ALBINONI/BACH/CACCINI: Arias and — well — Arrangements
Inessa Galante (soprano); Band of Latvian National Opera/Aleksandrs Vilumanis; London Musici/Mark Stephenson
Campion RRSP 8001 [26:08]
This peculiar little disc—it’s an EP, really, though that term feels quaint in the CD age—landed on my desk with the kind of promotional materials that make one’s heart sink. The biographical notes about Galante consume most of the sleeve space, relegating actual — information about the music to a cramped corner one needs reading glasses to decipher. We learn about her restaurant appearances along the Thames.
One supposes there are people who care more about that than about Bach, though I’d rather not make their acquaintance. The program itself raises eyebrows. Someone has decided that Albinoni’s overexposed "Adagio"—already of dubious provenance, as Remo Giazotto essentially composed most of it—needed a wordless vocal line floating above the strings.
The result sounds like Puccini’s cutting-room floor, all heaving bosom and vibrato wide enough to sail a barge through. It’s bizarre, frankly. Not unpleasant, mind you, just…
wrong in some fundamental way that’s hard to articulate without sounding like a pedant. Galante herself? She possesses a warm, pliant instrument—there’s real voice there.
The timbre has that slightly Slavic darkness in the lower register, opening into a rather lovely bloom above the staff. She sings in tune, which one shouldn’t have to mention but increasingly must. The Bach arias, however, swim in a soup of interpretive choices that would have sent Harnoncourt reaching for the smelling salts.
“Ei wie schmeckt der Coffee” gets the soubrette treatment, all winks and — well — nudges, while “Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not” from Cantata 21 drowns in portamento. David Golightly’s arrangements don’t help—everything reduced to tune-plus-lush-accompaniment, the continuo banished, the theological severity of Bach’s original conception utterly domesticated. The Caccini “Amarilli mia bella” proves genuinely comical if you’ve spent any time with the monodic revolution of the early Baroque.
Neil Ingman’s arrangement transforms it into something that might accompany a particularly lavish perfume advertisement. All that radical simplicity, that revolutionary directness—gone, replaced by swooning strings and the kind of vibrato that would scandalize anyone who’s heard Emma Kirkby. Diction throughout remains frustratingly unclear.
The German texts blur into generalized vowel sounds; the Italian fares somewhat better, though not by much. There are forced notes, particularly when Galante pushes into the upper register without proper support. The Orchestra of Latvian National Opera plays with more enthusiasm than precision, though Mark Stephenson extracts more polish from the London Musici in the English sessions.
I’m trying not to sound like a complete snob about this. There’s nothing morally wrong with enjoying prettified baroque music—Classic FM has built an empire on it, and people find genuine pleasure in these performances. If your aunt wants something pleasant for Sunday morning, this will serve admirably.
It’s inoffensive, often lovely in a generalized way, and Galante clearly has talent. But it won’t bear close listening. Everything here feels old-fashioned—not in the good sense of preserving valuable traditions, but in the bad sense of preserving interpretive habits we’ve learned to question.
The vibrato, the arrangements, the whole aesthetic belongs to a world where “early music” meant Stokowski conducting Vivaldi. We’ve learned so much in the intervening decades about how this repertoire might — actually have sounded, about rhetoric and affect and the relationship between text and music. None of that knowledge has penetrated here.
You can almost hear the rosin dust settling on the strings.
For the specialist collector, there’s nothing. For Auntie May, it’ll tickle the ear quite nicely. I know which camp I’m in.
