MUSICAL JOURNEY - ITALY: A Musical Tour of the Southern Tyrol

The Places
The Southern Tyrol was in earlier times part of the Habsburg Empire, governed from Vienna, and ceded to Italy in 1919. The region remains largely German-speaking and enjoys a considerable degree of autonomy. Of particular interest are the rock-formations of the Dolomites and the many castles and fortified houses of the province. The tour shows two historic buildings, Scholss Velthurns and Schloss Runkelstein.

The Music Music for thebr> tour is by Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756. With his father, Leopold Mozart, Vice-Kapellmeister in Salzburg, he made three notable visits to Italy, and on various occasions broke his journey at Bozen (Bolzano) and visited Brixen (Bressanone). The music heard here is the Posthorn Serenade, written in Salzburg in 1779, and the Notturno, another serenade, written there in the winter of 1776–77.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo 2.0 / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 59 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Sonate a Quattro are the brilliant compositions from Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, written during the summer of 1804 at the young age of 12. These works, at the time, were commonly performed by wind quartet and it wasn’t until 1954 when the original manuscripts were discovered in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. showing their original arrangement for string quartet. The world premiere recording of Rossini: 6 Sonate a Quattro features two of Canada’s most respected and beloved performers - Mark Fewer (violin), and Joel Quarrington (bass) - and two of North America’s rising stars - Yolanda Bruno (violin), and Julian Schwarz (cello) and produced by JUNO award-winning producer John D.S. Adams. These performances, from November 2017, were recorded in collaboration with the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance using the newly released (2014) Critical Edition published by the Fondazione Rossini Pesaro.

Includes concerto(s) for keyboard by J. C. F. Bach. Ensemble: The Music Collection. Conductor: Susan Alexander-Max. Soloist: Susan Alexander-Max.

When Xianji Liu became the first Chinese-born winner of the prestigious Francisco Tarrega International Guitar Competition in 2016, a new star emerged in the world of the classical guitar. Spanning the centuries and crossing the globe from Argentina to Britain, his recital includes some of the most beguiling and evocative pieces ever written for the instrument as well as four transcriptions so idiomatic to the guitar that they sound utterly natural on the six plucked strings.

Originally published in London in 1771, these six Sonatas for cello and basso continuo were arranged for cello and piano by the influential Italian virtuoso cellist Alfredo Piatti in the 1870s and are performed here on modern instruments.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s long-lost Impromptu for Viola and Piano, Op. 33, recently unearthed in the Moscow State Archives, receives here its world-premiere recording on Matthew Lipman’s Ascent, the acclaimed young American violist’s solo debut album, featuring, in the artist’s words, “music enraptured by flights of fantasy.”

Recipient of a 215 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Lipman has created an album of uplifting and spiritually transcendent works for viola and piano, dedicated to his late mother. Hailed by The New York Times for his “rich tone and elegant phrasing,” Lipman is heard in the world-premiere recording of Clarice Assad’s fantasy piece, Metamorfose, which the violist commissioned. It’s a poignant commentary on grief and acceptance. Robert Schumann’s Fairy Tale Pictures is dreamlike and fanciful. York Bowen’s richly expressive Phantasy draws on the Russian Romantic tradition. Garth Knox’s free-flying Fuga libre transfigures Bach-like fugal fragments through modern, coloristic performance techniques. The album’s finale is the first-ever recording on viola of Hollywood composer Franz Waxman’s popular violin showpiece, Carmen Fantasie. England’s The Telegraph praised Lipman as “gifted with poise and a warmth of timbre” for his recording of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with violinist Rachel Barton Pine, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and Sir Neville Marriner (Avie), which topped the Billboard classical chart. Lipman’s collaborator on Ascent is pianist Henry Kramer, winner of the Second Prize at the 216 Queen Elisabeth competition and top prizes at the 215 Honens International Piano Competition and 211 Montreal International Music Competition. His first commercial recording, dedicated to Liszt oratorio transcriptions, was recently released on Naxos.

