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1 CD -
2292-44633-2 - (p) 1990
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| Georg Philipp
Telemann (1681-1767) |
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| Ino - Cantata - Text: Karl
Wilhelm Ramler |
33' 25" |
33' 25" |
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| -
Recitativo "Wohin? Wo soll ich hin?" |
0' 48" |
|
1
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| - Aria "Ungöttliche
Saturnia" |
6' 23" |
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2
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| -
Recitativo "O all ihr Mächte des
Olympus" |
3' 11" |
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3
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| - Larghetto
"Wo bin ich?" |
4' 25" |
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4
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| - Vivace
con molto affetto "Ivh seh' ihn!" |
3' 11" |
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5
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| - Tanz der
Tritoten: Allegramente - Vivace spirituoso
e con affetto |
1' 50" |
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6
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Recitativo "Ungewohnte Symphonien" |
1' 27" |
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7
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| - Aria "Meint
ihr mich, ihr Nereiden?" |
5' 19" |
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8
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| -
Recitativo "Und nun! Ihr wendet euch" |
2' 09" |
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9
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| - Aria "Tönt
in meinem Lobgesng" |
9' 22" |
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10
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| Georg Friedrich Händel
(1685-1759) |
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| Apollo e Dafne - Cantata à due
con stromenti - Text: B. Panfili |
30' 34" |
30' 34" |
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| -
Recitativo (Apollo) "La terra è
liberata" |
0' 51" |
|
11
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- Aria
(Apollo) "Prende il ben dell'universo"
|
3' 46" |
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12
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-
Recitativo (Apollo) "Ch'il superbetto
amore"
|
0' 33" |
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13
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- Aria (Apollo) "Spezza
l'arco"
|
2' 49" |
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14
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| - Aria (Dafne) "Felicissima
quest'alma" |
4' 35" |
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15
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- Recitativo (Apollo,
Dafne) "Che voce! Che beltà!"
|
1' 09" |
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16
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- Aria (Dafne) "Ardi,
ardori"
|
3' 58" |
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17
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| - Recitativo (Apollo,
Dafne) "Che crudel! Ch'importuno" |
0' 15" |
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18
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| - Duetto (Dafne, Apollo)
"Una guerra ho dentro il seno" |
1' 58" |
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19
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| - Recitativo (Apollo) "Placati
al fin, o cara" |
0' 24" |
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20
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| - Aria (Apollo) "Come
rosa in su la spina" |
2' 25" |
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21
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- Recitativo (Dafne) "Ah,
ch'un Dio non dovrebbe"
|
0' 26" |
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22
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| - Aria (Dafne) "Come
in ciel benigna stella" |
3' 08" |
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23
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| - Recitativo (Apollo,
Dafne) "Odi la mia ragion" |
0' 32" |
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24
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| - Duetto (Dafne, Apollo)
"Deh, lascia addolcire" |
2' 45" |
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25
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| - Recitativo (Apollo,
Dafne) "Sempre t'adorerò" |
0' 23" |
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26
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| - Aria (Apollo) "Mie
piante correte" |
3' 01" |
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27
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| - Aria (Apollo) "Cara
pianta" |
3' 42" |
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28
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| Roberta Alexander,
Ino (Telemann), Dafne (Händel) |
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| Thomas Hampson,
Apollo (Händel) |
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CONCENTUS
MUSICUS WIEN (mit
Originalinstrumenten)
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| -
Robert Wolf, Traverso (Telemann) |
-
Helmut Mitter, Violine |
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| -
Sylvie Summereder, Traverso
(Telemann) |
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Walter Pfeiffer, Violine |
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| -
Kathleen Putnam, Naturhorn
(Telemann) |
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Doris Köstemberger, Violine
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|
| -
Alois Schlor, Naturhorn
(Telemann) |
