This album features a selection of African Art Music songs for voice and piano. The genre typifies the creative convergence of Western Art Music with African Folk Music traditions.

With this set, Centaur completes its traversal of the complete Beethoven String Quartet cycle, performed by the superb St. Louis based Arianna String Quartet. This is one of the truly great Beethoven String Quartet cycles.

The 'Master and Pupil' philosophy stems from an epoch when composers first began pilgrimages throughout Europe developing their skills and teaching other musicians and composers. This theme is the very core of Sestina Music's own philosophy, with younger musicians placed under the wings of experienced professionals in an apprentice-like fashion. Music has always been a craft of apprenticeship, with knowledge and skill passed down through the generations from master to pupil. The inspiration at the very heart of this recording is found in the works of Claudio Monteverdi, his influences and the immense legacy he instilled in his pupils and was equally instilled in him by his own teachers. The album celebrates these legacies with music by composers including Josquin des Prez, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Giovanni Gabrieli and Salamone Rossi.

Eric Coates was a master of refined and beautiful melodies, making him a household name during the golden years of British light music in the first half of the 20th century. The Four Ways Suite takes us to all four points of the compass, including exotic China and the jazz rhythms of America, while Springtime evokes both sweeping optimism and soulful memories of a lost age. The virtuoso Saxo-Rhapsody is one of the era’s major saxophone works, and Sleepy Lagoon remains famous as the signature tune to BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. High Flight March was to be Coates’ last composition. Since 1992, conductor Andrew Penny has made over 50 recordings for the Naxos and Marco Polo labels. Much of the repertoire is British music and includes symphonies by Arnold and Havergal Brian, film music by Vaughan Williams and Walton, theatre music by Sullivan and Holbrooke, and light music by Coates and Arnold. Penny has been on the instrumental music staff at Hymers College since 1977 and is the longest serving musical director of the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra. He was awarded the MBE for services to music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2014.

The Folly - Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam is the latest release on Naxos from the renowned conductor and composer Fabrice Bollon. The opera focuses on Erasmus of Rotterdam, the influential Renaissance reformer, cosmopolitan humanist and intellectual who, in old age, reflects on the events of his life. World premiere recording.

Ernest Moeran’s love for Ireland and absorption of its music and musicians led to the composer living on the island of Valentia for two years. He later made Kenmare his second home from around 1934 until his death there in 1950. Moeran’s experiences in Ireland appear to have influenced him melodically in the traditional folk dance-like textures he embraces, particularly throughout his early Piano Trio and Violin Sonata featured on this album alongside his Prelude for Cello and Piano and Sonata for Two Violins. With their own strong links to Ireland, the album is performed by the Fidelio Trio with violinist Nicky Sweeney. In the four chamber works on this album Moeran’s use of melodic and harmonic turns, his approach to instrumentation and command of the strings and piano writing, has gifted us a treasure trove of focus in repertoire, utterly connected, through him, with music of places and peoples.

REVIEW:

Especially valuable here is the superbly articulate and memorably affectionate advocacy lent to the disarming Piano Trio...this enterprising anthology yields copious rewards and can be welcomed without reservation.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2022)

Frederic Curzon started his career as a virtuoso organist, touring countless British theatres and concert venues. From 1938 he devoted himself to composition, creating a catalogue of works that is truly astonishing for its size and scope. This recording reveals Curzon’s fascination with Spain, and also features orchestral showpieces and evocations of cultured gentility, from the swagger of The Boulevardier to the wistful nostalgia of Simonetta. The Robin Hood Suite represents Curzon at the height of his melodic inspiration. As one affectionate obituary stated, ‘he was a classic among English light music composers’.

A New York Times profile of Pietro Yon (1886-1943) portrayed him as an adopted New Yorker who moved in high-society circles and enjoyed ragtime and vaudeville, and he welcomed the likes of Caruso and Toscanini to his home as friends. When he died in 1943, the world-famous conductor numbered among the 1300 mourners at St Patrick’s, where the Italian émigré Yon had become director of music in 1929. Yon’s music has a post-Romantic, mid-Atlantic flavor reflecting his background without belonging to a single ‘school’. He composed over 70 Mass settings and major works, including the oratorio The Triumph of St. Patrick which premiered at Carnegie Hall. Among his most popular works at the time was a Concerto Gregoriano for organ and orchestra, later rearranged for organ and piano and then solo organ, in which version Tommaso Mazzoletti performs it here.

