How can a great oratorio such as "The Creation" be reduced to a few instruments in order to enjoy it in a small, domestic setting? How should the arias, choirs and recitatives be presented, and how can the biblical text be conveyed? Joseph Haydn delegated this apparent challenge to the then well-known composer Anton Wranitzky, who arranged the music for string quintet. He left open questions about the text, so the Pandolfis Consort, playing on historical instruments, embarked on the great adventure of integrating spoken recitatives as well as passages of the libretto to illustrate the history of divine action. The role of the narrator took over Fritz von Friedl, one of the most famous Austrian speakers and actors. The result is this highly impressive and moving recording of the chamber music version of this monumental work, which had been wrongly forgotten.
The Pandolfis Consort was founded in 2004 by Elzieta Sajka-Bachler, viola player und graduate of Krakow Music Academy to bring rarely performed works by famous or forgotten composers to a wider public. The name comes from the violin maker Giuseppe Galieri Pandolfis, who was probably of Greek descent and was a student of Nicola Amati. The ensembleâs repertoire contains some 500 works and extends from early Baroque to Classical to modern music and also includes contemporary compositions written for the Consort. The ensembleâs period instruments set composers the interesting task of adapting their modern tonal language and in this way finding new sounds. In 2012 the ensemble gave the first performances of commissioned compositions by Johanna Doderer (Austria) and Stanley Grill (USA) and, in Innsbruck in 2014, of two works by Tyrolean composer, Franz Baur. www.pandolfisconsort.at
Fritz von Friedl was born in 1941 in Berlin as the son of an Austrian cameraman. He spent his childhood in Waldhausen in Upper Austria. One of the best-known voices in Austria, he is to be heard regularly in documentaries and literature programmes on ORF (Austrian radio). He trained as an actor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. Until 1972 he performed in German theatres with a particular focus on Hamburg (Thalia Theater). In 1972 he was called to the Burgtheater where he played many roles, among them âCandideâ. From 1978 there followed the Theater in der Josefstadt, Volkstheater, Ensembletheater and, what for him was the most formative influence, four years of collaboration with George Tabori in the theatre âDer Kreisâ from 1987. This activity brought him as far as New Zealand and Australia, where the performances were in English. Parallel to performing on the stage Fritz von Friedl could also be seen in many film and TV roles.