Corellimania
Michala Petri (recorder), Hille Peel (viola da gamba), Mahan Esfahanhi (harpsichord)
rec. 2022, Garnisons Kirke, Copenhagen, Denmark
OUR Recordings 6.220682 SACD [75]
Played by three performers who are all amongst the current masters of their instruments, and with a programme made up of works by Corelli, J.S. Bach, Handel and Telemann, this album promises much. I am happy to say that it certainly delivers almost all that it promises! As the disc’s title suggests, the programme has in mind the remarkable fame and influence of Arcangelo Corelli – both so widespread and powerful that word ‘Corellimania’ is hardly an exaggeration. To take just one example Roger North, writing around 1726, observed of English musical life “then came over Corelly’s first consort that cleared the ground of all other sorts of musicke whatsoever. By degrees the rest of his consorts, and at last the conciertos [op.6] came, all which are to musitians like the bread of life.” (Roger North on Music, ed. John Wilson, 1959, pp.310-11).
Though Corelli published only a relatively small body of music, his importance has been recognised by many writers; as Nicholas Anderson puts it (Baroque Music from Monteverdi to Handel (London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp.94-5) “Corelli was no more the inventor of the concerto than he was of the violin sonata, but in both he was the creator of a style which served as a model to later generations of composers”, while Manfred F. Bukofzer writes (Music in theBaroque Era, J.M. Dent, 1948, p.222) that “Arcangelo Corelli can take the credit for the full realization of tonality in the field of instrumental music. His works auspiciously inaugurate the period of late baroque music”. Corelli’s achievement consisted not so much in the invention of startling innovations as in the creation of fruitful and epoque-making syntheses. Indeed, the forms he wrote in, the trio sonata, the violin sonata, the sonata da chiesa, the sonata da camera and the concerto for strings were already extant when he made use of them. In his valuable monograph on Corelli, Arcangelo Corelli: New Orpheus of our Times, (OUP, 1999), Peter Allsop quotes W.S. Newman’s description of Corelli as “the convergence of past trends in momentarily ideal forms” (The Sonata in the Baroque Era, 6th edition, New York, 1983, p. 158) and sees Corelli as a more original figure than that wording suggests; Newman’s language no doubt presents the composer as too passive a figure, but a description such as Anderson’s, quoted above, as “the creator of a style” recognises the active creativity involved in the Corellian synthesis, a synthesis which established a balance between and within movements, blending contrapuntal textures and refined, quasi-operatic melodies. Corelli established four movements as the norm for sonatas, and the twelve concerti grossi making up his opus 6 served as foundational exemplars for many succeeding composers; the spread of Corelli’s influence was assisted by the contemporary growth of music publishing across Europe. One might see the connection as symbolised in the fact that one London music shop, in the Strand, advertised itself as being “at the Sign of the Corelli’s Head” (see A. Hutchings,The Baroque Concerto, New York, 1979, p.256).
However, Corelli’s influence was not disseminated only though his compositions, since he was also much sought after as a teacher. The Italian violinists/composers who studied with him included Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764), Pietro Castrucci (1679-1752) and Giovanni Battista Somis (1686-1763) Since many of his Italian students went on to work elsewhere in Europe, in cities such as London, Amsterdam and Paris, they indirectly a-spread knowledge of the models provided by Corelli. Some non-Italian musicians, including the Frenchman Jean-Jacques-Baptiste Anet (1676-1755) and the German Georg Muffat (1653-1704) also studied with Corelli. English students/imitators of Corelli included John Ravenscroft (c.1665-1697), who probably studied with Corelli – see Patrizio Barbieri and Michael Talbot, ‘A Gentleman in Exile: Life and Background of the Composer John Ravenscroft’, Early Music, 32, 2012, pp.3-35; Matthew Novell (c.1678-1728) – see Michael Talbot, ‘The Mysterious Matthew Novell: An English Imitator of Corelli’, (Music and Letters, 98, 2017,pp.343-64) and William Topham (c.1669-c.1709) and James Sherard (1666-1738).