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Gerold Klaus, Violine |
|
| -
Hans Gangler, Oboe (Händel) |
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Maria Kubizek, Violine |
|
| -
Paul Hailperin, Oboe (Händel) |
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Peter Schoberwalter junior, Violine |
|
| -
Albert Grazzi, Fagott (Händel) |
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Kurt Theiner, Viola |
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-
Erich Höbarth, Violine
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-
Lynn Pascher, Viola |
|
| -
Alice Harnoncourt, Violine |
-
Dorle Sommer, Viola |
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| -
Andrea Bischof, Violine |
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Herwig Tachezi, Violoncello |
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| -
Anita Mitterer, Violine |
-
Mark Peters, Violoncello |
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| -
Peter Schoberwalter, Violine |
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Eduard Hruza, Violone |
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| -
Karl Höffinger, Violine |
-
Herbert Tachezi, Cembalo, Orgel |
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| Nikolaus
Harnoncourt, Leitung |
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Luogo
e data di registrazione
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| Casino
Zögernitz, Vienna (Austria) - settembre
1988 |
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Registrazione
live / studio
|
| studio |
Producer
/ Engineer
|
Wolfgang
Mohr / Michael Brammann
|
Prima Edizione CD
|
| Teldec
"Das Alte Werk" - 2292-44633-2 - (1 cd)
- 75' 09" - (p) 1990 - DDD |
|
Prima
Edizione LP
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Notes
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When the
22-year-old George Frederic Handel
felt the urge to leave his native
Halle - a small town
in Saxony -for the centres of the most
influential musical style of the time,
i.e. Rome, Florence, Naples
and Venice, this was without a doubt
an expression of insatiable curiosity
and the desire to broaden his horizon,
such as is typical of a genius as a
rule. Handel arrived in Italy
in 1706 or 1707, and when he returned
to Germany in 1710, he had spent three
long years literally soaking up Italian
techniques, especially in the field of
vocal writing. The four cities in
which Handel stayed, alternating
between one and the other, were at the
same time the centres of different
styles of singing. In
Florence, the birthplace of monody
and thus of opera heavy with emotion,
the principle of recitative solo
singing was followed, dramatic and
lyrical throughout and with melodies
of an arioso nature. In Rome, where
"modern" opera had been officially
banned until 1709, the opulent vocal
polyphony of the Palestrina era (i.e.
the Latin sacred oratorio) continued
to predominate. In
Naples, on the other hand, Handel
encountered a unique mixture of highly
cultivated, technically advanced
music, both sacred and profane, and
spontaneous folk music - a mixture
that produced an attractive-sounding
and artistic synthesis full of pathos.
And finally in Venice, the inquisitive
traveller became acquainted with the
glorious colour of the multiple choir
tradition as well as with instrumental
music that had developed along
virtuoso lines. These were four
different “musical
landscapes", in other words, in which
Handel spent time, learning,
imitating, reproducing and in the
final event producing in his own
right. His time in Italy was a period
of thorough study, without which the
rich harvest of operas and oratorios
that he later produced would have been
inconceivable. In these years Handel
started off “modestly", as it were, by
composing a hundred or so profane
cantatas for one or more voices,
instrumental accompaniment and
continuo as well as another twenty or
so chamber duets with accompanying
continuo: experimentation on a fairly
small scale, then, which was later to
assume greater dimensions.
The duo cantata “APOLLO E DAFNE”
probably also comes from Handel’s time
in Naples, and can be cautiously dated
to the winter of 1708/09; the text was
written by Cardinal B. Panfili, a
patron of Handel's. The
plot conforms with the custom of the
time in being edifying, didactic and
allegorical, and in being taken from
Greek mythology. The god Apollo has
just freed Greece from a great
nuisance by killing the dragon Python,
and praises the superiority of his bow
to that ot Cupid, which he says could
never injure him. At that moment he
catches sight of Daphne and falls in
love with her at once. But Daphne
rejects him, for she mistrusts the
passion of a radiant
hero passing himself off as the
brother of Diana. Apollo starts to
make advances towards her, pulling out
all the stops of the fine (and the not
so fine) art of seduction, but Daphne
only answers coolly: “I’d
rather die than lose my honour". When
it is scarcely possible to resist
Apollo’s importunate badgering any
longer, the nymph suddenly turns into
a laurel tree, and Apollo calms down
and resigns himself to the situation.
The battle between the sexes, devotion
and resistance, the contrast between
desire and purity: the moral comes in
at the appropriate place. For Handel,
these emotions that surge first one
way, then the other, serve as
keywords, so to speak, beneath which
he can spread out emotional tableaux
such as he learnt in Italy.
In a few places, the
meagre plot is pushed ahead with secco
recitatives, only to come to a halt
once more and give way to renewed
concentration on the psychological
aspects of the story. Apollo is the
character type that is depicted in
bright triads, as if trumpets were
announcing his appearance; the kind of
hero who is always pressing ahead,
very much the man of action, and full
of energy in musical terms, too.
