Un portal on escoltar i gaudir de l'art musical dels segles XVI, XVII, XVIII i XIX. Compartir la bellesa de la música és l'objectiu d'aquest espai i fer-ho donant a conèixer obres de compositors molt o poc coneguts és el mètode.
French violinist and composer. He was probably a son of Jean Aubert, a member of the 24 Violons du Roi until his death in 1710. He was a student of Jean Baptiste Senaillé. In 1717 he is known to have been working in the Théâtres de la Foire, as a violinist and dancing-master, and had composed at least five ballets and comedies. In 1719, the year in which he married Marie Louise Lecat and published his first book of violin sonatas, he was appointed to the service of Louis-Henri, Duke of Bourbon and Prince of Condé. In 1727 he succeeded Noël Converset in the 24 Violons du Roi, remaining a member until 1746, and in the next year he accepted a position with the Académie Royale de Musique and was named first violinist of the Opéra orchestra, with which he performed for the next 24 years. As a composer, his output includes ballet and dance music, opéras comiques, concertos, sonatas for violin and continuo and what he called ‘concerts de simphonie’. His son, the painter Louis Aubert Aubert (1720-c.1800), was also a violinist and composer. Another son, Jean-Louis Aubert (1731-1814) was a dramatist, poet and journalist, also known as the Abbé Aubert.
Bohemian horn player and composer. Born into a poor family on the estate of Count Joseph Johann von Thun, Stich was sent to Prague by his patron to study horn with Joseph Matiegka and composition with Johann Schindlarz. In 1764 he became a student of Anton Joseph Hampel in Dresden, where he perfected his technique of hand-stopping. His return to and service in the court ensemble of Count Thun, however, was marked by charges of insubordination, and he escaped to Italy pursued by the count’s thugs who were charged with either bringing him back to Bohemia or knocking out his front teeth. He made his way to Italy, where he “Italianized” his name to Giovanni Punto, winning approbation for his performance and obtaining a post as a violinist at the court of Joseph Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern- Heuchingen. In 1769 he moved to Mainz to perform for Elector-Archbishop Emmerich Joseph von Breidbach zu Bürresheim. In 1772 he began a career as a touring soloist, centering his activities in Paris and London, although he maintained a post with Archbishop Adam von Seinsheim in Würzburg and with the private orchestra of George III of England. Settling in Paris in 1788 he was appointed conductor of the Théâtre des Variétés Amusantes a year later, riding out the Revolution as a popular conductor. Refusal to appoint him to the faculty of the new Conservatoire in 1798, however, led him to return to touring in Bohemia and Austria, where his performance ability was noted by composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven. As a performer, he concentrated on second or low horn, perfecting the art of hand-stopping to produce notes outside the natural harmonic series. Charles Burney noted the “astounding execution” of his performances. As a composer, he concentrated on his own instrument, writing 16 horn concertos (plus another for two horns), 103 horn duets, 47 horn trios, 21 horn quartets, and a horn sextet; in addition he composed a clarinet concerto, three flute quartets, three flute quintets (with horn), and a large number of trios for flute and strings.
Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) - Magnificat (D-Dur) a due cori 'Meine Seele erhebt den Herrn' (1716)
Performers: Nicki Kennedy (soprano); Ursula Eittinger (contralto); Andreas Post (tenor); Stephan MacLeod (bass); Kölner Akademie; Michael Alexander Willens (conductor)
German composer, critic, music journalist, lexicographer and theorist. He was the third and only surviving son of a Hamburg tax collector, Johannes Mattheson, and Margaretha Hölling. Johann the son received a liberal education at the Johanneum in Hamburg and began musical studies at the age of six. By age nine, he was performing on the organ in Hamburg churches and singing with the Hamburg opera, beginning a long association. He befriended George Frideric Handel there in 1703 and apparently helped Handel secure a position with the opera orchestra. Although, he nearly killed Handel in a sudden quarrel during a performance of Mattheson's opera 'Die unglückselige Kleopatra, Königin von Ägypten' in 1704. Handel was saved only by a large button which turned aside Mattheson's sword. The two were afterwards reconciled and remained in correspondence for life: shortly after his friend's death, Mattheson translated John Mainwaring's biography of Handel into German and had it published in Hamburg at his own expense ('auf Kosten des Übersetzers') in 1761. The key moment of Mattheson’s career arrived with the appointment as tutor to the son of Sir John Wich, the English ambassador to Hamburg, in 1704, a job which he performed so impressively that he was made Wich’s private secretary in 1706 with a high salary and important diplomatic responsibilities. Mattheson retained this post when the son succeeded his father as ambassador in 1715, even while taking on other posts as director of music at the Hamburg cathedral (1715) and Kapellmeister to the Duke of Holstein (1719). He married an Englishwoman, Catharina Jennings (?-1753), in 1709. During the extraordinarily productive years between 1715 and 1740 he wrote not only numerous important scores and treatises but also many translations from English of books et al. He also translated several English histories, novels and philosophical works, and produced a steady flow of articles for journals published in Hamburg. In 1741 he received the title of Legation Secretary to the Duke of Holstein, and in 1744 was promoted to ‘Legations-Rat’. On 25 April 1764, after a funeral with music of his own composition conducted by Georg Philipp Telemann, Mattheson’s body was buried in the crypt of St. Michael’s Church in Hamburg, the organ of which he had paid to restore. Possessed of great intelligence and a remarkably broad education in addition to prodigious musical talent, Johann Mattheson is remembered today as one of the most prolific writers on music of the Baroque period. His legacy of treatises, journals, letters, and articles yields a remarkably comprehensive picture of music as it was practiced in the first half of 18th-century Europe. The picture is particularly valuable because Mattheson himself held important positions in the musical world and composed 7 operas, 25 oratorios, 3 passions, 18 Italian cantatas, 24 sonatas, 13 suites for harpsichord, and 12 fugues. Details of his life come chiefly from his own 'Grundlage einer Ehren- Pforte', a biographical dictionary.
