This world premiere recording presents four sonatas and four duos by Giovanni Battista Cirri (1724-1808), a cello virtuoso and teacher whose reputation took him across Europe – including to London, where for a time during the 1760s he was employed by members of the Royal Family, and took part in the first concert given in the English capital by the eight-year-old Mozart. By now, however, Cirri’s name has been almost forgotten, save through an edition of dubious scholarship from the 1950s of a viola concerto which is in fact an arrangement of one of his London cello sonatas. His set of six cello concertos Op 14 has been recorded before now, revealing his creative gifts to be not dazzlingly original but always pleasing, and superbly conceived for his own instrument. All cellists of an adventurous disposition will accordingly be drawn to this new collection, which contains work dating from after his return to Italy in 1780, and to his native Emilia-Romagna region. The Breaking Bass ensemble has selected four of the 12 Sonate di camera, and alternated them with four of the Eight Duets for two cellos to make a satisfying contrast of genre and texture within the album. The solo parts of the sonatas bristle with technical challenges as well as attractive melodic writing, and the duos are full of lively exchange between the two instruments, revealing a far more theatrical side to the composer, with the two instruments taking on solo roles and sharing the limelight on equal terms. They were clearly designed for pedagogical use to be performed by teacher and pupil.

Emmerich Kálmán: Countess Maritza. “When the evening falls, when the sun sets, when the song of the violin is heard from the puszta …” or “I too was once a fine csárdás cavalier.” The operetta and the Munich Radio Orchestra – now that is a passionate relationship that has grown over many years. Now we are releasing one of the most performed works in German-speaking Europe: Emmerich Kálmán’s successful operetta (with which he rounded off the dozen) Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), which according to the German Music Information Center in 2016 was No. 10 on the operetta hit list. For the conductor’s job the Munich Radio Orchestra once again sought out a proven operetta specialist: Ernst Theis. The work tells the story of a countess who amidst much confusion finds her true love in an impoverished count. The music with hits like “Komm mit nach Varazdin,” “Komm Zigan, spiel mir was vor!,” and “Wo wohnt die Liebe?” made the operetta famous and a favorite with the public.

Haydn’s creative imagination was stimulated by eminent Italian composers such as Porpora and Scarlatti and by his contemporary C.P.E. Bach, whose piano sonatas Haydn had performed. Through Georg Wagenseil, an important figure in Viennese music for the piano, he also absorbed a new sense of musical form. Together, these influences generated Haydn’s own individual language, as shown in the Sonata in C major with its elegance and wit. The Andante con variazioni in F minor shows further refinement and development in the composer’s command of variation form. Alexandra Ivanova performs on fortepianos from Haydn’s era.

Edward Cowie is considered by many to be the greatest living composer directly inspired by the Natural World. His post-impressionist works, from the gigantic orchestral Leviathan (his first Proms commission) to his cycles of Bird Portraits and other chamber and instrumental pieces are drawing gasps of admiration from critics and audiences alike. Originally recorded for the University of Hertfordshire’s UHR label, this recording has been restored to the catalogue as part of the quickly-growing Cowie collection on Métier Records. The composer feels strongly that the individual works in the Bach ‘48’ and Debussy’s Préludes(for example) were a series of linked parts creating a greater whole. In his own ‘24’ Cowie has taken that principle but expressed it in his unique way – music that is impressionist, pictorial, descriptive and above all evocative… of place, time, flora and fauna” experiences of both natural and man-made phenomena. The Preludes follow the ‘Bach cycle of keys’ but at the same time are grouped into four books representing the ancient ‘Four Elements’.

Philip Mead studied at the Royal Academy of Music and has had a widely successful career, performing and broadcasting internationally. He had his own series on BBC Radio 3 exploring hidden pathways in piano music. A champion of contemporary composers, he founded the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 1988. He has been awarded honorary doctorates at the London College of Music and the Royal Academy and is a visiting professor of the University of Hertfordshire.

Composer Stephen Dankner was the composer in residence with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra from 2004-2007. Dankner has composed over 150 major works in all genres except opera.

