selecting Sammartini
Mar. 17th, 2009 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacG.B. Sammartini (1701-75) is one of those hidden gems of musical history. He was one of the creators of the classical style, and the earliest composer I know of to have regularly written what we now recognize as symphonies. His later works, which I don't know well, are more diffuse, but his early semi-Baroque transitional symphonies of the 1720s and 1730s are tightly woven, captivatingly fierce little monsters.
The sound quality is pretty awful, but the performance (this is the first movement of the Symphony in G with the catalog number JC 39) is excellent. I love this kind of music. I'd play you my CD of Chiara Banchini conducting Ensemble 415 in the Symphony in D, JC 14, if I could (they also do JC 39, but I like the other one even better); it's one of my favorite recordings of music of that period.
My main stash of Sammartini is on some old LPs that predate the 1976 standard thematic catalog of Sammartini by Jenkins and Churgin, which is where those "JC" numbers come from. I realized that, due to the irregular or absent work numbering on those old records, my Sammartini collection was a mess: I didn't know which works I had, or even caught all the duplicates. So I checked a copy of Jenkins & Churgin out of the library and double-checked them all; it didn't take too long. Warning: even if you have Newell Jenkins's own 1967 Sammartini recording on Nonesuch (H-71162) titled Five Symphonies, he renumbered them all before the catalog was published, so even his own numbering on the recording is no good.
My impetus for doing this was having picked up a little treasure-stash of 20 early Sammartini symphonies on 3 CDs on my last trip to LA. This is a new recording, so at least the numbers are straight (except that some symphonies in B-flat Major are listed as being in B Major, suggesting an incompetent translation from the German). Unfortunately, now that I've listened to them all, I don't think I like the recording (I Giovani di Nuova Cameristica, under Daniele Ferrari) very much: it's slow, heavy, closely miked, and overly generous with the harpsichord continuo. Some of the slow movements are good, but the fast ones are trying to be London-era Haydn, and it just doesn't work that way. So I'm not sure if I'm going to keep this one, but at least now I know exactly what I've got.
The sound quality is pretty awful, but the performance (this is the first movement of the Symphony in G with the catalog number JC 39) is excellent. I love this kind of music. I'd play you my CD of Chiara Banchini conducting Ensemble 415 in the Symphony in D, JC 14, if I could (they also do JC 39, but I like the other one even better); it's one of my favorite recordings of music of that period.
My main stash of Sammartini is on some old LPs that predate the 1976 standard thematic catalog of Sammartini by Jenkins and Churgin, which is where those "JC" numbers come from. I realized that, due to the irregular or absent work numbering on those old records, my Sammartini collection was a mess: I didn't know which works I had, or even caught all the duplicates. So I checked a copy of Jenkins & Churgin out of the library and double-checked them all; it didn't take too long. Warning: even if you have Newell Jenkins's own 1967 Sammartini recording on Nonesuch (H-71162) titled Five Symphonies, he renumbered them all before the catalog was published, so even his own numbering on the recording is no good.
My impetus for doing this was having picked up a little treasure-stash of 20 early Sammartini symphonies on 3 CDs on my last trip to LA. This is a new recording, so at least the numbers are straight (except that some symphonies in B-flat Major are listed as being in B Major, suggesting an incompetent translation from the German). Unfortunately, now that I've listened to them all, I don't think I like the recording (I Giovani di Nuova Cameristica, under Daniele Ferrari) very much: it's slow, heavy, closely miked, and overly generous with the harpsichord continuo. Some of the slow movements are good, but the fast ones are trying to be London-era Haydn, and it just doesn't work that way. So I'm not sure if I'm going to keep this one, but at least now I know exactly what I've got.
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Date: 2009-03-17 10:42 pm (UTC)