Search - Luigi Boccherini, Ensemble Claviere, Ilario Gregoletto :: Boccherini: Complete Clavier Quintets

GRAZIOSO

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 01/01/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"On top of their marvellous set of Haydn's piano trios Brilliant Classics are now offering us the complete piano quintets of Boccherini, brilliantly priced again at that. There are 12 of them, 3 per disc, all apparently from the same period of the composer's life. That might account for the lack of a sense of development in the musical idiom here, but I'm not sure I ever detected that in Boccherini to any great extent anyhow. Boccherini was 11 years Haydn's junior and 13 years older than Mozart. He was no Haydn, still less was he any Mozart, but his quintets have the easy and natural grace that seems to have been the 18th century's birthright when it came to music. They are a kind of musical blancmange - smooth, sweet, easy to take in, totally consistent and of course totally unchallenging to the listener. The melodic lines are unfailingly beautiful, and one expressive feature that Boccherini knows how to use effectively is modulation. For the most part this consists of coming to a full stop in one key and resuming in the contrasted key, but there are a few seamless transitions too. The instrumental writing is dulcet but unadventurous - the first violin gets most of the melody, the fortepiano has more of a role as accompanist and provider of supporting harmony than in Haydn's trios, and the cello is given a little more prominence than Haydn gives it, as is not surprising given that the composer was himself a cellist. For all that, the cello parts seem technically undemanding so far as I can tell, and I imagine that this is because the instrument was still comparatively new and there were probably few players of any great proficiency to be found.



The five instruments used are contemporary with the composer. The players (all with Italian names) were not previously known to me, but I am thoroughly glad to make their acquaintance here, and they do a first-class job in my own opinion. Tempi for one thing are very nicely judged, the technical proficiency and sense of style seem to my ears absolutely spot on, and I was never in the slightest danger of being bored by what I was hearing. The recordings were done over two sessions in 2005, its quality is discreet and well judged, and I would even say that for music-lovers still a little dubious about `period' instruments and `authentic' renditions, this might be as good a place as any to learn to relax with the general style.



Even the packaging of the set is excellent. The four discs are compactly presented in a stiff cardboard box, and the four envelopes containing them are slightly less sturdy than in the set of Haydn trios - to their entire advantage, I should say, as these cd's are much easier to extract and harder to mishandle accidentally. The liner-note by Emanuel Overbeeke is actually very thoughtful and interesting, but be warned that he's a bit of a wild man with a generalisation. When he tells us that the `classical' style involved more elaborate melody than the baroque style did I'm not sure what he means. If he's saying that the melody of Mozart and Beethoven was more elaborate than Bach's that seems to me plain nonsense. Again, what he says about bar-lines is only very partially true. It will do for Bach in the main, but not for Handel. It is characteristic of Handel's triple-time cadences that the last two bars of ¾ are really a single bar of 3/2, as in `And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed', and Handel will override bar-lines completely when it suits him, as at `The stars with deep amaze' in Samson. For all my pedantry over this I found his contribution very useful, although when he says that all these compositions have four movements don't believe him (not that it matters) - to find that most consist of four but some have five or three the heart of man need not be sore and is not like to be.

"

Charming

David Saemann | 03/10/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is absolutely lovely music. It is more familiar in the later versions for guitar and string quartet, but I feel the original versions are equally effective. This is a recording on original instruments, and it struck me as one of the better conceived bits of historically informed performance that I have ever heard. The fortepiano is an 1805 model, with a full and sustained sound, while the strings blend together and with the keyboard sound effortlessly. The music is always warm and gracious, a wonderful tonic to our noisier age. It also doesn't wear out its welcome; I find it very easy to listen to more than one of the CDs in a row. The sound engineering is a little cloudy, but it effectively conveys the tanginess of the sound of the original instruments. Needless to add, this is a great bargain."

"Ownage"

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 01/12/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I suppose being both a baseball fan and a Boccherini devotee isn't the usual, but there's a certain logic to it. Baseball, like chamber music, is a game of shifting configurations -- a duet (pitcher/hitter), a trio (Tinker to Evers to Chance), a full ensemble -- and smoothly varying tempos, from adagio to allegretto to andante majestoso. In baseball lingo, "ownage" refers to the situation where a hitter inexplicably dominates a certain pitcher, or vice versa. Luigi Boccherini (1745-1805) 'owns' the quintet form as thoroughly as any composer has ever owned a genre. Of the 200 'greatest hit' quintets of European music, to make a silly estimate, Boccherini composed 140. That is, he wrote at least 140 pieces of music for five string instruments or for four strings plus flute, guitar, or fortepiano. The 113 quintets for two violins, viola, and two cellos are Boccherini's greatest accomplishment, and deserve to be ranked alongside the sublime quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.



