Japanese Music 2016

The protean and prolific Jeroen van Veen turns his attention to Erik Satie’s complete piano works for a 9-CD boxed set that ties in with the composer’s 150th birthday year. In a way, the collection is completer than complete. It includes all of Satie’s published and unpublished works for solo piano and piano duo, piano arrangements of theater scores as Le fils des étoiles, Darius Milhaud’s transcription of Cinéma.

This young guitarists debut album is the perfect introduction to his artistry, showcasing as it does four leading 20th-century composers of guitar music Antonio José Palacios, Alberto Ginastera, Antonio Lauro and Julio Gentil Montaña composers who in turn represent four different countries and four styles of music that differ widely both aesthetically and in terms of the traditions from which they spring. Among the most promising Spanish composers of his generation, Antonio José was acclaimed by Ravel and counted Lorca and Dali among his associates, but like Lorca, he was executed by a Falangist firing squad during the Spanish Civil War.

The complete harpsichord works by Clerambault and Marchand on one CD! LouisNicholas Clerambault and Louis Marchand are typical representatives of the French harpsichord style, flourishing in the first half of the 18th century. Their Suites (multi movement sequels of dance forms) are grand, stately, rhythmically free and featuring lavish embellishments, all in perfect accordance with the courtly life at Versailles, the palace of Sun King Louis the XIV.

Ten English composers set the Latin text of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the mid-16th century, in the reigns both of the Catholic Queen Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth I. Precise details are hard to establish of when works were performed, as Andrew Carwood explains in an illuminating note to this disc, but there seems little doubt that Tallis, though a Catholic, wrote his masterpiece for Elizabeth. The repeated final lines, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God”, unforgettable once heard, have a dark resonance here, thanks to the sonorous basses of the Cardinall’s Musick (Robert Macdonald, Simon Whiteley). The rest of this fine recording draws on music from across Tallis’s career, with English and Latin settings (Sancte Deus, Te Deum, Come, Holy Ghost and more). The singers reach the highest standards.