The evidence for Corelli’s impact takes various forms, such as the writing of variations on themes by him, or Francesco Geminiani’s set of twelve concerto grosso arrangements (with embellishments) of Corelli’s Opus 5 violin sonatas (publ. London, 1726). Also worth attention are the Dissertazioni … sopra l’opera quinta del Corelli by Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768), consisting of reworkings of Corelli’s violin sonatas; exactly when these ‘dissertations’ were composed seems not to be known and they remained in manuscript until the 20th century. There were also striking musical tributes to Corelli in other forms, such as ‘La Corelli’, an intriguing piece in Louis Daquin’s Second Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, which might be described as a mildly parodic imitation of the Corellian manner. One of the most remarkable ‘tributes’ was the beautiful homage paid in François Couperin’s Le Parnasse ou L’Apothéose de Corelli(1724/5), the seven movements of which evoke scenes such as the Muses welcoming Corelli to Mount Parnassus and Corelli drinking from the Spring of Hippocrene. Its first movement, marked ‘Gravement’, which represents Corelli at the foot of Parnassus is surely modelled on the slow opening movements of Corelli’s church sonatas.
All this is the background to the opening sentence of the booklet note by Mahan Esfahani for this disc, in which Corelli is said to be “the progenitor of a style whose influence was pervasive enough throughout the eighteenth century that its characteristics more or less came to define an entire generation of music (and, alas, become hackneyed in lesser hands)”. A glance at the contents of the disc immediately makes it clear that there no “lesser hands” here! It opens with a performance of a Sonata in B minor from Corelli’s Opus 3 set of trio sonate da chiesa. This performance presents a perfect trialogue, with the three voices of recorder, viola da gamba and harpsichord distinct but always intimately interactive, in a beautifully lucid interpretation and fine recorded sound. The echoic sounds of recorder and viola gamba blend with Mahan Esfahani’s harpsichord in a sound world which is always rich, but never excessively so, the tone colours perfectly blended and mutually supportive. All who find joy in baroque music will surely find this opening movement irresistible. The complementary relationship between this delicious largo and the ensuing vivace is utterly beautiful. The third and fourth movements are perhaps not quite so enthralling, but they offer their own pleasures, being full of dignified emotion and unpretentious intelligence. The whole sonata is a ‘conversation’ conducted at a high level of intellectual and spiritual conviction, as Michala Petri, Hille Perl and Mahan Esfahani articulate its language to something like perfection.
Listening – and re-listening – to this sonata brought to my mind a quotation about Corelli which I jotted down some years ago; some 20 years ago, to judge by the dates in the old notebook in which I eventually found it. It comes from a book by John Gregory (1724-1773), a moral philosopher and Professor of the Practice of Physic in Edinburgh, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (1766) (I can’t now imagine why on earth I was reading the book!). In an interesting passage (pp.147-8) Gregory writes that “Corelli’s excellence consists in the chastity of his composition and in the richness and sweetness of his harmonies” and contrasts Corelli’s work with music which “sometimes pleases by its spirit and wild luxuriancy … but possesses too little of the elegance and pathetic expression of Music”. In praising Corelli’s ‘chastity’ of style I understand Gregory to refer to the kind of features which Schopenhauer, a few decades later, referred to in his ‘Essay on Authors and Style’: “An author should guard against using all unnecessary rhetorical adornment, all useless amplification, and in general, just as in architecture he should guard against an excess of decoration, all superfluity of expression — in other words, he must aim at chastity of style. Everything that is redundant has a harmful effect”.
Given Corelli’s evident respect for balance and (relative) simplicity, it is fitting that this disc should close, as it opens, with a work by Corelli, thus bookending a short selection of Corelli-related works by other composers. However, the closing work, the Violin Sonata in G minor, op.5 no.12 ‘La Folia’ is perhaps a little uncharacteristic of its composer, given its significant elements of virtuosic display. It serves, however, to remind us that like any composer of importance, Corelli is not easily pigeonholed. It is played here in an arrangement for recorder, published in London in 1702. Michala Petri plays the main melodic lines with exciting, but judicious, vitality, very ably supported by Hille Perl and Mahan Esfahan as the piece develops to an impressive climax. The rest of the album consists of pieces by other composers which, in varying ways and degrees, draw on the example of Corelli.
One of the disc’s highlights is the second of Telemann’s six Sonates Corellisantes (1735) in A major, originally scored for two violins and basso continuo. For all his use of the adjective corellisante Telemann isn’t, it seems to me, concerned to imitate the Corellian idiom, but to borrow some elements that interest him; one is the use of harmonic suspensions and another is the sequence of four movements – slow-fast-slow-fast which Corelli had established for the sonata da chiesa; here the four movements are marked ‘Largo’, ‘Allemande, ‘Sarabande’, ‘Corrente’ (and perhaps to take commercial advantage of the name). The balance of instrumental colours is judged to perfection throughout – Michala Petri clearly changes recorders more than once. The largo, the shortest of the movements, is ravishingly beautiful and the Allemande is a lively, compelling dance. The sarabande has an impressive dignity, while the closing Corrente rounds things off with a strong sense of unity and harmony (in more than a merely musical sense of the word) – this is music which makes me think of the kind of significance, both human and cosmic, which the Renaissance poet Sir John Davies (1560-1626) discovered in dance, as in these verses (17-18) from his long poem Orchestra (1596):
Dancing (bright Lady) then began to be,
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring
The Fire, Aire, Earth, and water did agree,
By Love’s persuasion, Nature’s mighty King,
To learn their first disordered combating:
And, in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.