Although Polish-born virtuoso and composer Karol Jozef Lipinski embraced the innovations of Paganini and other 19th century virtuosos, he disdained 'empty' technique devoid of musical depth, preferring the artistic ethos of Spohr, Tartini and Viotti. Described as 'lyrical Slavic folk tunes with elements of the ballad,' the expertly crafted G minor and A major String Trios are notable for their warmly expressive themes to go along with the bravura runs and doublestopping heard in the primo violin part. Adam Roszkowski plays first violin with the National Orchestra of Belgium. As a soloist he has performed with the Gorzow Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bialystok Philharmonic Orchestra, the Camerata dll'arte Chamber Orchestra and the Carloforte Festival Orchestra. Violinist Voytek Proniewicz made his solo debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005. Since then he has appeared with the philharmonic orchestras of Wroclaw Dzczecin, Rzeszow, Kielce, and Gorzow, as well as the Sinfonia luventus Orchestra and the Sinfonia Viva Orchestra. Polish cellist Jan Roszkowski is a laureate of the 27th National Chamber Music Competition in Warsaw. He completed a master's degree in music performance at the Manhattan School of Music in New York.

John Philip Sousa’s swift rise to fame and greatness came at a time when band concerts were the most important aspect of musical life in the US. The works on this recording range from the early Revival March of 1876 and the stirring Right Forward March from Sousa’s time as conductor of the US Marine band, to the “up-to-date” 1920s fox-trot Peaches and Cream and the 1923 Leaves from My Notebook, dedicated to the Campfire Girls of America. Music from Sousa’s operetta Chris and the Wonderful Lamp can be found alongside his medley of tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which includes many of the hit tunes from this operetta, while The Honored Dead was performed at President Ulysses S. Grant’s funeral.

Toshio Hosokawa, Japan's pre-eminent living composer, creates his distinctive musical language from the fascinating relationship between western avant-garde art and traditional Japanese culture. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1945 poem, Hosokawa frames his monodrama The Raven as a Japanese Noh play, with its interaction between the human protagonist and an otherworldly animal. Vividly exploring ideas of madness, The Raven conjures up a shadowy and unfamiliar world.

These two concertos show the increasing importance of the guitar duo on the world’s concert stages. Leo Brouwer, one of the foremost Latin American composers, has written many admired guitar concertos but The Book of Signs is his first for two guitars, a double concerto of great virtuosity, with a majestic, songful theme in its central movement. A crucial figure in the global promotion of Brazilian rhythms for the guitar, Paulo Bellinati deploys luxurious harmonies and brilliantly effective techniques to pay tribute to the country music of Sao Paulo State in Concerto Caboclo.

Missa Solemnis, Beethoven's sacred masterpiece, has thrilled audiences since its premiere with its monumental splendor and grandeur of vision. Even the master himself described it as "the greatest work that I have written so far." Helmuth Rilling, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, the Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart and a quartet of vocal soloists have achieved worldwide acclaim in producing a reference recording of this great masterpiece, now available once again in a new edition as part of the “Great Choral Works” series. “A production of the highest professionalism.” - FONO FORUM

Classical Music

On January 5, 2017, Robert Owens passed away in Munich. He left behind a vital legacy of music that is just now being fully discovered. Soprano Jamie Reimer has studied the life and work of Owens extensively, and gave the world premiere of his 4 Sonnets to Eleonora Druse, which are on this album. Soprano Jamie Reimer has performed in opera, oratorio and recital venues around the United States, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Australia. Her concert appearances include performances of Mozart Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Choral Fantasy, as well as Liszt’s Christus for the American Liszt Society’s international festival. She has performed with Opera Omaha, Omaha Symphony Chamber Orchestra, Lincoln Symphony, Hastings Symphony, and the Northern Iowa Symphony Orchestra. She has also appeared in several musical theater roles, including Tessa (The Gondoliers), Rapunzel (Into the Woods), and Martha Jefferson (1776).

