Sonatas for violoncello by Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde

Francesco Geminiani

Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde

Sonatas for violoncello

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917299120
Catnr: CC 72991
Release date: 18 October 2024
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Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917299120

Catalogue number
CC 72991

Release date
18 October 2024

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

What first intrigued me about Geminiani as a musical figure was his propensity for unpredictable, asymmetrical and improvisatory style—both as a composer and as a performer. If his tempo rubato was apparently too wild for the Neapolitan musicians, his performances were greatly admired for their elegance and taste in England. My everlasting fascination with tempo rubato and the art of “reading between the lines” in terms of tempo, flexibility and rhythmic variations have led me to approach Geminiani’s music with this angle in mind. Moreover, during the recording sessions, many musical aspects—such as ornamentation, continuo realization, and dynamics—were intentionally left to the musicians’ extemporaneous decisions. We used the diversity of colors found in the various instruments forming the continuo group (harpsichord, cello, cello piccolo, violone, theorbo) to create different textures for each movement. Almost like in jazz, each instrument is given its moment to come to the foreground and emerge from the sound of the group.

Was mich an Geminiani als musikalische Persönlichkeit zunächst faszinierte, war seine Neigung zu einem unberechenbaren, asymmetrischen und improvisatorischen Stil - sowohl als Komponist als auch als Interpret. Während sein Tempo-Rubato den neapolitanischen Musikern offenbar zu wild war, wurden seine Aufführungen in England wegen ihrer Eleganz und ihres Geschmacks sehr bewundert. Meine immerwährende Faszination für das Tempo-Rubato und die Kunst des „Lesens zwischen den Zeilen“ in Bezug auf Tempo, Flexibilität und rhythmische Variationen haben mich dazu veranlasst, mich Geminianis Musik unter diesem Gesichtspunkt zu nähern. Darüber hinaus wurden während der Aufnahmesitzungen viele musikalische Aspekte - wie Verzierungen, Generalbassumsetzung und Dynamik - absichtlich den spontanen Entscheidungen der Musiker überlassen. Wir nutzten die Farbenvielfalt der verschiedenen Instrumente, die die Continuogruppe bilden (Cembalo, Cello, Cello piccolo, Violone, Theorbe), um für jeden Satz unterschiedliche Texturen zu schaffen. Fast wie im Jazz erhält jedes Instrument seinen Moment, um in den Vordergrund zu treten und aus dem Klang der Gruppe hervorzutreten.

Artist(s)

Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde (violoncello)

Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde is a versatile musician whose repertoire ranges from the late-17th to the 20th century. She researches and uses techniques and instruments according to the time of the music she plays. After studying modern cello with Denis Brott and Carole Sirois at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, Octavie received the Prix avec Grande Distinction in 2011. Following her interest in performance practice, she studied baroque cello with Susie Napper in Montreal and with Viola de Hoog in Amsterdam. As a young musician, Octavie regularly won prizes in national competitions in Quebec and Canada and regularly attended masterclasses and courses with internationally renowned soloists and pedagogues. She received prizes as a soloist at the International Competition “Concours Corneille” in France...

After studying modern cello with Denis Brott and Carole Sirois at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, Octavie received the Prix avec Grande Distinction in 2011. Following her interest in performance practice, she studied baroque cello with Susie Napper in Montreal and with Viola de Hoog in Amsterdam. As a young musician, Octavie regularly won prizes in national competitions in Quebec and Canada and regularly attended masterclasses and courses with internationally renowned soloists and pedagogues. She received prizes as a soloist at the International Competition “Concours Corneille” in France and the Early Music Competition in Yamanashi, Japan. Her musical endeavors were supported by grants from the Canada Arts Council, the Banff Center for the Arts and the CALQ.

Currently focusing on the historical performance of late Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires, she performs recitals regularly with fortepiano player and harpsichordist Artem Belogurov. Together, they took part in the Oude Muziek Festival Utrecht, Festival Montreal Baroque, the International Young Artist Presentation in Antwerp, Festival Royaumont, the Fortepiano Festival Zaandijk, among others. Their first CD will be issued later this year on the label Challenge Classics and is centered around mid-18th century German music for violoncello piccolo.

