Hana Blažíková, Collegium Marianum, Jana Semerádová - Brentner: Concertos & Arias (2009)

The only early eighteenth century composer from Czech-speaking lands to have gained much exposure in western Europe and North America has been Jan Dismas Zelenka. But there's a great deal of music left to discover from that culturally rich part of the world, where early music is a comparatively new concept. This Czech release, compiling performances from 2003 and 2005, examines two publications by composer Jan Josef Ignác Brentner, both with grandiloquent Latin titles: the Harmonica duodecatometria ecclesiastica, Op. 1, is a set of Latin sacred arias, issued in 1716; the Horae pomeridianae seu concertus cammerales sex, Op. 4, is a group of chamber concertos with diverse instrumentation, from 1720; they have some traits of the Italian concerto grosso. Both sets of pieces apparently circulated quite a bit in their own time. The arias, with complex varied structures that show Brentner trying to come to terms with the different Italian models that would have come his way, are the more successful of the two. The concertos likewise show a variety of influences, but, although the booklet notes (in English, French, German, and Czech) drop the name of Vivaldi, he is hardly among them; the concertos consist of sequences of (in most cases) four tiny movements, and Albinoni is a likelier model for many of them. The most fun is the middle movement of the concerto No. 4 (track 17), which quotes a night-watchman folk tune and resembles the delightful rustic programs in some of Biber's instrumental music. Probably the best news here is the set of performances by the Collegium Marianum and Jana Semerádova, playing a group of carefully documented historical instruments; this was among the first Czech historical performance that inhabits the same sphere as contemporary Italian and French groups, and one can only hope that there's more where this came from. Soprano Hana Blazková has an attractive level of control over the phrases of the arias; she is agile, but she doesn't inflate the music to a dimension that the notes can't bear.