Daphne is quite different: she is
given a delicate musical guise with a
gently swaying siciliano character
("Felicissima quest’alma",
without doubt a character portrait in
the Neapolitan style), Each new sign
of emotion is reflected by an
appropriate musical gesture. One
impatient tremolo is closely followed
by another in depiction of the
agitated Apollo, quivering with tense
excitement (“Come rosa in su la
spina"), and this same agitation
recurs in the hasty fioriture of
Daphne’s aria "Come in ciel benigna",
while the contrast between sweet
temptation (Apollo) and agitated
resistance (Daphne) is built up into
an extremely dramatic scene in the
duet "Deh! Lascia
adolcire". "Scena" is also the word
used by Handel to describe the part
where Apollo tries to seize Daphne and
she changes into a laurel tree: with
the resources of precisely written
instrumental music, Handel really does
conjure up an imaginary (musical)
stage, on which the characters'
emotions are just as clearly
represented as the actual events. - He
uses a rapid scale figure to depict
Daphne’s transformation, in the style
of film music, as it were. Elegant
vocal lines and plastically conceived
figure-work create music capable of
portraying fine nuances of feeling.
Nuances of feeling that on the one
hand - in the consistently treated da
capo aria - have time to spread out
expansively, but on the other hand are
subjected to a rapid succession of hot
and cold baths in terms of different
moods, since Handel does tighten up
and shorten these arias. Handel
assimilated the foreign “musical
landscapes" rapidly and confidently,
and with cantatas of such conciseness
he laid the foundations on which the
colossal buildings of his operas were
then erected not long after.
With Telemann’s solo cantata “Ino”
we enter a transformed musical terrain
and a new period: the era of
sentimentality, of Rococo delicacy.
Telemann does, it’s true, still have
recourse to the established pattern of
the da capo in both the opening and
the closing arias. But otherwise he
does without .the secco recitative and
lets his music hug the lines of the
epic flow. What story does the cantata
tell? lt’s the tale of Ino,
the daughter of Cadmos and the sister
of Semele. After her death she cares
for her child Dionysus, but is then
stricken with madness by Hera, and
persecuted. Ino’s
spouse Athamas kills her son Learchos.
Ino throws herself
into the sea with her second son Melicertes,
but she is saved from drowning by the
Tritons and by Neptune, and is
transformed into the goddess Leucothea
and her son is changed into the god
Palaemon. A dramatic story, made into
the libretto for Telemann's cantata by
K.W.D. Ramler. Telemann, who was
already over 80, created a fresh and
easily flowing musical scenario which
derives a plastic and graphic
character from a variety of
imitative/illustrative effects in the
music - one literally "sees" the
billowing waves, and the dance of the
Tritons is endowed with mimicry
sometimes coarse, sometimes delicate.
The modernity of such a natural
musical language (in both senses of
the word) is closely related to the
simplicity of Gluck. Indeed, one has
the impression that the reform of
opera that Gluck ushered in with his
"Alceste" has been taken at face value
here, for the rhythm and the emotional
gestures of the music Telemann wrote
in his old age harmonize perfectly
with the vocal line and with the
natural accents of the language.
Extravagant textual repeats such as
were still popular with Handel do not
occur here: the successive stages of
the narrative evolve smoothly, without
clear divisions. Where Handel still
preferred the sharp contrast between
different emotions, Telemann seems to
be more interested in gradual changes
of feeling. It is in this sense that
the many accompagnato recitatives are
to be understood,
and with such a recitative the event
in question is "sprung" on the
listener in a manner similar to the
narrative technique of a modern short
story. The grandiose Handelian pathos
as against sensitive Telemann
sentimentality; the clearly graspable
emotional state in Handel’s music as
against the flowing emotional
transformation found in Telemann.
These are clear differences between
two cantatas, the
first of which tends to be more
didactic, while the second is more
edifying in character. Or, to put it
another way: one is representative,
the other suggestive. "Musicien poète
et peintre" - thus a
description of Telemann, later
ridiculed as just a prolific composer,
in a French travel diary. In
the muted shimmer of the strings in
the aria “Meint ihr mich?", Telemann’s
poetic skill as a painter is expressed
at its most sensuous, and offers
evidence of what was understood in
1765, on the threshold of the
Enlightenment, by the “galant style”:
highly cultivated and tasteful
naturalness.
Hans-Christian
Schmidt
Translation:
Clive Williams
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt (1929-2016)
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