Guillou Consort - Matteo Cesarotto
Jean Guillou: Souffles Heroiques
This Da Vinci Classics album includes original works and transcriptions penned by one of the leading figures of modern organ music, Jean Guillou. This master organist and composer wrote impressive organ transcriptions of the orchestral part of two Marian masterpieces originally written by the young Mozart, as part of his duties as the Salzburg Archbishop court musician. The organ accompanies the vocal parts, as it does in Guillous transcription after a Psalm by Franz Liszt, here presented in a version for solo tenor, choir and organ. The album also comprises original works by Guillou: one is the performance of an improvisation transcribed by Matteo Boischio, and proposed by Guillou in 1989. There is also a Suite pour Rameau by Guillou himself, which pays homage to one of the most important French musicians alluding to the suites composed by Rameau himself or Couperin, marked by suggestive titles. Finally, Ihr Himmel, Luft und Wind opus 76, a later work, is Guillous only a cappella piece for an ensemble of eight voices. It is based on a sonnet by Martin Opitz, dating from 1625. Opitz is generally regarded as the father of German poetry in the Baroque period, and even a theoretician of it, notably thanks to his Buch von der deutschen Poeterey. Beyond the text chosen, this poetic symbolism, extending the very subject of the work, is particularly enlightening, for a composer who openly claimed the poetic dimension as constitutive of his language and expressive aims, and who was himself a poet.