Florilegium | |
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Genres | Historically informed performance |
Years active | 1991 | –present
Website | florilegium |
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Past members |
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Florilegium is an early music ensemble based in London. It was founded in 1991 by the harpsichordist Neal Peres Da Costa and the flautist Ashley Solomon, [8] who is now director of the group. It specialises in period performance of Baroque and early Romantic chamber music. [3]
The group was founded in 1991, and gave its first performance at the Blackheath Concert Halls in that year. [3] It has since performed at the Wigmore Hall in London, and in many countries worldwide. A recording of the cello sonatas of Antonio Vivaldi with Pieter Wispelwey as soloist won an award, as did a recording of the chamber music of Georg Philipp Telemann. [3]
Sir John Eliot Gardiner is an English conductor, particularly known for his performances of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and of other 17th and 18th-century music.
The English Concert is a baroque orchestra playing on period instruments based in London. Founded in 1972 and directed from the harpsichord by Trevor Pinnock for 30 years, it is now directed by harpsichordist Harry Bicket. Nadja Zwiener has been orchestra leader (concertmaster) since September 2007.
Gustav Leonhardt was a Dutch keyboard player, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor. He was a leading figure in the movement to perform music on period instruments. Leonhardt professionally played many instruments, including the harpsichord, pipe organ, claviorganum, clavichord, fortepiano and piano. He also conducted orchestras and choruses.
Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, is a cantata for Easter by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, one of his earliest church cantatas. It is agreed to be an early work partly for stylistic reasons and partly because there is evidence that it was probably written for a performance in 1707. Bach went on to complete many other works in the same genre, contributing complete cantata cycles for all occasions of the liturgical year. John Eliot Gardiner described it as Bach's "first-known attempt at painting narrative in music".
Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ) is composed of an orchestra and a chorus specializing in Baroque music, playing on period instruments. It was founded in 1990 by Masaaki Suzuki with the purpose of introducing Japanese audiences to European Baroque music. Suzuki still remains its music director. The ensemble has recorded all of Bach’s cantatas, a project that extended from 1995 to 2018 and accounts for over half of its discography.
Joshua Rifkin is an American conductor, keyboard player, and musicologist, currently a Professor of Music at Boston University. As a performer he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas, and as a scholar has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century. He is famed among classical musicians and aficionados for his increasingly influential theory that most of Bach's choral works were sung with only one singer per choral line. Rifkin argued: "So long as we define 'chorus' in the conventional modern sense, then Bach's chorus, with few exceptions, simply did not exist." He is best known by the general public, however, for having played a central role in the ragtime revival in the 1970s, with the three albums he recorded of Scott Joplin's works for Nonesuch Records.
Robin Blaze is an English countertenor.
Neal Peres Da Costa is an Australian harpsichordist, fortepianist and organist. He specialises in performance on historical keyboard instruments of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, for which he has gained international renown. He is a Professor and the Chair of the Early Music Unit at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney.
Gary Cooper is an English conductor and classical keyboardist who specialises in the harpsichord and fortepiano. He is known as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Bach and Mozart, and as a conductor of historically informed performances of music from the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods.
Baroque music is a period or style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era followed the Renaissance music era, and was followed in turn by the Classical era, with the galant style marking the transition between Baroque and Classical eras. The Baroque period is divided into three major phases: early, middle, and late. Overlapping in time, they are conventionally dated from 1580 to 1650, from 1630 to 1700, and from 1680 to 1750. Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and is now widely studied, performed, and listened to. The term "baroque" comes from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning "misshapen pearl". Key composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, François Couperin, Giuseppe Tartini, Heinrich Schütz, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Dieterich Buxtehude, and others.
Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 131, is a church cantata by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. It was composed in either 1707 or 1708, which makes it one of Bach's earliest cantatas. Some sources suggest that it could be his earliest surviving work in this form, but current thinking is that there are one or two earlier examples.
John Butt is an English orchestral and choral conductor, organist, harpsichordist and scholar. He holds the Gardiner Chair of Music at the University of Glasgow and is music director of the Dunedin Consort with whom he has made award-winning recordings in historically informed performance. Many of them feature reconstructions of a specific historical performance, such as Bach's first Christmas services on Christmas Day in Leipzig.
The listing shows recordings of the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, by Johann Sebastian Bach. The selection is taken from the 281 recordings listed on the Bach Cantatas Website as of 2018, beginning with the first recording by a symphony orchestra and choir to match, conducted by Albert Coates. Beginning in the late 1960s, historically informed performances paved the way for recordings with smaller groups, boys choirs and ensembles playing period instruments, and eventually to recordings using the one-voice-on-a-vocal-part scoring first argued for by Joshua Rifkin in 1982.
Johannes Pramsohler is a violinist, conductor and record producer, specialised in Historically informed performance, currently based in Paris.
Michael Schneider is a German flautist, recorder player, conductor and academic teacher. He is especially connected with later Baroque repertoire such as the works of Telemann and with early Classical repertoire such as the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and founded the orchestra La Stagione to perform and record such repertoire.
Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde, BWV 53, is an aria for alto, bells, strings and continuo. It was likely composed in the early 18th century, although its date of first performance is unknown. From the second half of the 18th century until the early 1950s the aria was attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1955, it was suggested in Bach scholarship that the aria's composer was more likely to be found in Melchior Hoffmann's circle.
Gabriella Di Laccio is a Brazilian operatic soprano. She performs in the opera seria genre of the Baroque, and in Classical and early Romantic repertoire. Her career spans opera, oratorio and chamber music.
New London Consort was a London-based Renaissance and Baroque music ensemble, which performed in most of Europe and various other parts of the world. Founded and directed by Philip Pickett, most of its repertoire was recorded and broadcast by BBC and regularly appeared at major venues and festivals. This repertoire included unpublished works and new interpretations of familiar ones, sometimes controversial. The group has been inactive since its director's conviction as a sex offender in 2015.
La Stagione Frankfurt is a German ensemble of Baroque and classical music, adept at historically informed performance.