572307bk Benda EU_572307bk Benda 19/07/2011 17:01 Page 4 Hans-Joachim Berg Franz Hans-Joachim Berg was born in Schwetzingen in 1980. After receiving early prizes as a violinist he decided to follow his natural affinity for the baroque violin and its literature and studied with Gottfried von der Goltz at the BENDA Würzburg University of Music from 2000 to 2005 and with Petra Müllejans in Frankfurt, finishing with the highest honours in 2007. He took chamber music courses with Glen Wilson, Jaap ter Linden, Anton Steck, Michael Schneider, Michael Hofstetter and Gerhart Darmstadt. He has been closely associated with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, touring with, among others, Cecilia Bartoli and René Jacobs, and recording Händel’s Messiah and Mozart Violin Sonatas symphonies. Sonatas by Gottfried Kirchhof were recorded with the Freiburg Chamber Music Ensemble. He has participated in major opera productions in Paris, Amsterdam, Stuttgart and Brussels, and played in the Badische (with original ornamentation) Staatskapelle Karlsruhe, the Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra, and most recently the baroque ensemble L’arpa festante and the Stuttgart Baroque Orchestra under Frieder Bernius. This world-première recording of five sonatas Hans-Joachim Berg, Baroque Violin with original ornamentation by Franz Benda on an unaltered Sebastian Klotz violin marks his début as a soloist on CD. Naoko Akutagawa, Harpsichord Naoko Akutagawa Naoko Akutagawa was born in Hiroshima in 1974. She studied piano there from the age of three and in Tokyo with Masayasu Oshima. At sixteen she switched to the harpsichord, and studied privately with Chiyoko Arita before entering her class at the Tohogakuen College of Music. Her chamber music instructor there was Masahiro Arita. She took her soloist diploma in 1997. In that year she entered the Musikhochschule in Würzburg, Germany, as a student of Glen Wilson, ending her studies with the Meisterklasse diploma in 2001. She had been appointed assistant professor in 1999, a position in which she continues to the present. She pursues a flourishing career in chamber music and as a soloist in Germany, recently performing Mozart concertos on the fortepiano to great critical acclaim. Her recordings have been broadcast by Japanese state radio and European stations. Naoko Akutagawa made her début recording for Naxos in 2005 with the complete works for harpsichord by Gaspard le Roux, and followed this with a highly acclaimed selection of works by Graupner. She was a prize-winner of the 2006 Bonporti Competition in Rovereto, Italy, and at the 2008 Göttingen Händel Festival Competition, and in 2007 was a guest music member of staff at the Netherlands Opera, Amsterdam. 8.572307 4 572307bk Benda EU_572307bk Benda 19/07/2011 17:01 Page 2 Franz (František) Benda (1709–1786) was in the hands of an artist such as Franz Benda, the movement scheme, and settled in for a relatively long thrill of not knowing what was coming next must have period of stability as a three-movement form. But Violin Sonatas with original ornamentation been like listening to Art Tatum. He has left us what is composers quickly tired of imitating opera sinfonias, As Europe recoiled from the endless wars of Louis XIV and had higher praise for him than for any other violinist probably the most extensive compendium of written-out and began experimenting with layouts other than fast- and the aesthetic tumults of the seventeenth century, she he met on his journeys through Europe, calling him “a examples of “improvisations” in all of music history: a slow-fast. Benda is particularly inventive in this respect. sought solace in the “dolce sereno” of the operas of truly great genius”, not belonging to any school. Benda manuscript in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek with 34 fully- By the time of his death in 1786, the sonata for melody Venice’s sunset, and the secluded intimacy of the French himself tells us he was most indebted for youthful ornamented sonatas for violin and continuo. Mihoko instrument with a bass line only – with or without chords Regency style called “galant”. The Germans combined inspiration to an itinerant Jewish dance-fiddler named Kimura (Edition Offenburg) has edited a selection of filled in by a keyboard instrument, as they are here – was and translated these into their “mixed” style, later Löbel.!This is how Benda chose (according to Burney) these, and the artists gratefully acknowledge her on its way out, in favour of wholly written-out piano refined into Empfindsamkeit (sensitivity), one of various to praise an Italian colleague whom he had not seen in permission to record five of them. In a very few parts. This certainly made life easier for accompanists, developments usually called, with admirable hindsight, twenty years: “he had not forgot his fine tone, so instances, when a repeat seemed inordinately long, they but resulted in the abandonment of the flexibility, “pre-classical”. The composers of the time had the good remarkably clear, full and sweet; and added, that he have merged the two versions. musicianship and participatory fun of the continuo era. fortune of not knowing that Haydn and Mozart were should always retain a precise and pleasing idea of his At this point in its chaotic history, the sonata had looming over the horizon. graceful manner of playing”. Burney’s descriptions of dropped the slow first movement of the Corellian four- Glen Wilson This turning inward produced a music difficult to other fine violinists linger on the same words – clear, grasp for ears raised on Beethoven, Wagner and sweet, graceful. Of Benda’s own playing he says, “His Stravinsky. Moderate tempi and what Kenneth Clark style is so truly cantabile, that scarce a passage can be called “the smile of reason” form a solid, conversational found in his compositions, which it is not in the power centre as a foil to the occasional presto or, more of the human voice to sing.” frequently, to adagios, which are, however, so lushly Nothing could be further removed from modern ornamented that the effect is one of garrulity rather than violin-playing. For Benda’s music, the fluty warbling of pathos. (But Benda is said to have brought tears to the the nightingale and a quicksilver bow, not the raucous eyes of his listeners with his adagio playing.) cry of the eagle and interminable “big sound”, are The productions of the period are often mere requisite. Instruments were sought to match. The baubles – exertion avoided at all costs, in an effort to be “silvery voice” of the Tyrolean Jacob Stainer was the “pleasing”; but a few composers – C. P. E. Bach more ideal for 150 years, even among Italians, until the than any other – managed to graft serious musical glamorous, larger-toned products of Cremona substance onto this precarious root. Franz Benda, for supplanted it as concert halls bloated at the end of the years a close associate of Bach’s at the court of Crown eighteenth century. For this recording, Hans-Joachim Prince and King Frederick the Great of Prussia, can be Berg plays an instrument unaltered since it was built in counted among the first rank of these exceptional 1735, just over the Karwendel mountains in Mittenwald, masters. Born the son of a Bohemian weaver in 1709, he Bavaria, by the leading German builder Sebastian Klotz. slowly rose through the ranks to a position of intimacy In mid-century Berlin, the art of ornamentation, ex with the most formidable monarch of the eighteenth tempore or only seemingly so, reached a pitch never Hans-Joachim Berg and Naoko Agutagawa century, brought four musical siblings to Prussia, and seen before or since. All repeats and all slow movements Photo: Bernd Lindemann sired one of the most famous composers of the next had to be almost newly composed on the spot, if one generation: Georg Benda was one of very few were to please the demanding connoisseur. The results colleagues who got a good word from Mozart.! of such adventures, judging by the testimony of the best Charles Burney met Franz Benda in Berlin in 1772, writers, were often lamentable; but when the listener 8.572307 2 3 8.572307.