyperion recording I last broadcast on Sunday, March 17, 1996. There was a subsequent Naxos recording of Deborah that I presented on Sunday, November 4, 2002. This Sunday I return to the Hyperion release.

 

 

SUNDAY APRIL 7TH Rossini, Mose in Egitto The Italian oratorios of the eighteenth century may have been unstaged operas, but there were also staged Italian lyric theaterworks dealing with Biblical subjects. One such from the early nineteenth century is Gioacchino Rossini's Mose in Egitto (1818). I featured a PHILIPS label LP recording of "Moses in Egypt" on Palm Sunday,1986. I confess I forgot about this Rossini masterpiece thereafter. Only now in the twenty first century did I think back to it, and so I feature it again for this Fifth Sunday of Lent, 2019. Rossini created this work in the sub-genre of azione tragico-sacra, as it's styled in Italian language. Mose in Egitto began as a fiasco in its premiere staging in Naples. A year later in 1819 Mose was produced again in revised version and became one of Rossini's most popular operas. In 1827, after he had moved to Paris, Rossini rewrote the opera yet again to a French libretto. This new Moise opera was also hugely popular, so popular it was translated back into Italian and completely replaced the 1819 original. That earlier version was recorded in digital sound for PHILIPS with Claudio Schimone conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Ambrosian Opera Chorus. Mose in Egitto has more choral writing like an oratorio. It includes some of Rossini's finest music for solo voices as well, and the plot has enough love interest to satisfy those who expect high operatic passions. Italian basso Ruggiero Raimondi sings the leading role of the great Hebrew prophet. Pharao is the distinguished German bass Siegmund Nimsgern.

 

SUNDAY APRIL14TH Telemann, Seliges Erwagen I customarily offer listeners a Passion oratorio or something similar on Palm Sunday. The most famous of such works is, of course, Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Bach's colleague Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) wrote many more Passion settings than Bach and long outlived him. In fact, Telemann was one of the single most prolific composers in the history of music.) Over three decades plus of Palm Sundays I have aired recordings of some of Telemann's output of Lutheran church music for Eastertide, for instance, his setting of Brockes Passion (1716), which went over the air on March 28,2010 (Jacobs/Akademie fur Alte Music Berlin/RIAS Kammerchor, Harmonia Mundi CD's, c2009).    

Many of the leading composers in Northern Germany in the early eighteenth century took on Brockes Passion (Handel included). Seliges Erwagen or "Blessed Contemplation" is not a musical setting of the Passion narrative of one of the four Gospels. Rather, it is a sequence of nine cantatas which are dramatic meditations on the suffering and death of Christ. In its earliest form it may have been performed in 1719. It definitely was given during Holy Week of 1722 in Hamburg in its revised form and became one of the most widely played works of its kind throughout Central Europe in the eighteenth century, surpassing even Brockes Passion. "Blessed Contemplation"has no Evangelist or narrator. It does have solo singing roles for Jesus, Peter, the High Priest Caiaphas and the allegorical figures of Devotion or Faith and Zion (ie. The Church). Seliges Erwagenwas recorded live in performance by NDR North German Radio in the course of the 2017 Hamburg Telemann Festival. Gottfried von der Goltz conducts the period instrument players of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. The French Aparte label issued this Telemann oratorio on two compact discs in 2018.

 

 

SUNDAY APRIL 21ST Elgar, The Kingdom Sir Edward Elgar's popularity in his home country rested on his oratorios. The English have always loved choral singing. Choral societies abounded in the grim industrial cities of Victorian England. It was for the Three Choirs Festival at Birmingham

that Elgar wrote his last oratorio The Kingdom

(1906). Elgar compiled his text for The Kingdom mainly from passages of the first four chapters of the Acts of the Apostles plus other verses drawn from the Gospels. Some critics think Elgar never again matched the sublime excitement of The Dream of Gerontius (1900). The Kingdom is in its own way a great work in the oratorio genre. It was intended to be the second part of a trilogy of sacred musical dramas that Elgar never completed. It is, however, not really a dramatic musical conception, but something of an essentially reflective nature. If it has any dramatic content, that would lie in the mystic drama that transpired between Jesus Christ and his disciples in the Upper Room. The great English conductor Sir Adrian Boult left us his interpretation of The Kingdom on EMI LP's. In the 1969 recording for EMI Boult led the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a stellar cast of English vocal soloists of that period. The Boult recording I broadcast on Easter Sunday, 1988. Not long after that, on Sunday, February 26,1989. I presented what was then a new RCA Red Seal compact disc release of The Kingdom with the American Leonard Slatkin conducting the London Philharmonic and Philharmonic Choir. This 1988 Red Seal release on two CD's I feature again this Easter Sunday.

 

 

 

SUNDAY APRIL 28TH Rachmaninoff, Russian Easter Vesper Mass, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,The Miserly Knight Due to the "Old Style" Julian calendar that Eastern Orthodoxy follows Russian Easter falls on this Sunday. That gives me the opportunity to present one of the treasures of Russian Orthodox choral music, Sergei Rachmaninoff's Russian Easter Vesper Mass, Op. 37 and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op.31 (1910). The Liturgy music predates Rachmaninoff's better known All Night Vigil Vespers (1915) for Holy Saturday evening, Op. 37, numbers from which were extracted for concert performance. (Curiously, Rachmaninoff was never an observant Orthodox Christian, but he always loved the Old Slavonic monadic liturgical chants and studied them intensively in preparation for his harmonized choral treatments of them.) The Vespers treatments have been more frequently recorded. I have presented various recordings of the Op. 37 Vespers at Eastertime in years past. On April 14, 1985 I broadcast a liturgically complete recording of Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil music. It was styled Evening Service when it was presented on three Musical Heritage Society LP's. The choral forces in this case were the Johannes Damascenus Choir of Essen and the Choir of the Papal Russian College in Rome. All the music of Op. 31 and what other recordings left out of Op.37 was recorded in 1994 for the Austrian Capriccio label. The recording was made in the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. Two choral groups participated in the effort, neither of them Russian: the Bulgarian National Choir and the Sofia Orthodox Choir. The two audio CD's and a documentary DVD were issued by Capriccio first in 1996 and again in 2009. I last presented the Mass and Liturgy on Russian Easter Sunday, May 5, 2013.

   There will be time remaining to present something else by Rachmaninoff: his hour-long opera in two acts The Miserly Knight (1904) in its 2004 release on a single Chandos silver disc. The Miserly Knight was recorded in studio production in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with Valeri Polyansky directing the Russian State Symphony Orchestra. The Baron, who is the miser, is bass Mikhail Guzhov. The story of the opera Rachmaninoff derived from one of the four "Little Tragedies' of the nineteenth century Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. The sin of greed is the focus of Pushkin's tale. The Miserly Knight from Chandos I aired previously on Sunday, June 22, 2008.