French composer and theorist. Details about his life before 1722, when he moved permanently from Dijon to Paris, are sketchy, partly owing to his own reticence. He was the seventh child and eldest surviving son of Jean Rameau, organist in Dijon, and Claudine Demartinécourt. He may have studied music with the organist at the Sainte Chapelle in Dijon, Claude Derey, and he eventually enrolled in the Jesuit Collège des Godrans, where he first encountered musical theater. In 1701 or 1702, he spent a brief time in Italy and then took up the post of organist of the Clermont Cathedral in May 1702. Next, he moved to Paris in 1706, became organist at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le- Grand and to the Pères de la Merci, and published Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin. In 1709, he returned to Dijon to succeed his father as organist of Notre Dame and then to Lyons in 1713 to be chief organist of the city. In 1715, he was reappointed at Clermont Cathedral, where he began work on the Traité de l’Harmonie. His first decade in Paris was consumed with publishing his new book, which would become famous all over Europe, two more collections of keyboard music in 1724 and 1729, and teaching. Oddly, he was not able to secure a major position as organist anywhere in Paris until 1732, when he became organist at Sainte Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie. He married a talented singer, 19-year-old Marie-Louis Mangot, on 25 February 1726. She would bear him four children and sing in some of his operas. Rameau’s first attempt at a full-scale opera, 'Hippolyte et Aricie', opened in 1733 and immediately ignited that kind of intellectual controversy that could only happen in France. His proponents, the ramistes, admired the opera’s adventurous harmonies and more realistic dramaturgy, while the opposing lullistes, motivated perhaps by jealousy and fear that their namesake might be eclipsed, railed against its Italianisms and harmonic complexity. The controversy persisted through the 1730s and encompassed Rameau’s second opera, 'Les Indes Galantes', which saw 64 performances in two years, and especially his fifth, 'Dardanus'.
From sometime in the mid-1730s until 1753, he was attached to the household of one of the richest men in France, Alexandre Le Riche de La Poupelinière. La Poupelinière, a financier, was a great patron of the arts and all manner of writers, actors, and cultural figures would meet at his house. The attachment advanced Rameau’s operatic career considerably, since he met some of his many librettists there. After a fallow period in the early 1740s, he seems to have caught the attention of the French court. In 1745, he received three commissions for theater works, including the opera for the Dauphin’s wedding, 'La Princesse de Navarre', with a libretto of Voltaire. On May 4, he was rewarded with an annual pension of 2.000 livres and the title 'compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roy', a singular honor for a musician not officially appointed at the court. These commissions began a train of nine works for the stage composed between 1745 and 1749. Rameau’s operas so dominated Paris at this time that the management of the Paris opera felt compelled to restrict the offerings of Rameau to only two operas per year, in order to give younger composers a chance. Despite his fame as a thinker about music, Rameau was never elected to the Académie Royale des Sciences, a disappointment. Five months before his death, however, he did receive a patent of nobility from the king, and he died a comparatively wealthy man three weeks after falling ill with a fever. Many memorial services in Paris, Dijon, and other provincial cities followed. The first, at the Pères de l’Oratoire on 27 September 1764, included as many as 180 musicians and was attended by over 1.000 mourners. Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the greatest figures in French musical history, a theorist of European stature and France's leading 18th-century composer. He made important contributions to the cantata, the motet and, more especially, keyboard music, and many of his dramatic compositions stand alongside those of Lully and Gluck as the pinnacles of pre-Revolutionary French opera.
William Babell (c.1690-1723)
- Concerto (e-moll) for Flute from 'Concertos in 7 parts: the first four for violins and one small flute and the two last for violins and two flutes ... opera terza'
Performers: Anna Stegmann (flute); Ensemble Odyssee
English harpsichordist, organist, violinist, composer and arranger. He received his early musical instruction from his father, Charles Babel, a bassoonist in the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra until he was 80, and later from Johann Christoph Pepusch. He led an active professional life in London. As a violinist he was said to have played in the private band of George I, while as a harpsichordist, from about 1711, his name frequently appears in London concert notices, usually in conjunction with those of William Corbett, James Paisible and (later) Matthew Dubourg. He was also associated with Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. From November 1718 until his death he was organist of All Hallows Bread Street and was succeeded there by John Stanley. He acquired an international reputation as a harpsichordist largely through his virtuoso arrangements of fashionable operatic arias and overtures, especially those of Georg Friedrich Handel. His keyboard style was undoubtedly influenced by his close acquaintance with Handel's playing; it has been proposed that one of the manuscript settings of ‘Vo' far guerra’ is Babell's response to a reworking and development of the material by Handel himself, but this hypothesis has found no support. These arrangements by Babell, although appearing exceptional, nevertheless give an intriguing insight into early 18th-century practices of keyboard extemporization and ornamentation.