Album 1 concludes with a pair of Easter-themed works, while album 2 features Christmas music including an Advent Suite, some gentle pastorales and finally the Gesù Bambino song which travelled the world in performances and recordings by Luciano Pavarotti, as well as countless other arrangements such as the solo-organ version played here. This album marks the climax of a seven-year project in which the Italian organist Tommaso Mazzoletti has become the world’s foremost exponent of his countryman’s music. As Mazzoletti remarks in his booklet essay, Yon knew exactly what his audiences enjoyed, and was prepared to experiment, rediscover and astonish.

As both musician and composer the violin was central to Sibelius’s career, and his output for the instrument spans much of his long life. Acclaimed violinist Fenella Humphreys and celebrated pianist Joseph Tong explore a tantalizing program of Sibelius’s music, from the youthful Andante cantabile in G major composed in 1887, through Opp. 78 and 81, written in the midst of the First World War, to his last works for the instrument – Four Pieces, Op. 115 and Three Pieces, Op. 116 both penned in 1929. Completing the program are the five Danses champêtres, Op. 106 from 1924–5.

It has long been my wish to record both of Johannes Brahms’s piano concertos for CD. In doing so, I have been able to build upon many experiences that allow me at this point in time to open myself up even more to the essence of these works, which move me to the depths of my being. Both works offer me something incredibly great, something that in my conception of things can hardly be further enlarged. Each of the two concertos fascinates me with its vast wealth of sound, its intensity, above all with its simply infinite emotional range. Highly dramatic developments open out into playful lightness of being. Time and again there are sincerely thoughtful moments, marked by deep serenity. The slow movements of these two concertos particularly fascinate me on account of those passages, which give us a glimpse into what is above and beyond the world we know. The Magyar in me senses many Hungarian influences. My engagement with the two concertos in the course of making the present recordings together with the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen has enabled me to look at the above aspects with new eyes. These are insights that go ever deeper throughout one’s whole life. The process is never complete. The cathedral is too big for that. Andrea Kauten

One of the most fascinating challenges that any violinist can face is the repertoire for solo violin. In this genre of music, both the musician and the listener can encounter polyphonic masterpieces performed with minimal means - with only four strings. These pieces often carry as much emotional and musical meaning as works composed for a large orchestra. This rarely represented category in musical literature has always excited the artist Agata-Maria Raatz. She wondered how Bach managed to create such a remarkably complex and demanding harmonic as well as formal structure in his sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which are considered timeless masterpieces of extraordinary brilliance in every detail. Where did he draw his inspiration from? What music did he listen to? And who was he as a person? Bach was not only a genius, but also a human being. Monuments created to honour personalities of genius often obscure their humanity, which encompasses not only the outstanding and special, but also the mundane and prosaic of life.

The album "Echo of BACH" is her personal exploration through the history of solo music for violin, tracing its origins from the early Baroque period to the present. It is a musical journey centred on J. S. Bach, an inspiration to many generations of composers. On this unique path, the great master not only inspires, but is also influenced by the works of other musicians. Among them is a composer who might have been a guidepost for Bach on his musical path. It is the composer and violinist Jean Paul von Westhoff. Bach was 18 years old at the time, while Westhoff died only two years later at the age of 49. The probability is high that they met at that time and the young Bach became familiar with Westhoff's work. For her album she has chosen the Suite No. 5 in D minor. In addition to a piece composed by the artist especially for this CD under the pseudonym Clara Jaz, we also find the work "Cette âme a six ailes tout comme les Séraphins" (This soul has six wings like the Seraphim) composed by the Swiss composer Xavier Dayer especially for Agata-Maria Raatz.

Five of the best brass players in the world united in a chamber music ensemble: The Reinhold Friedrich Brass Quintett was founded in 2022 and presents here its first CD, UNITY.

For this brass quintet's lifelong dream, world-renowned trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich has brought together the best players in their respective fields, musicians who not only get along extremely well with one another in a musical sense but also on a personal level. In their playing, one can feel their mutual appreciation and their joy in making music together, and, coupled with their unique technical and musical skills, as well as their chamber music experience, this enables the musicians to merge into a single unit.