Since when they still are carried in a round,
And changing come one in another’s place,
Yet doe they neither mingle nor confound
….
This wondrous miracle did Love devise
For Dancing is Love’s proper exercise.
Further delight comes in Mahan Esfahani’s dazzling performance of Handel’s Suite for harpsichord in B flat Major, HWV 434. Stylistically there isn’t any clear connection with Corelli’s music (at least I can’t hear one), but there was, of course, a personal connection. During his years in Italy – and specifically his time in Rome – Handel spent much of his time in the cultural circle around Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, one of Corelli’s principal patrons and Handel and Corelli are known to have worked together in Rome. Naturally, a composer of Handel’s intelligence could not have failed to recognise the quality of Corelli’s work. That he did is evident in his borrowing,
in for example, his Concerti Grossi, op.6, where the fact that this is his op.6, just as Corelli’s 6 concerti grossi formedhis op.6, is surely more than a coincidence. Handel’s concerti follow the structure of Corelli’s and his use of the concertino and concerto is patterned on that of Corelli. In the suite for harpsichord, any musical relationship between Corelli and Handel is secondary to the sheer quality of Mahan Esfahani’s performance. The Prelude with which it opens is a tour de force of virtuosity, which Esfahani plays with a kind of radiant panache. The third movement of the sonata, a limpidly ceremonious Air con Variazione, gets an equally impressive reading. The ‘Air’ of this movement is, of course, the theme which Brahms adopted for use in his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel of 1861. In 4/4 time, the ‘Air’ has a range of only a single octave, but this doesn’t inhibit the inventiveness of either Handel or Brahms. Handel presents just five variations, while Brahms wrote 25!
Handel is represented by another work too, his Sonata for alto recorder and basso continuo in D minor, HWV 367; a work which survives in a manuscript (Mu.ms.261, pp.52-60) in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Though the influence of Corelli is certainly audible – notably in the refined largo which opens the work, Handel, characteristically, is no mere imitator. Mahan Esfahani’s booklet notes are especially perceptive here and deserve quotation; he observes that Handel “slyly alluding both to the second half of Corelli’s op.5 [the 12 violin sonatas] and to the sorts of movements found in François Couperin’s Concerts Royaux, Handel introduces the dances of his adopted England […], both in the second movement which is clearly a hornpipe in the Purcellian vein, and the wittily angular melody of the penultimate movement, a bourée-cum-rigaudon straddling the line between the courtly and the rustic.” Amongst the major composers of the baroque, Handel is the one who can, magpie-like, borrow or steal from others – whether they be Italian, French or German – and unite all these ‘influences’ so that the result still sounds absolutely Handelian. Michala Petri plays the piece with astonishing beauty and subtle shades of tone and colour, very ably and sensitively supported by Perl and Esfahani.
Corelli was but one of the Italian composers with whose music J.S. Bach engaged – as composer, transcriber or performer – others included Albinoni, Frescobaldi, Vivaldi, Legrenzi and Locatelli, several of whom are discussed in, for example, Peter Williams’ article ‘Some thoughts on Italian elements in certain music of Johann Sebastian Bach’, Recercare, 11, (1999), pp.185-200. Corelli and Vivaldi were surely the most important of these figures for Bach. All three of the works by Bach recorded here have a relationship to Corelli, in one instance more directly than is the case with the other two. All were originally written for the organ. The Fugue on a theme by Corelli, BWV 579 uses thematic material from Corelli, from the second movement of the fourth sonata in Corelli’s op.3 violin sonatas; the Duettos, BWV 802-5 and the Chorale Prelude: “Von Gott will ich nicht lassen” BWV 658 are ‘Corellian’ in their imitation of the kind of dialogic patterns found in the writing for violin by Corelli and his imitators.
