I don’t often listen to CDs released on Australian jazz labels but I did come across tripudiis sonis variis from the Melbourne trio Hyperbaroq and was quite intrigued. It’s a set of performances of, mainly, Italian baroque music. Composers such as Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Strozzi feature but there are also a couple of earlier pieces in Latin and Galician and two English songs; one by Henry Purcell and a Robert Johnson setting of Ben Jonson.
This is not your typical HIP baroque performance. Hyperbaroq’s style is highly improvisatory and incorporates a lot of atypical instruments as well as pre-recorded electronics. The results are interesting but the dominant style seems to be a kind of cool jazz sound. This is very evident in their version of Scarlatti’s O Cessate Di Piagarmi; which features saxophone and electric guitar along with vocals. Some other tracks are rather different though. Monteverdi’s Lamento Della Ninfa gets a much more experimental feeling treatment with lots of electronics and the 13th century Galician Ay Ondas Que Eu Vim Veer makes interesting use of nature sounds and electronic effects. There’s also a weirdly boppy but rather enjoyable version of Purcell’s Music for a While. It’s pretty varied though I think I could have used more up tempo, high energy material as it mostly feels pretty relaxed.
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The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.
The Way Appears is a CD by cellist duo Leah Plave and India Gailey. It consists of seven commissioned pieces by young(ish) Canadian composers who were asked to create pieces in which the two instruments function as equal partners rather than, say, as soloist and continuo. It’s a really varied and interesting collection providing a little over forty minutes of music.
French tenor Cyrille Dubois has collected some of the better known Britten works “en français” for this recording. One normally hears these works performed by English singers in what is pretty much an “official” Britten style so I was intrigued to hear them interpreted by a native French speaker, albeit one with a track record of performing Britten’s operas, song cycles and choral works!
Lili Elbe; music by Tobias Picker, libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, is an opera set in the late 1920s. The essence of the plot is the surgical transitioning from male to female of the Danish painter Einar Wegener to become Lili Elbe. It’s the first instance historically of such a transition and it deals, inter alia, with issues of identity and acceptance that still resonate today. 
Intelligence; music by Jake Heggie, libretto by Gene Scheer, is, on the face of it, a spy thriller. We are in Richmond in 1865 and Union forces are closing in on the Southern capital. Elizabeth Van Lew is a wealthy spinster who is spying for the North. She infiltrates her enslaved woman Mary Jane Bowser into the Jefferson Davis household but Mary Jane is not what she appears. She is highly intelligent, literate and has a photographic memory. No-one will think to hide sensitive information from a, presumed illiterate, slave. The relationship between the two women is complex. Mary Jane was born in Elizabeth’s father’s home but was baptised in the white church and educated in the north. She has been told that her mother died in childbirth. But all is not as it seems.