Why the quintet? There are some biographical contingencies to account for Boccherini's commitment to five-part music; Boccherini was himself a virtuosic cellist, very likely the most skillful cellist of his era, and it seems clear that he composed the most challenging passages of his early quintets for his own delectation. But many of his finest quintets of later years were composed after his own physical skills began to deteriorate; Boccherini suffered from some degree of skeletal tuberculosis. Thus there are, I think, more profound explanations for Boccherini's devotion to the quintet form, explanations based on Boccherini's distinctive musical concepts and style. Despite the widespread notion that Boccherini was chiefly a purveyor of elegant entertainments for the privileged classes, the truth is that Boccherini was an ardent experimentalist, both in musical structures and in sonorities. An intellectual composer, I dare say, rather like Haydn, fortunate in the opportunities to compose 'music for music's sake' that his career as a 'court composer' provided.



Boccherini was NOT a melodist, and certainly not a song writer. I recently had a conversation with cellist/musicologist Elizabeth Le Guin, author of the fine book "Boccherini's Body", about the rather surprising absence of song-like melodies in the quintets. Le Guin perceives Boccherini as the most physical -- tangible, audible -- of 18th C composers. His preoccupation was with the sounds of music, as they were heard in the ears and felt in the arms of the performers. She would argue, and I'd agree, that Boccherini was closer in aesthetic preoccupations to modernism than to classicism. His quintets are replete with effects of pure sonority, of playful experiments with the timbres of his instruments, solo and in ever-shifting configurations. Elizabeth pointed out that there are fifteen possible configurations of the four fiddles of a quartet, one tutti, four trios, six duos, and four solos. With a quintet, there are twenty-eight: one tutti, four quartets, seven trios, ten duos, and five solos. Boccherini gladly employs all twenty-eight in a kaleidoscopic flow of timbres, while his writing for cello uniquely explores the colors of the different strings, the acoustics of various bow techniques, and the astonishing range of the instrument. Boccherini's cellists often play passages ABOVE the notes of the violins, creating the possibility of a whole quintet of treble instruments. Boccherini's patterns of modulation and choice of keys is likewise rigorously selective, seeking always to value marvelous sonorities above architectonic progressions.



Boccherini wrote extremely little for keyboard instruments, particularly solo keyboards. As a string player, perhaps he felt less qualified to produce idiomatic keyboard works, although I'm sure he had a generic competence on the harpsichord and fortepianos of his time. This box of four CDs, produced by Brilliant Classics, contains all twelve of the quintets for four strings and fortepiano which Boccherini published between 1797 and 1799. Boccherini's income in his last decade of life was highly dependent on the sales of his published works, and there's no question that he composed these twelve quintets with an eye on the market. But they are NOT slapdash commercial frivolities. Particularly the final three (on disk 4 of this set) are bold proclamations of Boccherini's adulation of sonority. The whole set bubbles with exuberance and variety; with Boccherini, one must always remember that 'joy' is an emotion just as profound as 'gloom'. Honestly, I find Boccherini's exuberance to be a moving celebration of life, despite his failing body and oppressive financial straits.



Ensemble Claviere - all Italians - perform on 'original' instruments, that is, on fiddles with gut strings and using baroque bows, and a fortepiano from 1805. The string players are, by choice, brash and sometimes bumptious in their dynamic interpretation of this music; they are not afraid to handle their bows in the eccentric manner Boccherini himself prescribed in many of his quintets. Once in a while, their tuning gets more adventurous than orthodox, but they more than compensate by playing the music 'con amore.' The fortepianist, Ilario Gregoletto, shepherds the bounding, frolicking strings with mature discipline and serenity, so that the total effect of the music is often almost polychoral, strings to one side, keyboard to the other like two choirs facing each other in a florid rococo chapel. I like the sound of Gregoletto's fortepiano very much; it's clear in touch and timbre, without the rattling overtones of more modern pianos. Above all, it balances with the strings; it never battles them for acoustic prominence. But I don't mean to belittle the instrument's role in this music; the fortepiano has a grace of its own, which Boccherini exploits in cascades and filagrees.



Brilliant Classics is going about the business of assembling a 'complete' Boccherini edition in the best possible way, rather than in the potluck fashion of its Bach and Mozart bargain boxes. The recordings by the quintet La Magnifica Comunita, now up to volume 7, are all superb. Perhaps, if you have ten years to wait, you'll be able to get everything for one nominal price. I'm not that patient when it comes to great musical performances. The best time to hear Signore Boccherini's delightful "Quintetti, opera dedicata alla Nazione Francese" is now."