4 Times Baroque - Caught in Italian Virtuosity (2018)

Caught in Italian Virtuosity’ is the motto under which the up-and-coming young ensemble 4 Times Baroque are releasing their debut album, at the same time firing the starting gun for a promising career. It is indeed the often vertiginous virtuosity that totally ‘catches’ players and hearers alike of Italian music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, this ‘Baroque music’ has far more to offer than just acrobatic broken triads, precipitous passages and brilliant trills. It is not easy to answer the question of what the actual concern of ‘Baroque’ music is: Hardly any other period of European cultural history is so contradictory, so full of extremes as that which spanned the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – today appositely termed the ‘Baroque’. To start with, ‘baroque’ was not the name of an era, but a pejorative term for the ill-proportioned and ill-formed: ‘barocco’ was the term applied by the jeweller to an irregular pearl, by the rhetorician to a poorly thought-out idea, and at the end of the period by Italian critics to ‘the extreme of ridiculous and bizarre’.

The ensemble 4 Times Baroque was founded in 2013 by the four young musicians Jan Nigges (recorder), Jonas Zschenderlein (violin), Karl Simko (cello) and Alexander von Heißen (harpsichord). Based in Frankfurt (Main), the quartet is one of the most exciting ensembles of the new generation of early music performers and has already been invited to well-known festivals and venues throughout Germany and Europe. The FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) described a concert at the Rheingau Musikfestival as a “fresh, energetic and thrilling performance,” the Schwäbische Post went so far as to call them “popstars” and “four young shooting stars.”

The majority of works on this album do stem from full-blooded Italian composers, Corelli and Vivaldi. As regards Handel, he was born a Saxon, lived most of his career in England, but did borrow considerable parts of his art from the newest Italian trends. Pierre Prowo hailed from Hamburg which he never seems to have much left, but here again, his language is heavily inspired by Italy. Finally, Giuseppe Sammartini was born in Milano, but spent nearly all his life in London – although here again, his musical taste remains Italian.