In Europe, she regularly performs with groups such as Ensemble Masques, Vox Luminis, La Sfera Armoniosa, Il Gardellino, Orchestra of the 18th century, and the Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht. She was selected for the 2017 Experience Scheme with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Handel House Talent 2018-2019 and the Monteverdi Apprenticeship 2019-2020. An avid chamber musician, she co-founded the period ensemble Postscript, which has performed during Oude Muziek Festival Utrecht and MA Festival Brugge, among others. While still in Montreal, Octavie performed with many ensembles including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Caprice, les Rendez-vous baroque français, Les Lys Naissants and the chamber groups Epsilon, quintette à cordes, Ensemble Arkea, Ensemble Allogène, Ensemble Paramirabo and the Ensemble BOP. Her recordings can be heard on labels such as Alpha Classics, Passacaille, Challenge Classics, Brilliant Classics and TRPTK.

She was the co-director of Romberg Dagen, a festival celebrating the composer and cellist Bernhard Romberg and the performance of 19th-century music, which took place in Amsterdam in May 2018. Her current research is centered on the performance practice of late 19th and early 20th century through the imitation of early recordings: these experiments are explored on the Romantic Lab blog.

Octavie has the pleasure of playing a Thomas Dodd cello from 1800 on loan from the Nationaal Muziekinstrumenten Fonds of the Netherlands, as well as her own ca.1700 baroque cello by Johann Michael Alban.

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Postscript

A period ensemble specializing in the historically inspired performance of music from Baroque to the Romantic era. Co-directed by cellist Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde and keyboardist Artem Belogurov, and founded together with flutists David Westcombe and Aysha Wills, the ensemble takes various forms and sometimes expands to a small orchestra. In addition to performing instrumental music, Postscript also collaborates with singers, and actors when reviving the forgotten genre of melodramas. First prize winner at the international Brothers Graun Competition in 2018, Postscript was selected for the 2020 REMA showcase and has performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, Festival de Royaumont, MA Festival Brugge, Early Music Vancouver. The group has received the support of Cultuurfonds, Fonds Podium Kunsten and Amsterdams Fonds voor...

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Artem Belogurov (harpsichord)

Known equally for his “verve, wit, and delicatesse” (Boston Musical Intelligencer) and his “infinite tenderness” (Evening Odessa), Artem Belogurov has an extensive repertoire, ranging through three centuries of solo and chamber works. He has a particular affinity for the Viennese classical style, in which he is distinguished by his use of improvisatory ornamentation. His interest in period performance leads him to historical keyboards, including clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepianos spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His critically acclaimed album of solo piano works by the late nineteenth century American Romantic composers, recorded on a Chickering piano built in 1873, was released by the London-based label Piano Classics in 2015. He is also a discerning advocate of contemporary music, and collaborates with a number of composers. In 2009 he had the honor of performing the Boston premiere of Elliott Carter’s Caténaires for solo piano.
As a soloist and in chamber groups, Artem has performed in a wide variety of venues, among them Jordan Hall, Harvard Musical Association, the Universität der Kunste in Berlin, the Musikhochschule in Hanover, St Andrews University in Scotland, the Odessa Philharmonic Hall in Ukraine, the Rachmaninoff Society in Saint Petersburg, Castello di Galeazza in Italy, Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht, and Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.
Artem’s recent projects included a series of lectures, recitals, and masterclasses in Germany on the Chopin Préludes with the noted musicologist and historian Mark Lindley, US tours with the brilliant young Ukrainian violinist, Aleksey Semenenko, and performances at the Early Music Festival Fabulous Fringe in Utrecht. He has also been performing programs drawn from his solo CD in the US and Europe. His recording of a new arrangement of Prokofiev’s opera Fiery Angel for cello and piano with the Russian cellist Maya Fridman on the label TRPTK is scheduled to be released in Fall 2016. His next recording projects include Beethoven’s complete works for fortepiano and cello on original instruments with the Canadian cellist Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde, for the Italian label Gamma Musica and a CD of violin and piano music by composers from Boston with Aleksey Semenenko. In the coming season, Artem will be touring Europe, the US, and Japan.
In April 2016, Artem was awarded second prize at the 29th International Competition for Early Music in Yamanashi, Japan. Artem received his Bachelor degree in Piano Performance from the New England Conservatory where his teachers were Gabriel Chodos, Patricia Zander, and Victor Rosenbaum. In 2016 he graduated from the Master of Music in Early Keyboards program at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and received cum laude in both clavichord and fortepiano. His main teachers were Menno van Delft, Richard Egarr, and Kris Verhelst.

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Víctor García García (violoncello)

Victor Garcia Garcia is a Spanish cellist specialized in historical performance. He enjoys a varied and international musical career as a soloist, teacher, chamber musician and orchestral player. He teaches historical cello at the Utrechts Conservatorium, and was recently awarded a doctoral degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His artistic research focused on the performance practices of cellists around Beethoven. Victor is a prizewinner at the Witold Lutoslawski Cello Competition, the Händel Competition (as part of the Duo Auxesis) and the Biagio Marini Competition (as part of Ayres Extemporae). Additionally, he has been an Artist in Residence at the Schloss Weissenbrunn. Victor has participated in the Monteverdi Apprentices Programme at the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Collegium Vocale Gent...