Ravel grew up in Paris during la belle epoque, the thirty-odd years prior to 1914 when Paris was the unquestioned artistic center of the world. The fin de siecle years saw him enter the Paris Conservatoire. He was an immensely gifted youth, and one by one his early compositions began to show a real mastery of conception and execution-before the 1800s were out, he had produced such assured works as Habenera, Menuet antique, several fine songs, and Pavane pour une infante defunte.

Performing on the Taylor & Boody Organ of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the critically acclaimed organist Stephen Farr presents a rare exploration of the keyboard works of William Byrd on the organ. This historically informed instrument is made in the early English style and makes a fitting tribute in this, the composer's 400th anniversary year.

Composer William Ortiz was born in Puerto Rico, but raised in the U.S. Nonetheless, his Latino identification plays a major role in his music, which can readily be heard in this superb album of his works.

Violinist Rolf Schulte presents a program of great American violin works composed between 1947 and 2000. He is joined in two of them by pianist Ursula Oppens.

Sachiko Furuhata was born in Yokohama, Japan, and completed her piano studies at the Tokyo Conservatory. Further studies took her to Germany at the Detmold University of Music and the Robert Schumann University in Düsseldorf. Her teachers include Roberto Szidon, Detlev Kraus, Naoyuki Taneda and Willem Brons. Her concert activities have taken her to Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Japan. With this third recital album, Sachiko Furuhata takes up selected works by Frédéric Chopin. With the famous etudes, the nocturnes and waltzes, different moods are singled out and compare so that an independent Chopin portrait is drawn.

This album features the last three piano sonatas by Beethoven. pianist Dainius Vaicekonis has an active performance career as soloist, collaborative artist, and piano professor in the US and Europe.

This new album presents a delightful selection of Poulenc’s piano music, starting with the intriguing little Valse (1919) from L’Album des Six, which first presented in published form the collective of Franco-Swiss composers who came to be known under that title. As the fruit of a trip to Italy in the company of Darius Milhaud, a fellow Les Six-er, Napoli is a suite written in 1925 and presenting Italian forms through the light of Poulenc’s irrepressible personality.
More affecting are the eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938, and the three Novelettes (1927-1959), while the ’Six petites pièces enfantines’ that make up the Villageoises of 1933 share the a spirit of gentle playfulness with Poulenc’s popular musical tale, Babar the Elephant. One day when Poulenc was improvising on the piano, his cousin’s little girl exclaimed: “Grandfather, it’s so boring when you play like that, why don’t you play us this?”. And in 1945, once the dreadful war years were over, Poulenc was happy to oblige.
The Trois Mouvements perpetuels are early pieces, a product of the kaleidoscopic ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 1920s. The three movements reveal a musical freshness and fluidity somewhat reminiscent of Satie, whose individualistic approach to life and art inspired the members of Les Six, to whom he served as a kind of honorary president. Finally, Poulenc evokes the spirit of Bach returns in a surprising guise in the Valse-Improvisation sur le nom de Bach, a piece bursting with vitality, in perfect keeping with the famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz, to whom it was dedicated.
Two previous albums by Chiara Cipelli on Brilliant Classics and Piano Classics have won enthusiastic praise from reviewers in Fanfare magazine. The piano music of Bruno Bettinelli is ‘presented with wonderful vigour and colour by the fine young Lombardy native Chiara Cipelli’ (95801), while ‘Cipelli’s technical capabilities are impressive throughout’ her selection of early Messiaen pieces (PCL10200).

Korusa (Sujung Cho and Jacob Clark, piano) perform the Complete Piano Duets by Beethoven. This is great Beethoven literature that is heard far too infrequently, here presented in superb performances.

Bruckner‘s Third - a creative history that is unique even for the great Austrian romantic. No other of his symphonies has been revised, reshaped and reissued more often. Yet the first version from 1873, which François-Xavier Roth has chosen for this recording, bristles with boldness and the joy of experimentation. Here, the reminiscence of Beethoven‘s Ninth and the works of the dedicatee Richard Wagner is almost tangible. With this recording, François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln continue the highly acclaimed Bruckner Symphonies cycle and, with great attention to detail, once again present the „unvarnished“ Bruckner, groundbreaking, virtuosic and refined.

