Roel Dieltiens & Orchestra of the 18th Century – C.P.E. Bach: Cello Concertos (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Roel Dieltiens & Orchestra of the 18th Century – C.P.E. Bach: Cello Concertos (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:14:07 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Glossa

In the 18th Century, the cello concerto was still a fairly new genre and Boccherini and Haydn had not yet written their contributions at the point when C.P.E. Bach completed his, the three concertos written between 1750 and 1753.

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Georg Nigl, Andreas Staier, Anna Lucia Richter, Petra Müllejans, Roel Dieltiens – Bach Privat (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Georg Nigl, Andreas Staier, Anna Lucia Richter, Petra Müllejans, Roel Dieltiens – Bach Privat (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:24:54 minutes | 1,52 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

This recording is an invitation to immerse ourselves in the musical inner circle of the Bach family. We are familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach as a composer of genius, but we know little about his family life, with the exception of the famous Clavierbüchlein (Little keyboard book) that the forty-year-old composer gave as a present in 1725 to his second wife Anna Magdalena, his junior by sixteen years. This manuscript is a unique document of the music the family played together. It provides us with a point of reference for the ‘programmes’ of these domestic concerts: it contains short keyboard pieces and songs alongside extended arias taken from the church cantatas, as well as chamber music. Bach and his two eldest sons were not only virtuoso harpsichordists but also excellent violinists, while the composer’s son-in-law Bach, J. C. Altnickol, played the cello and was an outstanding double bass player. Anna Magdalena Bach and her oldest stepdaughter both contributed as singers. And the still young children of the second marriage participated by playing easy pieces on their father’s various keyboard instruments. The musicians and singers on this recording, all eminent exponents of Bach and of Baroque music in general, have come together here to bring these exceptional moments back to life.

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Werner Güra, Christoph Berner, Julia Schröder, Roel Dieltiens – Haydn: Scottish Airs (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Werner Güra, Christoph Berner, Julia Schröder, Roel Dieltiens – Haydn: Scottish Airs (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:05:47 minutes | 595 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Late in life, Franz Joseph Haydn made about 125 arrangements of Scottish songs for the publisher George Thomson. Thomson’s project was an ongoing one in the 1790s and early 1800s; after a volume with arrangements by Scots composers sold well, Thomson was apparently inspired to commission more of the same from “name” composers like Haydn and later Beethoven, Hummel, and Weber. The results were more than purely financially motivated. The aged Haydn proclaimed in one of his submissions to Thomson that he was proud of his work, and Beethoven seems to have gone on to set a variety of national popular songs (the term “folk songs” is anachronistic here, for the materials were contemporary) without any commission at all. Haydn’s are pretty regular in structure, with a strophic setting for a trio of piano, violin, and cello, and an instrumental introduction that neatly sets the mood and the pitch world for the song. It’s easy to see why Haydn became intrigued by the project: within the severe constraints of the form, he introduces quite a variety of expressive touches, and he was obviously well coached on the meaning of the texts (or absorbed a great deal of English in the course of his travels to London), even those in Scots dialect. There is little to tell the listener that German tenor Werner Güra is anything other than a native English speaker, and he even does well with the Scots pieces (everything is translated into German and French in the CD booklet, and the Scots texts are heavily footnoted for English speakers). The interpretations by Güra and his trio of instrumental collaborators (keyboardist Christoph Berner plays a fortepiano) are probably ideal for these little pieces. Güra keeps the music to its proper small scale, and he gives the instrumentalists room to move and avoids the mechanical quality of earlier readings. There’s nothing revelatory here, but for those interested in the development of Scottish song, or in hearing some of the last notes Haydn set to paper, this is a strong pick.

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Andreas Staier, Roel Dieltiens – Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Op. 102, Bagatelles, Opp. 119 & 126 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Andreas Staier, Roel Dieltiens - Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Op. 102, Bagatelles, Opp. 119 & 126 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Andreas Staier, Roel Dieltiens – Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Op. 102, Bagatelles, Opp. 119 & 126 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:26 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

From the mid-1810s until the end of his life, Beethoven constantly tested to the limit the forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. His last two cello sonatas bear witness to this structural preoccupation, which was to open up so many new spaces . . . as do the final sets of Bagatelles, as disconcerting as they are innovative! Two genres shrewdly linked by Andreas Staier and Roel Dieltiens in these interpretations, in which eloquence merges with historically informed performance practice.
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Andreas Staier, Daniel Sepec, Roel Dieltiens – Schubert: Piano trios, Op. 99 & 100 (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Andreas Staier, Daniel Sepec, Roel Dieltiens - Schubert: Piano trios, Op. 99 & 100 (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Andreas Staier, Daniel Sepec, Roel Dieltiens – Schubert: Piano trios, Op. 99 & 100 (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:37:08 minutes | 1,67 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

‘One glance at Schubert’s trio, and the miserable hustle and bustle of human existence vanishes, the world takes on fresh lustre’, wrote Robert Schumann in 1836 of Schubert’s Piano Trio D898. He was equally admiring of the Viennese composer’s other great trio, D929, notably its funeral march-like Andante con moto, later to achieve cinematic fame in Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’.

Here three peerless interpreters bring out every nuance of these endlessly fascinating works on their ‘period instruments’, including a splendid copy of an 1827 Viennese fortepiano.
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