Les Passions de l’Ame

Les Passions de l’Ame – Bewitched – Enchanted Music by Geminiani & Händel (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:06 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © deutsche harmonia mundi

This is a somewhat odd mixture of late baroque works, but the title and the booklet blurb offer a certain logic to it. The most substantial work in the programme is Francesco Geminiani’s ‘The Enchanted Forest’, a lively and colourful orchestral suite composed in 1754 for the Paris stage for a pantomime illustrating a section from Torquato Tasso’s ‘La Gerusalemme Liberata’. Halfway through its performance here, we get Handel’s solo soprano cantata ‘Armida abbandonata’, also based on Tasso’s narrative of the doomed love affair between crusader Rinaldo and the sorceress Armida. And, for still more variety, the disc begins with Geminiani’s orchestral transcription of Corelli’s ‘La Follia’ variations from the latter composer’s sonata opus 5 no. 12.

So, although the rationale is a bit dubious, the music is all somehow associated with witchcraft and it does add up to an enjoyable late-baroque programme. What’s more, it’s all extremely well performed by the very talented Swiss-based early-music ensemble Les Passions de l’Âme directed by violinist Meret Lüthi. They bring superb style and expression to the opening ‘La Follia’ piece, and vivid energy to Geminiani’s sequence of orchestral movements – the more vigorous sections with horns and trumpet going especially well and producing spectacular instrumental textures in places.

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Les Passions de l’Ame – Schabernack – A Treasure Trove of Musical Jokes (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:46 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © deutsche harmonia mundi

The group of Weimar cantatas is exciting on many levels. The purpose Bach expressed in his Mühlhausen resignation letter – which became a master beam of the musical edice he built throughout his life – is expressed with an even more seminal vigour, due to the restrictions it suffered previously. Besides the beauty of the surviving works, which renders the loss of the missing ones all the more bitter, it is moving to see the musician engage, with each new piece, in experiments with form, ideas, and the language for expressing the word of God through the most sensitive possible texts. The choice of developing themes dear to him enabled him to afirm and deepen his faith.

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Les Passions de l’Ame – Divina (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:03 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © deutsche harmonia mundi

Les Passions de l’Ame release their new album “Divina”. The echo between heaven and earth becomes tangible in the spirited and opulent interpretation on instruments by Jacobus Stainer, the rich continuo and touching human voices. This album crowns the complete recording of all Partitas of the collection “Harmonia Artificiosa-Ariosa” by Biber.

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Les Passions de l’Ame – Biber: Harmonia Artificioso-Ariosa (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:21:34 minutes | 931 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © deutsche harmonia mundi

The violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) was a celebrated Kapellmeister at the court of Archbishop Max Gandolph of Salzburg. Present-day audiences tend to think of him first and foremost as the author of anthologies of spectacular violin music such as his Rosary Sonatas of around 1670 and his Sonatas for solo violin of 1681. But attitudes to these works were initially devastatingly dismissive. In 1927, the eighth – posthumous – edition of Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski’s seminal Die Violine und ihre Meister appeared with revisions by the author’s son, Waldemar, and assured its readers that only “some” of these pieces were of “lasting musical merit”.

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