The classical friend of good music is a dialectic phenomenon through and through. He trusts in the familiar, whose tonal language he understands, and constantly looks for the new. This in turn also likes to play in the old and forgotten, whose sound dialects speak to him like the good-natured grandmother and not like the crazy grandson. He prefers listening to Helmut Lachenmann and things like that and is happy that the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra is now climate-neutral. Sounds good. The musicians probably complete their world tours by bike now. Or they stay at home.
The Roman Harpsichordist Fernando DeLuca also likes to make himself comfortable at home, where he has a fantastic instrument at his disposal and travels through worlds and times in his spirit. He is currently on the road in France during the Baroque period. An important era here too, with outstanding musicians such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. In their shadow stood and stands the organist Christophe Moyreau (1700 – 1774), who came from a long-established family in Orléans and enjoyed a fulfilling musical life there. Nobody believes anymore that he, like his more famous colleagues, also composed wonderful new music, and that he did so with his very own stylistic innovations. The only composition that survives the times is the organ piece “The Bells of Orléans” and yes, it imitates the bells of Orléans. But now Fernando De Luca has stepped in and presents the harpsichord work of the climate-neutral Monsieur Moyreau on seven amazing CDs. He has a lot of fun doing it and lets the listener participate in every moment. A lot revolves around lively baroque characters that Moyreau elaborately ornate and dissolves again, sometimes pretending to be a perpetual motion machine, at other times excited drama. (brilliant)
Basically, he is not that far away from the Italian grandmaster Domenico Scarlatti, a contemporary who is scarcely older, born in 1685, the same year as Handel and Bach. Indeed, the Italian pianist shows that Andrea Molteni, Scarlatti places his creative focus even more on virtuoso – for which he is famous and popular to this day. Molteni, who uses a climate-neutral concert grand piano, feels comfortable in the baroque world of exuberant diversity and joie de vivre, in which art was always understood to mean the artistic in the concrete sense of craftsmanship. The enthusiasm for the sheer ability was seldom as pronounced as at that time. This applied to the composition, just think of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”, as well as to the dexterous playing. The live competition in Rome between “Il Sassone” Handel and Scarlatti was a sensation. Handel won. Scarlatti too. One on the organ, the other on the harpsichord. Today you would have to let Molteni compete against De Luca. Difficult to say who would win. Probably both again. (Piano Classics)
Dimitri Mitropoulos, The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection (Sony)
What you also about the competition of Dimitri Mitropoulos and numerous great soloists, from Zino Francescatti to David Oistrakh, from Vladimir Horowitz to Robert Casadesus. Mitropoulos, born in Athens in 1896, was one of the most important American conductors. On November 2, 1960, during a rehearsal for Mahler’s Third at La Scala in Milan, he died of a heart attack. He was regarded as a specialist in Mahler and modern music, but conducted almost the entire classical repertoire. In 1950 he succeeded Leopold Stokowski as chief of the New York Philharmonic, and – despite the claims of scheming opponents at the end of his career – the New York Philharmonic sounded more finely balanced and attentive than ever before. Unfortunately, not all of the relevant recordings, such as the tone poems by Richard Strauss, have survived or are of sufficient quality to appear in the extensive edition of the recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (Sony). And although Mitropoulos dramatically differentiated the orchestral sound down to the finest ramifications with fascinatingly sparse clarity, his conducting style rarely corresponded to this sound pattern. He was above all a physical conductor, working through sheer presence and physical exertion. He seemed not only to be electrified, but also under high voltage, which discharged every now and then. He liked to jump half a meter high, just like we know from his apprentice Leonard Bernstein. It is still unclear to what extent he was involved in the ultimately successful intrigues in the no longer neutral climate of the New York Philharmonic against their chief conductor Mitropoulos before he succeeded him. However, he always emphasized that he learned a lot and important things from Mitropoulos.