Victor Garcia Garcia is a Spanish cellist specialized in historical performance. He enjoys a varied and international musical career as a soloist, teacher, chamber musician and orchestral player. He teaches historical cello at the Utrechts Conservatorium, and was recently awarded a doctoral degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His artistic research focused on the performance practices of cellists around Beethoven. Victor is a prizewinner at the Witold Lutoslawski Cello Competition, the Händel Competition (as part of the Duo Auxesis) and the Biagio Marini Competition (as part of Ayres Extemporae). Additionally, he has been an Artist in Residence at the Schloss Weissenbrunn. Victor has participated in the Monteverdi Apprentices Programme at the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Collegium Vocale Gent Academy and the Academy of the Balthasar Neumann Ensembles. He also performs regularly with ensembles such as the Orchestre des Champs- Élysées, the Utopia Orchestra and the Millenium Orchestra. He is the artistic director of the Festival Impulso in La Palma, Spain.

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Michele Pasotti (theorbo)

Michele Pasotti is the director and founder of the Early Music ensemble la fonte musica. He teaches Lute at Cesena’s Conservatorio and often gives seminars on medieval music and on the lute in specialized institutions, conservatories, schools, festivals and radios. He graduated in lute with Massimo Lonardi and specialized following seminars by Hopkinson Smith and Paul O'Dette. At the Civica Scuola di Musica in Milan he then specialized in Renaissance Theory and Counterpoint and deepened the study of medieval music in both Milan and Barcelona (ESMUC). He also graduated with honors in theoretical philosophy. As a lutenist, he collaborates regularly with Il Giardino Armonico, Collegium Vocale, Arcangelo, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Cecilia Bartoli. He devotes himself with passion to chamber music...

Michele Pasotti is the director and founder of the Early Music ensemble la fonte musica. He teaches Lute at Cesena’s Conservatorio and often gives seminars on medieval music and on the lute in specialized institutions, conservatories, schools, festivals and radios.
He graduated in lute with Massimo Lonardi and specialized following seminars by Hopkinson Smith and Paul O'Dette. At the Civica Scuola di Musica in Milan he then specialized in Renaissance Theory and Counterpoint and deepened the study of medieval music in both Milan and Barcelona (ESMUC). He also graduated with honors in theoretical philosophy.
As a lutenist, he collaborates regularly with Il Giardino Armonico, Collegium Vocale, Arcangelo, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Cecilia Bartoli. He devotes himself with passion to chamber music in small ensembles.
As a soloist (lutes, theorbo, baroque guitar) he has a repertoire ranging from the Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century and has recorded a work dedicated to the great 17th century guitarist Francesco Corbetta (Dynamic). He has performed on more than 80 records.

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Margaret Urquhart (violone)

Margaret Urquhart studied double bass and violone with Anthony Woodrow and viola da gamba with Anneke Pols at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. After completing her studies she became a member of many notable baroque ensembles including La Petite Bande, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Leonhardt Consort and Collegium Vocale Gent. She is a member of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and is active as a chamber music performer taking part in many radio, tv and CD recordings. She teaches baroque double bass/violone at The Hague Conservatory and at the Amsterdam Conservatory. She also teaches at the University of Salamanca and coaches at the European Baroque Orchestra training courses. She performs on the 16 foot double bass/violone, the Viennese double...

She teaches baroque double bass/violone at The Hague Conservatory and at the Amsterdam Conservatory. She also teaches at the University of Salamanca and coaches at the European Baroque Orchestra training courses.
She performs on the 16 foot double bass/violone, the Viennese double bass and also the eight foot violone in various tunings.

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Composer(s)

Francesco Geminiani

Francesco Geminiani was born at Lucca, in Tuscany, in December 1687. At an early age he showed considerable talent after being taught violin lessons by his father. Later he studied the violin under Carlo Ambrogio Lonati in Milan and then in Rome under the celebrated master, Corelli. It is also considered possible that he studied composition with Alessandro Scarlatti whilst staying in Naples. At the age of 20 he returned to his home town of Lucca where he played the violin in the Town Orchestra for three years. He then moved to Naples in 1711 to take up the position as Leader of the Opera Orchestra. By this time he had become recognized as a brilliant violin virtuoso; indeed the orchestra...

