In Gabriel's Garden

Album Review

Once again planting himself in London's St. Giles Church, Wynton Marsalis performs a program of heroic pan-European Baroque music that permits him to blow his horn above the orchestra like the proverbial archangel Gabriel. There are fanfares, small-scale sonatas, dances, and famous tidbits, and ultimately J.S. Bach's wonderful "Brandenburg Concerto No. 2," with its notorious high-flying tessitura for piccolo trumpet that Marsalis nails every time with relish. The non-classical listener will recognize some of this stuff, like Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau" (latterly known as the theme for PBS' Masterpiece Theatre), Jeremiah Clarke's "The Prince of Denmark March" (once wrongly attributed to Purcell), and a genuine Purcell "Rondeau" from "Abdelazar" that Benjamin Britten used so famously well in his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Torelli figures heavily in this program, with five of his sonatas placed in between the other numbers. Anthony Newman takes over leadership of the English Chamber Orchestra this time, with phrasings that are often more in a clipped period-performance-practice-influenced style than those that Raymond Leppard used to produce on Marsalis' classical recordings. In part because of this, the program seems to zip along at a swift pace, one tiny number dispatched after another, and perhaps would make a greater effect if taken in small doses. In any case, this would be Marsalis' last recording of classical repertoire for awhile; his next several Sony Classical releases would contain his own music. ~ Richard S. Ginell, Rovi