Harry Christophers has been at the forefront of choral music for the last 45 years and this album, in celebration of his 70th birthday, demonstrates the breadth of his musical passions and the wealth of repertoire he has recorded over the years. Featuring 39 tracks hand-picked by the conductor, the works on this collection document Harry Christophers' life in music-from his early years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, through his time at Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequent founding of The Sixteen, to more recent years as Artistic Director of America's renowned Handel and Haydn Society. This collection charts his discovery as a boy of Purcell and Poulenc to his enduring love for the music of Victoria and Handel and his celebrated partnership with James MacMillan. Each track holds special significance and the stories behind the choices are documented in notes especially written by Harry Christophers for this album.

Hardly any combination of instruments is more appealing than a string quartet and a clarinet; together they make a magical melange. The Hagen Quartet and Jörg Widmann have recorded Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, a 'work among friends', in this irresistible blend. Jörg Widmann, clarinettist and composer in equal measure, picks up on the omnipresent themes of 'floating, love, and chant' in Mozart's notes and creates a weighty counterpart to Mozart's popular work with his own clarinet quintet, which is available here in a world premiere recording.

In a unique collaboration, Kirill Gerstein teams up with his mentor and inspiration, the great Hungarian pianist Ferenc Rados, for an album of four-hand duets by Mozart. An icon for generations of musicians but one who has mostly avoided making recordings, this fascinating disc reveals Rados’s distinctively characterful art at its captivating best and finds both partners in a stimulating musical conversation.

Jheronimus Vinders (fl.1525/6) is best known for the oft-recorded lament on the death of Josquin Desprez (d.1521), O mors inevitabilis, which has led many to presume that he was a disciple or even a pupil of the great master. Now that his surviving works have recently been published in a modern edition, we are better able to place him among his contemporaries. He belongs to a rather small group of Flemish musicians who form the link between the Josquin generation and that of the mid-sixteenth century, featuring composers such as Clemens non Papa and Crecquillon. He boasts a wonderfully imaginative ear with a preference for dark sonorities, and his music often surprises and delights. This is the first recording devoted to a selection of Vinders’s works along with the polyphonic models that inspired them.

The harpsichord concertos of J.S. Bach form the origins of the keyboard concerto genre that was to continue to flourish through the music of his sons, C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach, and onwards. Here, celebrated keyboardist Steven Devine is joined by members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in this recording that features the Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, Concerto in A major BWV 1055, and the Concerto in D major BWV1054, together with a new reconstruction by Steven Devine of the Concerto in D minor BWV 1059.

This recording features rarely performed musical works by three renowned 20th-century Italian composers: Franco Margola, Giorgio Federico Ghedini and Vittorio Rieti. Margola was profoundly influenced by Alfredo Casella, whom he met while still a student of composition. After graduating, Margola began to compose his Piano Trio in A, and on hearing the piece, Casella immediately rated it among the best modern trios, including it in the repertoire of his own piano trio and performing it in Italy and abroad. The composition, in three movements, is characterized by drama and darkness, with moments of great expression but also fleeting, volatile brilliance. Its concision of articulation and form, its ability to consistently maintain a tight and fully logical discourse and its modern but comprehensible harmonic language all conspired to make this composition one of the most appreciated in Margola’s catalogue. In Due Intermezzi (Two Intermezzos), written by Ghedini at the age of 23, the sublime mastery of counterpoint and use of forms that would become the composer’s signature are already evident and accomplished. Each intermezzo has a distinct character: the first, marked “tranquillo” (calm), pervaded by an intimate atmosphere giving in to momentary expressive outbursts; the second tinged with irony and a buoyant spirit. Unlike Margola and Ghedini, who spent their entire professional lives in Italy (both renowned professors and eventually directors of conservatories), the advent of Mussolini’s fascism forced Rieti – who had Jewish roots and whose music was considered deviant by the regime – to emigrate first to Paris and then to the United States. He was a composer particularly admired by the American public and often performed there, despite being almost completely ignored in his native country.