At the age of 20 he returned to his home town of Lucca where he played the violin in the Town Orchestra for three years. He then moved to Naples in 1711 to take up the position as Leader of the Opera Orchestra. By this time he had become recognized as a brilliant violin virtuoso; indeed the orchestra appears to have experienced some difficulty in following him due to his improvisational virtuosity, or, as the music historian Dr. Burney put it, "his unexpected accelerations and relaxations of measure".

In 1714, he tried his fortune in England, where his brilliant violin playing immediately met with great success. London had become a major European music center, thanks in part to Handel, who had himself studied in Rome under Corelli and thus brought a measure of Italian musical style with him. Geminiani gained much support from the aristocracy and leading figures at the Royal Court, and was invited to play the violin before George I, accompanied at the harpsichord by no less than Handel. He soon established himself in London as the leading master of violin-playing, with his concerts, his published compositions, and his theoretical treatises, the first and most important being "The Art of Playing the Violin" (1731) which included all the technical principles of essential violin performance.

He also had aristocratic pupils, among them the Earl of Essex who in 1728 tried unsuccessfully to arrange for Geminiani to become Master and Composer of the State Music of Ireland. It was also the Earl of Essex who had to rescue him from prison after he ran into debt through his consuming passion for art-dealing and collecting. This may have led him to leave London for a period in Dublin in 1733, where he rapidly built up a fine reputation as a teacher, performer, concert promoter and musical theorist. In that same year, he opened a Concert Room in Dublin, using the upstairs premises for music and the rooms below for trading in pictures. However, he was soon to return to London to make it his permanent home, although he did pay another visit to Dublin a few years later.

At this period of English musical life, as the essayist Roger North testified, Corelli's music had rapidly become the staple diet of players and music clubs alike: "Then came over Corelly's first consort that cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever," wrote North in about 1726. "By degrees the rest of his consorts, and at last the conciertos [0p. 6] came, all of which are to the musitians like the bread of life." Whether out of respect for his teacher, or to "cash in on" his teacher's popularity is a matter of speculation; whatever his motive, Geminiani based his earliest published Concertos on Corelli's Sonatas for Violin and Continuo, Op.5. He later made further concerto arrangements from Corelli's Trios Op.1 and Op.3, as well as having made arrangements from his own Violin Sonatas Op.4.

His own Concertos, Op.2 and 3, appeared in 1732 and 1733, the Op.3 Concerti Grossi being amongst his most popular works at the time. He revised and reissued them in full score in about 1755. In the opinion of Burney - usually a stern critic of Geminiani - the Op.3 concertos "established his character, and placed him at the head of all the masters then living, in this species of composition" (General History of Music, Vol. 4, 1789).

He also published further Concertos as Op.7 (1746), and The Enchanted Forest, a staged pantomime scored for two violins and cello with an orchestra of two trumpets, two flutes, two horns, strings and timpani, was presented in Paris at the Tuileries palace in 1754.

As a renowned violin virtuoso, he published several challenging collections of his Violin Sonatas which require dramatic flair from the player; indeed such was the difficulty of his Op.1 and 4 in particular that very few contemporary violinists dared play them in public. Among the Sonata movements are fugues and double fugues, strong in imitative counterpoint, and idiomatic passages of multiple stopping.

Geminiani provided ornaments for both slow and fast movements as well as cadenzas; he advocated the use of vibrato 'as often as possible'. The expressiveness of his playing was much admired by both Hawkins and Burney; Tartini tellingly described him as 'il furibondo'.

Geminiani was undoubtedly fond of arranging his own works: among his transcriptions are Harpsichord versions (1741) of his Op.1 and 4 and Concerto Grosso versions of Op.4 (1743). His Op.5 Cello Sonatas (published in Paris), together with a transcription for Violin (issued in London and The Hague), appeared in 1746. In about 1755 he published 'modernized' versions of the Op.2 and 3 Concertos, and in 1757 a final arrangement of Op.1 in trio format.

He gained further fame from the publication of a series of practical treatises which were much reprinted, translated and paraphrased. In addition to The Art of Playing on the Violin, Geminiani produced Rules for Playing in a True Taste (1748), revised a year later as A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick, a Guida harmonica with supplement (c.l754), The Art of Accompaniment (c.l754) - written from the soloist's point of view - and The Art of Playing the Guitar or Cittra (Edinburgh, 1760). When considered together with his music and the implications of the alterations he made when reissuing collections such as Op.1 and 4, Geminiani's treatises represent an important source of post-Corellian performance practices.

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