Armida Quartett
Fuga Magna
- Type CD
- Label CAvi
- UPC 4260085533800
- Catalog number AVI 8553380
- Release date 07 July 2017
About the album
The act of thinking and composing in counterpoint – in fugues – has reigned as the supreme musical discipline ever since Western music emerged around the year 1200 from the shadows of purely oral transmission to be codified in writing, initially in mensural notation.
Our seven-league-boot journey across the realm of fugue begins with the two earliest published German works in the genre for instrumental ensemble from the year 1602. The first of them has ethereal motifs which it rather cautiously explores, whereas the second is based on the folk song O Nachbar
Roland, mein Herz ist voller Pein (which Samuel Scheidt arranged as a magnificent canzone for strings in 1621). Haussmann’s Fugae are written “for all kinds of instruments”: idiomatic passagework for violin is thus entirely absent here, and only emerged as a stylistic trait in the course of the 17th century.
Alessandro Scarlatti is the composer of four sonatas that are to be performed senza cembalo, as he specifies, and which are often referred to as the first string quartets. The animated movements are complex counterpoint constructions; the middle movements are tortuous harmonic meanders brimming with ligature et durezze; the final movements are all short, ironic minuets with the two violin parts in unison.
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11Fuga prima (ca. 1600)
04:53 -
12Fuga secunda (ca. 1600)
02:33 -
13Sonata à quattro No. 4 I. Largo
03:20 -
14Sonata à quattro No. 4 II. Grave
01:30 -
15Sonata à quattro No. 4 III. Allegro – Allegro – Minuet
02:17 -
16From: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 Contrapunctus 1
03:29 -
17From: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 Contrapunctus 4
03:04 -
18From: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 Contrapunctus 11
04:22 -
19Sonata in C Minor I. Largo
02:52 -
110Sonata in C Minor I. Fuga. Allegro moderato
03:17 -
111Sonata in C Minor III. Grave
01:47 -
112Sonata in C Minor IV. Giga
04:44 -
113Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 I. Adagio
02:57 -
114Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 II. Fuge
03:31 -
115Grosse Fuge in B Flat Major Op. 133
14:31