Pour passer la Melancolie

Pour passer la Melancolie cover $35.00 Out of Stock
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FROBERGER / CASPAR / COUPERIN / MUFFAT / etc
Pour passer la Melancolie
Andreas Staier (anon. French harpsichord, late 17th century, Joseph Collesse, 1749, restored by Laurent Soumagnac 2000-4)

[ Harmonia Mundi / CD ]

Release Date: Wednesday 20 February 2013

This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.

Whether the composer luxuriates in melancholic disorder or attempts to remedy it, there is but a fine line here between the vanity of the world and the artist's glory. In his readings of Froberger, Fischer and Clérambault, Andreas Staier distils the fruits of this sophisticated blend on an instrument saved from oblivion at the start of the 21st century.

GRAMOPHONE AWARD WINNER 2013: Baroque Instrumental

"Staier's Froberger is played with a sure hand and a compelling sense of how to stretch the music's almost verbal rhetoric to the limits of what the musical line can bear...[his] sheer exuberance in rendering this deliciously absurd music is infectious. The instrument...has more than sufficient personality to bear up to the musical demands." (Gramophone)

"'Why have all eminent men, whether philosophers, statesmen, poets or artists, so obviously been melancholics?' This question forms the opening of a treatise attributed to Aristotle. The doctrine of the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic) associates the melancholic with the most varied phenomena: the planet Saturn, the autumn (also in the sense of the autumn of life), twilight, cold, avarice, but also genius, geometry, and brooding profundity of thought. Albrecht Dürer condenses this multiplicity of motifs with extreme concentration in his celebrated and enigmatic engraving Melencolia I of 1514. ...I would like to thank Laurent Soumagnac for placing his wonderful harpsichord at my disposal for this disc, and Markus Fischinger for maintaining the instrument during the recording sessions. My very special gratitude goes to my friend and colleague Skip Sempé. He took the time for many inspiring conversations about French music of the seventeenth century." Andreas Staier

Tracks:

Anglebert:
Pièces de clavecin (1689)

Clérambault:
Suite No. 2 in C minor

Couperin, L:
Suite in F major

Fischer, J K F:
Musicalischer Parnassus, de la Suite 'Uranie' D minor
De Ariadne Musica, 1702: Ricercar pro Tempore, Quadragesimae super Initium
Da Jesus an dem Creutze stund

Froberger:
Suite [XXX] Plainte faite à Londres pour passer la Melancholie laquelle se joue lentement avec discrétion - From Book IV (1656)
Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Maestà di Ferdinando IV Rè de Romani

Muffat, Georg:
Passacaglia in G minor