The players that form this top-class quintet come together from a variety of European countries: Jeroen Berwaerts hails from Belgium and as a former principal trumpeter of the NDR Symphony Orchestra is a much-sought-after soloist who now teaches at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. The Dane, Lasse Mauritzen, who was knighted to the Order of Dannebrog by Queen Margarethe II, is first principal horn of the Copenhagen-based Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra (DRSO). Although Ian Bousfield is British, he now lives in Switzerland and is accustomed to performing around the world as a former principal trombonist with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as being a soloist and a conductor. Fundamental to the quintet is the Norwegian Thomas Røisland, who now lives in Sweden and is principal tuba in the DRSO, as well as playing in other renowned European orchestras.These five musicians are united by their desire to set new standards in brass chamber music for their audiences and to present premiere recordings and commission arrangements of classics that have not yet been recorded at a world-class level.

Once again, Ensemble Aventure presents a jewel of new music that has so far been little known in Europe within its series of works by Latin American composers on WERGO: "Flores blancas", chamber and ensemble music by the Argentine composer Mariano Etkin. Listeners are captivated by the raw power of “La naturaleza de las cosas”, the title of which is an apt characterization of Mariano Etkin’s compositional language, which is a celebration of the sensuous nature of sounds and of the human senses as a source of knowledge without illusions, realized with a small number of “sound objects” that appear and fade away with a sense of both beauty and pain. Each of the eight works (from 1992 to 2016, Etkin’s late compositional period) on this recording focuses in its own way on the physicality of sounds and the foundations of human existence.

In his last years, Etkin’s musical language became more densely lyrical, introspective, and focused on fundamental elements of human existence such as dreams (“Sueños olvidados”) or blood (“Le sangre del cuerpo”) and, above all, tears (“Estudios para lágrimas”). Mariano Etkin creates authentic crystals of intensity – an unflinchingly existential music that looks into the eye of darkness, but nevertheless spreads its wings. It sings, throbs, and shivers with excitement before dissolving in pain and beauty.

Acis et Galatée is acknowledged as one of Lully’s finest masterpieces. This recording from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is conducted by the early music specialist Federico Maria Sardelli, and features tenor Jean-François Lombard and soprano Elena Harsányi in the principal roles. Also available on Dynamic Blu-ray (57971) and DVD (37971).

Fabrice Bollon’s unique arrangement of The Cunning Little Vixen for chamber forces was developed during the COVID lockdown when the use of large orchestras was unsafe. Bollon also compressed Šarka into a duo and wrote Twelve Lillies for Leoš, a colourfully scored tribute employing reminiscences from Janácek’s works. All works are heard here in world premiere recordings.

A musical journey, James W. Iman's latest album, IMAN II, is a stunning blend of Classical and contemporary piano compositions that will leave you spellbound. Four years in the making, this album is the culmination of Iman's passion for Debussy and Donald Martino, as well as his permiere of work from composer and sound designer, Jenny Beck. Iman's masterful interpretations of Martino's Fantasies and Impromptus are nothing short of awe-inspiring, and his renditions of Debussy's works provide the perfect contrast, bringing together the past and present in a way that is both exciting and unique. But it is Beck's electrifying compositions that truly set this album apart.

Iman says, "I have played Stand Still Here more times than any other work in my repertoire. Each of the five pieces that comprise the work are brief–the longest is four minutes–but Jenny Beck achieves a depth of introspection and emotional sweep that is absolutely magnetic.” What makes Beck's work so remarkable is the way she achieves such depth and complexity with seemingly simple motives and harmonies. The pieces on this album hover and linger, creating a hypnotic and immersive listening experience that is nothing short of miraculous. Iman's passion and dedication to this project are evident in every note he plays. He has crafted a captivating album that showcases his skill as a pianist and his ability to bring together the best of the past and present in a way that is fresh, exciting, and deeply moving.

