SUBLIME NOISE
“It will be generally admitted”, begins Chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, “that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man”. This programme prefaces Beethoven’s iconoclastic masterpiece with another remarkable and visceral C minor symphony, composed in Vienna a quarter of a century earlier by Johann Martin Kraus. The first half is completed by two sublime and substantial arias by the composer who exerted the greatest influence on Kraus, Christoph Willibald Gluck; the second of these arias is an epic scena from Gluck’s 175 opera Antigono, and the programme is completed by a magnificent setting of the same text by Joseph Haydn, who was Beethoven’s teacher and the dedicatee of Kraus’ C minor symphony.
| Sample Programme | |
| Kraus | Symphony in C minor |
| Gluck | “Se mai senti spirarti sul volto” from La clemenza di Tito |
| Gluck | “Berenice, che fai?” from Antigono |
| Interval | |
| Haydn | Scena di Berenice |
| Beethoven | Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 |
Forces: 1 soloist (soprano), 2+1.2.2.2+1. – 2.2.3.0. – timpani, strings, harpsichord
Blessed Spirit: A Gluck Retrospective
Released on Wigmore Live in 2010
“Conductor, instrumentalists and singers alike make sound the servant of sense, with stylish, eloquent and dramatic music-making of the highest order.”
INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW
“This is a terrific, unmissable disc.”
GRAMOPHONE
