Search - Luigi Boccherini, Chiara Banchini, Ensemble 415 :: Boccherini: Stabat Mater; Symphonies

Music is Inexhaustible

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 04/14/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've practiced, performed, or listened to music five hours a day average, five days a week all my adult life, and still I come upon repertoires I haven't explored and brilliant composers I've ignored. Luigi Boccherini, a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart, is such a composer. He wrote only one short opera, and his output for wind instrumentalists like me is minor. He was a virtuosic cellist. Much of his best music was written for quintets with two cellos. No composer has ever explored the sonorous possibilities of five-part writing as inventively as Boccherini.



Boccherini's Stabat Mater was originally composed for the usual quartet of two violins, viola, and cello, with a soprano voice singing the passionate Marian devotional poem by Jacopone da Todi. The vocal line is not essentially soloistic, but rather melodically integrated with strings, and that's how Agnes Mellon performs it on this disk. If you are expecting a dominant operatic voice, you'll need to adjust. Mellon can belt when she chooses, but her singing on this CD is sensitively restrained and reflective. The whole piece could be performed as an instrumental quintet, although the wealth of sorrow expressed in Mellon's voice would be sorely missed. Boccherini later rearranged this Stabat Mater as an oratorio accompanied by a small orchestra. That version has also been well recorded, but I prefer the quintet. In fact, I greatly prefer this intimate Stabat Mater to the more famous ones by Pergolesi and Haydn. To my ears, this is how the mother of a crucified messiah would mourn.



The Quintet op. 31/4 which fills out the disk is one of Boccherini's most structurally memorable and eloquent. Ensemble 451, with Chiara Banchini as first violin, performs it with graceful authority. The other disk is devoted to four of Boccherini's symphonies, one of his earliest (1765) and three from his maturity, including his fairly well-known "La Casa del Diavolo" (1771). Ensemble 451 performs as an original instrument orchestra of 18 players, including oboes, bassoon, and horns. The symphonies are reminiscent of Haydn in their elegance and inventiveness - easily a match, I think, for Haydn's best, and at times suggestive of the emotional intensity of the later Mozart symphonies. Once again, Ensemble 451 performs impeccably, and the recorded sound is rich and realistic. Harmonia Mundi's 1+1 packaging makes this performance charmingly affordable as well."