Luigi Picchi learned the rudiments of music from his father Faustino; a self-taught organist; and later studied with the Pavia-based teachers Giovanni Baroni and Franco Vittadini in preparation for admission to the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan in 1909. The first phase of his musical activity saw him engaged in the concert and operatic life of the province as well as composing: instrumental and vocal works; a Requiem Mass (1922) and musical accompaniments for the Passione di Cristo (1925) to a text by Don Ennio Bernasconi. In Como; Picchi’s true vocation; for sacred music; was able to be realized: as a boy he had had the opportunity to play for liturgical services on the Sairano organ and; as a young student at the Conservatory; he had continued this activity in villages in the surroundings of Milan. He also composed pieces for organ which were featured in L’Organista italiano (1922–26) and I Maestri dell’Organo (1931); journals issued by the Carrara music publishing house of Bergamo; whose founder Vittorio Carrara was astute enough to sense and appreciate Picchi’s talents: his artistic substance as well as the playability of his music and its suitability for the liturgy. In 1932 Carrara entrusted him with the editorship of a new journal; L’Organista liturgico; which he held until 1943. Alongside his music for organ Picchi also composed vocal works for use by the cathedral choir as well as amateur choral groups and public assemblies; including various motets as well as masses (Cristo risusciti; 1932; Italica; 1940; Christus vincit; 1941) and also educational music (theatrical sketches; school songs) and theoretical works (Scuola moderna di Teoria e Solfeggio; 1941–44). His wish to set the text of the mass in an appropriate manner together with his faithfulness to Cecilian ideals led Picchi to the innovations of his Missa Misericors Deus (1949); published by Ricordi together with the masses in honour of San Nicolao della Flüe (1947) and San Pio X (1954) and his collections of Christmas Carols (1947) and Easter Songs (1950–54). In 1954 Picchi established a new journal on organ music; Laus Decora; operating from Como; it was issued over the course of a decade with associated publications from the Schola music publishing house and introduced readers to a wide range of vocal compositions by Picchi; including various songs and motets; the masses Rex pacificus (1945); In onore di Maria Vergine Assunta (1950) and Auxilium Christianorum (1960) as well as various school songs and educational works (Nuovo Corso di Solfeggio; 1954; Metodo teorico-pratico per lo studio dell’Armonio e del Pianoforte; 1956). The resumption of his collaboration with the Carrara publishing house coincided with the implementation of the liturgical reforms as stipulated by the Second Vatican Council; of which Picchi had already been a precursor in his interpretative consistency as well as his involvement of the assembly of the faithful; namely in his songs for Il popolo alla messa; 1953; written in collaboration with Don Luigi Agustoni and Don Silvano Albisetti. His greatest success in this field was the Messa Vaticano II (1965) followed by the Messa dei Defunti (1966) and the Messa Apostolica (1968). Picchi’s organ output included compositions written for later editions of Laus Decora (1966–67) as well as for the journal I Fiori dell’Organo (1968–70).

Maria Briggs is joined on this album by pianist Drew Quiring, and violin/violist Limor Toren-immerman, where together they present a selection of songs by composers including Anton Rubinstein, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Mikhail Glinka, and more. Dr. Briggs-Okunev is a Russian-born, Australian soprano. She earned her Bachelor degree in piano performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Dr. Briggs then attained Masters in vocal performance, Newcastle Conservatorium and DMA from Sydney University and Royal Northern College of Music, UK. Her research is focused on training and development of young opera singers. Her published thesis on tertiary opera training is available online.

The music of Johann Speth (1664-1719) has featured here and there on many compilations of instrumental music from mid-17th century Germany. However, until now there has never been a complete recording of the sole collection which carries his name down to us today. Published in 1693, this volume of keyboard toccatas, partitas and Magnificats takes its title from an influential treatise on the science and aesthetics of music from 1650 by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Kircher attempted to show how the balance of dissonance with consonance in harmony mirrored the presence of good and evil in the universe. There is in turn something attractively compendious about Speth’s musical response, which Speth appears to have produced as a bona fide for his successful application to become organist of the cathedral in Augsburg. Very little is known of his life until that point in 1692, and not much after, save that in 1719 he was still living and active in the city which at the time was politically significant and prosperous as a seat of the Hapsburgs Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni opens with a sequence of 10 toccatas, quite brief and owing something to the influence of contemporary southern German composers such as Georg Muffat and Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer. There follows the more Italianate strains of three ‘partitas.’ The remainder of Speth’s collection synthesizes Italian and German styles in eight Magnficats. Each of the Magnificats takes its tonal base – the equivalent of its key signature – from a different musical mode, each starting on their own note. The collection as a whole adds up to a colorful snapshot of the invention and variety of German keyboard music beyond Bach, and as a notable predecessor to the compendious ambitions of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Le Testament de la Tante Caroline (‘Aunt Caroline’s Will’) remains one of Roussel’s least-known works. It’s an energetic and imaginative operetta that sits perfectly in the lineage of French musical comedy, with a plot that concerns the conditions attached to the mischievous aunt’s will. The text is inimitably Parisian and Roussel responded with graceful and elegant writing that for some contemporary critics evoked the music of one his orchestral masterpieces, Le Festin de l’araignée. The operetta is heard herein the revision requested by Roussel’s widow which cuts three acts down to one.