Holland Baroque meets Jeremias Schwarzer, Hosokawa & Vivaldi: Sounds & Clouds - album review

Download: Das Meer Vor Dem Sturm; La Tempesta Di Mare; Dämmerung; Il Gardellino

Holland Baroque Meets Jeremias Schwarzer

“Ideal music,” the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa once noted, “is like the sound of nature” – a pertinent position from which to regard this work, commissioned by recorder virtuoso Jeremias Schwarzer, in which five sections of Hosokawa’s Singing Garden in Venice are separated by appropriate Vivaldi concertos.

Hosokawa describes his work as akin to gardening or ikebana (flower arranging), of devising the musical backgrounds against which Vivaldi’s “flowers” might best blossom.

Accordingly, the theorbo and trickling water of “Dämmerung” clears the way for the delightful trilling recorder birdsong of “Il Gardellino”, so deftly and delicately delivered by Schwarzer; while the lowering strings and deep, mysteriously lyrical woodwind lines of “Das Meer Vor Dem Sturm” provide the perfect setting for “La Tempesta Di Mare”.