In BW579 Bach triumphantly undertakes a complete reworking of Coreli’s subject and countersubject. Corelli’s counterpoint is already subtle and interesting, but Bach expands it enormously (one might almost say he explodes it and reassembles the pieces). What Corelli left implicit and hidden, merely possible, as it were, Bach makes explicit in its full complexity. As a result, after Bach has displayed them to us, we can see/hear possibilities intrinsic to the original, part of its essential nature left unspoken by Corelli. Where Corelli’s double fugue is concise, Bach’s treatment of it is expansive. Mahan Esfahani (surely correctly) sees this as an example of how Bach was “able to show the inherent strength of thematic material through demonstrating what can be obtained and spun out of an idea by seeing it from every conceivable contrapuntal and harmonic angle”. The results are richly enjoyable, whether heard on the organ or, as here, in a successful arrangement (by who?) for recorder, viola da gamba and harpsichord, the music happily reconciling Corelli’s lyricism with the complexities of the German organ tradition. Indeed, I am not sure that I didn’t get more pleasure from this version than from most of the organ performances I have heard. The precision (and fluidity) of the ensemble playing is outstanding.
The four duets, BWV 802-805, played by Michala Petri and Hille Perl are equally captivating, full of graceful lucidity in which the weight of Perl’s viola da gamba and the vivacity of Petri’s recorder create a very engaging sound-world. However, I find the version of Bach’s Chorale Prelude ‘Von Gott will ich nicht lassen’ BWV 658 rather less exciting, though not without interest. Here, it seems to me the work works better on the organ. This reaction may only be a limitation of mine but does not, in any case, constitute any kind of serious reservation about the disc as a whole.
Given the sheer beauty of the sound heard on this album, both the instruments played and the recorded sound deserve mention. Hille Perl plays a Viola da Gamba of 1686 by the luthier Matthias Alban(i) of Bozen (now Bolzano) in the Tyrol. It was discovered in an Austrian convent in 1952 and was subsequently owned by an amateur gambist who had it restored by the German gambist and luthier Ingo Muthesius. In 2004 the owner bequeathed it to Perl in his will. Its range of colours and weight of sound is impressive. Mahan Esfahani plays an instrument made for him in 2003 by Matthias Kramer of Berlin, while Michala Petri plays several different recorders on the disc and provides the following note in the booklet: “The recorders on this disc has[sic] for me a special meaning. In 2022 I was contacted by Patricia van Duren Svendsen, the wife of recorder player […] Leif Ramløv Svendsen”. Petri had studied with Svendsen and his widow wanted to give her the “opportunity to perform on his fine collection of carefully selected baroque recorders by the Swiss maker Heinz Ammann […] this was a wonderful – though also sad – opportunity for me to follow the wish I had had for some years to explore more of the world of authentic recorders, tuned in a=415.” Is it, I wonder, merely fanciful to believe that the beauty of instrumental sound on this disc owes something to the emotional significance their instrument has for each of these very special musicians? The recording was made in the baroque Garnison’s Kirke, completed in 1706, in Copenhagen’s Sankt Annæ Plads. The acoustic of the church, as captured on this recording sounds perfectly appropriate for the music. Producer Mette Due has clearly done an excellent job.
My only minor reservation about this excellent disc is that some of the music it contains has relatively tenuous links with the music of Corelli. The inclusion of something by, for example, Geminani, who had close connections with Corelli, would have been valuable.
This is not, of course, the first disc to illustrate something of Corelli’s massive influence. Several such discs are discussed in two surveys in the journal Early Music: ‘Corelli and his legacy’ by Eric Cross, vol.34, 2006, pp.513-15 and ‘Corelli the archangel’ by David R.M. Irving, vol.41, 2013, pp.
692-694. I haven’t heard by any means all of the discs considered in these two essays and it would therefore be invidious to offer any particular recommendations; I do, though, feel safe in saying that although some of them may better demonstrate Corelli’s influence few, if any, of them are likely to be more aesthetically satisfying than this new disc.
Glyn Pursglove
Help us financially by purchasing from
Contents
Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
Sonata da Chiesa in B minor, op.3 no.4 (1689)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Fugue on a theme by Corelli, BWV 579 (c.1710)
George Frederic Handel (1685-1759)
Sonata for alto recorder and basso continuo in D minor, HWV 367 (c.1724)
Suite for harpsichord in B flat Major, HWV 434 (1733)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Four Duets for recorder and viola da gamba, BWV 802-805 (1739)
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Sonata Corellisante no. 2 in A major (1735)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Chorale: ‘Von Gott will ich nicht lassen’, from Lepiziger Choräle, BWV 658
Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
Sonata Op.5 no.12 in G minor “La Follia” (1700)