This series explores China’s rich and diverse musical heritage. The songs featured in this recording are folk songs of four of the minority ethnic groups of Guangxi province – Zhuang, Bouyei, Mulao, Maonan. As with Chinese traditional visual arts, the song titles explain their mood and origin. It is noteworthy that the music of the Dong-Tai language speakers presents a common feature of incorporating polyphonic or heterophonic songs. Although this feature is present in the music of more than 20 minorities in China, it is rare that the speakers of a whole language family all incorporate multi-voice songs in their music. The performance forms of these multi-voice songs include nearly all the types found in folk music. The number of harmonic intervals is limited because the songs usually employ only one octave. Aside from pentatonic scales, the folk music of the Dong-Tai language speakers also incorporates the scales of three or four notes.

Classical Music

The idea of arranging movements from Prokofiev' popular ballet Romeo and Juliet for brass band and percussion is not as strange as it may first seem, since Russia boasts a great brass band tradition.

A 2020 GRAMMY nominee for Best Choral Performance!

GRAMMY-winning chamber choir The Crossing is back with their latest installment in a multi-album series with Navona Records. In this latest offering, artistic director Donald Nally leads the choir through six striking pieces by composer James Primosch that confront the most elemental questions of Western philosophy. CARTHAGE opens with Journey, a solemn meditation in which the men of The Crossing chant text based on the work of 13th-century monk and mystic Meister Eckhart: “There is a journey you must take./It is a journey without destination./There is no map./Your soul will lead you./And you can take nothing with you.” Next comes the title track, Carthage, on prose by Marilynne Robinson from her novel Housekeeping, which employs the devastated city of Carthage as a metaphor for desire and imagination: “For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it.” Composer James Primosch evokes images of once-fertile fields now salted and wasted, with Nally teasing out the dynamic subtleties of a work that is nevertheless full of hope and rebirth. Following is Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus. Here, four soloists sing the Latin Mass texts, while the main choir sings Denise Levertov’s cycle of poems which gives the work its title. In pulling together these texts, Primosch celebrates the feast of St. Thomas Didymus, plumbing the depths between unbelief and faith in which true spirituality so often resides. The ancient texts are strangely illuminated by the highs and lows of Levertov’s journey. The album closes with One with the Darkness, One with the Light, a setting of poetry by Wendell Berry. True to its title, the music employs cascading harmonic textures to explore the tension between light and dark, waking and sleeping, life and death.

While Hill' first three string quartets were reminiscent of Dvor-Ak and Tchaikovsky, these three demonstrate new directions. With the slow movement of Quartet No. 4 hinting at influences of Elgar, and Quartet No.

String quartets have for a long time been received as a conversation between four rational people. For 20th and 21st century composers wanting to leave this idea of a discussion behind, the question has been: in what other ways can one write for two violins, viola, and violoncello? Helmut Zapf’s three string quartets perfectly illustrate the stages of such a confrontation. They have appeared throughout his entire career as a composer, and can be understood as markers for different periods in his compositional output. In Zapfs first string quartet elements of an individual musical rhetoric survive and are clearly understandable as such. However, the context – the “rational conversation” – is now present in only a rudimentary fashion. The second string quartet is a logical continuation of the path already established by Zapf: the last remnants of rhetoric and conversational discourse are dispensed with. The four instruments do not act individually, but are treated as a single organism. The third string quartet has been written for the Sonar group. This composition takes up the experiences of the previous pieces and at the same time tries to connect with the tradition: a reconnection from a great and skeptical distance.

Composer Axel Borup-Jorgensen never held a high-profile post as an academic or performer. Rather, he chose to live a quiet life composing and teaching piano. With an intensely personal style, Borup-Jorgensen was a scrupulous modernist. His music has a concentrated language and an advancement of expression. Although Borup-Jorgensen was an adept pianist, he did not write a great deal of literature for the instrument. The works on this release are an overview of his piano output, and span almost five decades. Interpreting this demanding repertoire is pianist Erik Kaltoft. Kaltoft is a contemporary music specialist, and was also a friend, colleague, and collaborator with the composer for forty-five years.