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CD Review: Strikingly Original Music from Handel’s Violinist

EMA Recording Reviews, News

Pietro Castrucci is not well enough known. He studied violin with Arcangelo Corelli, moved to London in 1715, and served as leader of Handel’s opera orchestra. Castrucci often performed with Handel and another of Corelli’s students in London, Francesco Geminiani. Although Castrucci’s compositional output is relatively small, his incredible invention and skill are much to be admired. This recording is the first complete set of his Op. 1 sonatas, a welcome addition to the Baroque violin repertoire.

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CD Review: On Fortepiano, Schumann that Rivals Golden Age Pianists

EMA Recording Reviews, News

American pianist David Hyun-su Kim’s historically informed recording of three familiar Robert Schumann masterworks—Papillons, Carnaval, and Arabeske—is brilliant artistry indeed. And his instrument is of special interest: a copy of an 1830s Graf fortepiano, made in 2013 by Rod Regier of Freeport, Maine, and based on an instrument given by Conrad Graf to Robert and Clara as a wedding present. Kim is sensitive to Schumann’s mercurial mood shifts, and he uses the fortepiano for sounds and effects that are hard to achieve on a modern instrument.

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CD Review: An Urgent ‘St. Matthew Passion’ for Our Time

EMA Recording Reviews, News

Pinchon and his superb singers and ensemble offer an immersive, all-encompassing experience. Throughout, they let Bach’s dance rhythms propel music and narrative. The conductor’s attention to relative weights and specific articulations adds a dimension of almost sensual physicality—the emotions expressed here are vividly embodied, not abstract prayers, What makes this interpretation a significant contribution to the vast Matthäus-Passion discography is the admirable balance it finds between dramatic, contemplative, and even architectural approaches, too often taken as polarities.

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Book Review: We’ve thought a lot about Bach. Time for ‘Rethinking Bach.’

EMA Book Reviews, News

This fascinating book—rich in historical and analytical detail—offers many surprising reevaluations of long-held beliefs. With essays ranging from consumer culture in Bach’s Leipzig and Bach’s humor to an outright dismissal of ‘Affektenlehre’ and heated questions of antisemitism, the book is always provocative, often controversial, and smartly argued.

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Opera Lafayette Connects Marie-Antoinette, Music, Slavery, & Revolution

EMA Features, News

Inspired by the woman who remains an icon and a cautionary tale over 200 years after her death, Opera Lafayette’s ‘The Era of Marie Antoinette Rediscovered’ will shed light on the French queen’s extraordinary education in music and dance, her early embrace of opéra comique, and her legacy as a champion of modern composers in pre-Revolutionary France. But the series goes further, exploring ‘progressive’ philosophies that were in direct opposition to the atrocities being committed against enslaved people on sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, the source of much of France’s wealth.

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