Ensemble Masques

Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Legrenzi: La morte del cor penitente (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:17:26 minutes | 2,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

A highly prolific composer, Giovanni Legrenzi practised his art in oratorios and other works for the church, as well as in opera and chamber music. In fact he explored all the musical genres of his period, taking over the baton handed on by Gabrieli and Monteverdi, and enjoying an enviable reputation among his contemporaries. Better known during his lifetime (1626-1690) for his operas rather than for his religious music, Legrenzi was widely admired and copied all over Europe.

Of his eight known oratorios, only three have survived, including this gem: La morte del cor penitente (The Death of the Repentant Heart), a chamber oratorio probably composed in 1671. The theme is the spiritual development of the Sinner, the central figure of the work, who must pay his debt to God to save his immortal soul. The oratorio’s text provides a whole vivid universe of ‘affects’ (emotions) relating to spiritual torments and temptations. In his pilgrimage from the Cross to the heavenly light, beset by the competing voices of Sin and Hope, the Sinner duly makes his repentance, and finally achieves redemption.

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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Bach & Bernier: Routes du café (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:36 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

The history of coffee is fascinating! From the opening of the first establishments in Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century to the appearance and diffusion of the drink in Europe in the following century, coffee and coffee houses were highly fashionable. Two composers devoted a cantata to the topic. Gottfried Zimmermann opened his famous coffee house in Leipzig in 1715 and organised concerts there. Around 1735, Bach composed his famous cantata Schweigt still, plaudert nicht, which was probably performed there. It depicts the humorous dispute between a father and his daughter over her consumption of coffee. In Paris, Nicolas Bernier’s cantata Le Caffé (1664-1734) praised the beverage and its many virtues. The ‘Coffee Road’ Olivier Fortin has mapped out here makes a detour to London around 1660, where the composer Matthew Locke frequented the Turk’s Head Coffee House and promoted a string fantasia. Fortin has chosen to organise this album like a fasil, a ‘suite of pieces’ in traditional Ottoman music, with taqsims (improvisations) interspersed among the compositions and played on such instruments as the ney flute, the Arab violin and the yayli tanbur.

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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Bach: Ouvertures-Suites (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:17:29 minutes | 2,98 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

The orchestral suite, sometimes simply called ‘overture’ because of the imposing dimensions of its opening movement, enjoyed great popularity in the early eighteenth century, especially in central Germany. Bach had discovered the genre in his youth and cultivated it until his late period in Leipzig. This recording assembles his four overture-suites, including the famous Suite no.2 BWV 1067, which belongs among the late works. Numerous copying errors in the instrumental parts suggest that this piece was originally written a tone lower – in A minor – and therefore probably for a solo instrument other than the transverse flute: in the present recording, this first version, reconstructed from the clues mentioned above, is performed with solo oboe.

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