Best Of Baroque Music

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Cat No: 8557124

Release Date: 06 January 2003

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313212422

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: BEST OF BAROQUE MUSIC

Description
The Best of Baroque MusicThe first half of the eighteenth century saw the culminationof a musical synthesis between elements predominant in three major musicalcountries in Europe. From Italy came, above all, song, from France dance andfrom Germany the more academic procedures that could weld these into awhole. Instrumental music had developed notably in the seventeenthcentury, as forms that were to predominate were developed. The later part ofthe century brought the career of the South German organist Johann Pachelbel(1653-1706), a prolific composer who had drawn much from his experience ofItalian music. Pachelbel served as an organist in Erfurt, where he hadconnections with the Bach family and taught Johann Sebastian Bach's elderbrother, Johann Christoph, with whom the former lived after the early death ofhis parents. Pachelbel was able to spend his final years as organist at StSebald's in his native Nuremberg. While his other work may be known principallyto organists, his Canon and Gigue, an ingenious composition originally forthree violins and continuo, has enjoyed very wide popularity, appearing in avariety of arrangements [10].The Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) spent hislater life in Rome, where he established himself as a violinist and composer,serving there the Catholic Swedish Queen Christina, Cardinal Pamphili andCardinal Ottoboni. Contemporaries and later composers were strongly influenced,in particular, by his Concerti grossi, orchestral compositions in which a smallgroup of solo players (two violins and continuo in Corelli's work) arecontrasted with the full string orchestra. His so-called Christmas Concerto,designed for performance on Christmas Eve, includes a pastoral movementsuggesting the shepherds at Bethlehem in a musical form that was much imitated [5].Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759) had met Corelli in Romeduring the earlier years of the eighteenth century. Born in Halle, he hadworked first at the opera in Hamburg, before travelling to Italy. Recruited asdirector of music to the court at Hanover, he soon found a way to move toLondon, where he was at first primarily occupied in the provision of Italianopera. Handel's melodic facility and the form his musical language took suggesta different balance in the developing baroque synthesis. Nevertheless Corelli,leading an orchestra for Handel in Italy, claimed he could not grasp thelatter's 'French' style. Whilecontinuing an intermittent connection with Italian opera, by 1740 Handel hadfound a new musical compromise in a new form, that of English oratorio. Thepresent collection is introduced by the familiar Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,an instrumental movement from the oratorio Solomon, first heard at CoventGarden in 1749 [1]. Equally familiar is the Largo from Handel's 1738 operaSerse, originally an aria in which Xerxes is overheard expressing hisadmiration for the plant life around him [7].With a contemporary reputation that rivalled that of Bach,Georg
Tracklisting