Variations on a Theme

Concerto Italiano Part 1 - My theme for the next 2 weeks is music played by an ensemble called the Concerto Italiano.  Now the Concerto Italiano is is an Italian early music vocal and orchestral ensemble that has become well known for playing the music of baroque composers and especially for their involvement in the Vivaldi Edition recording project .  This is a recording venture conceived by the Italian musicologist Alberto Basso to record the massive collection of Vivaldi autograph manuscripts preserved today in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin.  This comprised round 450 works from the private library of scores Vivaldi had at home at the time of his death in Vienna in 1741 and includes numerous operas, hundreds of concertos, sacred compositions and cantatas. Much of this music has not been heard since the 18th century.

The Concerto Italiano are a historically informed performance ensemble which means they play on period instruments and following known performance practices of the time of thee composed words.  This means things like playing using gut strings and using minimal vibrato.  They were formed by the harpsichordist and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini in 1984. Since then, they have recorded a huge amount of early and baroque music featuring well core composers such as Vivaldi, Handel and Bach as well as numerous other less well known composers.

 Welcome to the first Variations on a Theme show for 2012.  Now I was very dilgent through December and stuck to the theme of Christmas and Advent throughout the month but now it’s the New Year so time for some new themes  and I’m going to start with a theme suggested by Mel Moratti, one of the highly knowledgeable staff at a record store in town.  Mel has a particular penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan and also 20^th Century Russian Music and he suggested the theme of film scores by Prokofiev and Shostakovich  - the first part of the show features  film music from Prokofiev followed by film music from Shostakovich

I think that we all know that Advent is the time of year leading up to Christmas, which is probably best known to children through the ever popular advent calendar. But advent is actually a very specific period in the liturgical calendars it is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commences on Advent Sunday, which is the 4th Sunday before Christmas, This year Advent Sunday fell on the 27th of November, which makes this Sunday the 3rd Sunday in Advent. Obviously Advent is closely associated with Christmas as the next period in the liturgical calendar is Christmastide and the word Advent derives from the Latin word adventus meaning "coming". So todays show is given over to 2 works that had their genesis in Advent, both of them by J S Bach.

Bach - Cantata BWV 186 - Argre dich, o Seele, nicht

Bach - Cantata BWV 147 - Herz un Mund und Tat und Leben

 This Wednesday, one of the world’s leading mezzo-sopranos is performing in Auckland for the very first time.  The singer in question is the Anne Sofie von Otter, who was born in Stockholm.  Her father was the diplomat Göran von Otter and as a result she grew up in Bonn, London and Stockholm

In 1983 she was Engaged as a principal member of the Basel and  made her debut as Alcina in Haydn’s Orlando Paladino and since then she has an international career that has now spanned more than two decades, and is considered to be one of the finest singers of her generation.

She has sung opera in most of the great opera houses across Europe and elsewhere  including making her Covent Garden début in 1985 and. At The Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1988 . She has sung roles in a huge range of operas, spanning Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Gluck, Strauss, Debussy and even Wagner

She has also worked and recorded with some of the world's pre-eminent conductors such as Carlos Kleiber, Claudio Abbado, John Eliot Gardiner, Georg Solti and Marc Minkowski among many others as well as performing smaller scale recitals with her long-time accompanist, Bengt Forsberg, which is who she will be accompanied by on Wednesday.

Anne Sofie von Otter also has a very wide ranging discography that encompasses a wide range of works from the Baroque period to 20th-century music and for today’s show I’m going to be playing a range of pieces that covers this range, beginning with Purcell and ending with Bo Linde, a 20th Century Swedish composer and covering both orchestral and recital pieces.  For details of this individual songs you’ll need to visit my page on the website as time constraints means that I haven’t been able to write and record synopses for each song.  Anyway I’m sure you’ll enjoy the music and hopefully some of you will be inspired to get tickets to the Town Hall recital which is where I’ll be on Wednesday