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Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp As Royal Academy of Music Principal Jonathan FreemanAttwood reminds us in the booklet for this recording, performances of Gabrieli’s ensemble music have tended to fall into two distinct camps: those on the cornetts and sackbuts the composer would have known, mellow, rounded and historically informed in terms of tempo relationships and ornamentation; and those by modern brass ensembles of trumpets and trombones, bright, hard-edged and often gleefully virtuoso. The musical object of this project – alongside a diplomatic one of bringing together talented trumpeters and trombonists from two great conservatoires – was to find a way of treading the middle ground between traditions. It does so in a triumph worthy of the grandest of fanfares. Directed by the experienced hand of Reinhold Friedrich, the ensemble (which ranges in size from four to 22) quickly settles into a style totally satisfying in itself, taking the warm and gladdening foundation of smoothly blended trombones and the incisive agility of the trumpets and, according to Gabrieli’s demands, either playing them off against each other or combining them to wrap the listener up in one tingling embrace. The clean attack and technical security of the modern instruments help highlight many textural details, while Friedrich’s sensitivity to pace and dynamic reveals the Gabrieli’s control of harmonic and rhythmic flow in all its genius, especially in longer works such as the wondrous Sonata XVIII a 14 or the disc’s climax, the mighty Sonata XX a 22. The programme is billed as a ‘Venetian Extravaganza’, and indeed not all the pieces are by Gabrieli. Among the others Lodovico Viadana and Cesario Gussago are both bringers of a rather secular jollity, while a sonata by Buonamente edges us towards the Baroque. But noble Gabrieli is rightly the main man, and this one-off ensemble does him proud. |
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