Following their acclaimed recordings of the works for string trio by Mozart and Beethoven, Trio Zimmermann make a great leap in time. Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith were both at the avant-garde epicentre of the 1910s and 1920s, but their future paths could hardly have been more different. Whereas Schoenberg would go on to have a decisive influence on twentieth-century modernism with his dodecaphonic music and the Second Viennese School, Paul Hindemith gradually renounced his rebellious early music, eventually becoming something of an anachronistic loner. The relatively early String Trio No. 1 (1924) already betrays the composer's interest in the forms and textures of baroque music. It opens with a flittering Toccata, going on to offer a contrapuntal web in its slow movement and ends with a double fugue. The contrapuntal textures are present also in the Second String Trio, but the neotonal language and general atmosphere point forward to later, large-scale works such as Mathis der Mahler. In 1933, the year Hindemith composed his second trio, the political developments in Germany caused Arnold Schoenberg to leave Europe for the U.S.A. (Hindemith would follow in 1940.) It took him considerable time before he found his feet in this new environment and continuing financial and professional worries probably contributed to a serious heart attack that struck him down in August 1946. The String Trio, Op.45, begun shortly before the heart attack and completed a month after it, is the disturbing expression of this extreme near-death experience. It also presents one of the greatest challenges in the entire string repertoire – in fact Schoenberg considered easing the technical difficulties by expanding the trio into a quintet.

Described in Gramophone as ‘one of the most needed and important recording projects in progress today’, this series has up until now featured the clavichord, the tangent piano, and the fortepiano. It is therefore something of an occasion when Miklós Spányi for his Volume 37 chooses to perform on a harpsichord. In doing so he reminds us of C.P.E. Bach’s own advice to keyboard players to have both a clavichord and a harpsichord in order to play ‘all sorts of things alternating’ (‘allerley Sachen abwechselnd’). But the album – which includes some of the composer’s earliest works – also features one of the very few, if not the only, compositions that Bach specifically dedicated to the harpsichord, namely the Sonata per il cembalo a 2 tastature. In it, Bach makes colorful use of the instrument by specifying various detailed and idiosyncratic harpsichord registrations. Spányi also performs two of the few fugues – in F and A major respectively – that Carl Philipp composed: besides the general shift in fashion away from intricate counterpoint to melodic simplicity, it is possible that he found father Johann Sebastian’s achievements in that particular genre too hard an act to follow.

Xiaogang Ye (b. 1955) is one of China’s foremost contemporary composers. His compositions have gained international acclaim over his thirty year career. For this release, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jose Serebrier, performs Xiaogang Ye’s works Symphony No. 3 ‘Chu’, Op. 46, and The Last Paradise, Op. 24 for violin and orchestra. Joining the Royal Philharmonic are violinist Cho-Liang Lin and soprano Hila Plitmann.

This new release is the latest installment in Miklos Spanyi’s series of the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The works on this volume include some of CPE Bach’s most celebrated works. The six collections “fur Kenner und Liebhaber” were published between 1779 and 1787. Roughly translated as “connaisseurs and amateurs,” the collections were composed for the enjoyment of both the musically trained and untrained. Spanyi has decided to combine works from both collections for this volume, and performs them on the clavichord. The next volume will complete these collections, and will be performed on the tangent piano. Spanyi’s prior installments in this series have been called an “illuminating journey through the keyboard landscape of JS Bach’s best-known son” (BBC Music Magazine) and “one of the most needed and important recording projects in progress today.” (Gramophone)

On this amply filled album, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (Keyboard Pieces of various Kinds) is presented in its entirety, with the exception of three songs for voice and keyboard. This collection is the most diverse of Bach’s publications and includes multi-movement genres, a free fantasia, a learned fugue, and various short pieces of varying degrees of difficulty. The variety suggests that Bach did not want for his keyboard music to be strictly divided into ‘light’ and ‘serious’ pieces. But he also wished to demonstrate a wide range of techniques of keyboard composition and performance: orchestral writing in the symphony and the concerto, two-part textures in the sonata, polyphony in the fugue, and free and virtuosic composition in the fantasias and solfeggios. In order to bring a similar variety to his recording of the collection, Miklós Spányi has chosen to perform the pieces on a harpsichord built after the Antwerp maker Joannes Daniel Dulcken. To this double-manual harpsichord offering a wide range of possible registrations, Spányi has added a so-called swell device which facilitates quick dynamic changes. This makes it possible to bring out the contrasts between orchestral and soloistic textures in the Concerto in C major, but also to highlight the different characters in the contrasting pairs of Minuets.

Flutist Sharon Bezaly has dazzled listeners and critics all over the globe, even being called “God’s gift to the flute.” With almost 40 releases to her name, her wide-ranging discography includes both standard repertoire and selections written specifically for her. This release is owed to two fellow world-class flutists, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Gunilla von Bahr. Rampal was the flutist who arranged Aram Khachaturian’s virtuosic violin concerto for the flute, at the suggestion of the composer. “Dances with the Winds,” Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1974 composition, is dedicated to Gunilla von Bahr. Rautavaara’s “Dances with the Winds,” is an interesting addition, as the first and last movements are scored for bass flute, while the second movement is written for piccolo, and the third for alto flute. In a later revision, the composer replaced the bass flute with the alto. Bezaly includes both versions on this recording.

Separated by the Pyrenees, the musical milieus of Spain and France have sometimes been like oil and water - or maybe like oil and wine. It took Bizet's opera Carmen to open the ears of the French to the Spanish rhythms and inflections which were to become so important to so many later composers, from Debussy to Ibert. On the present disc, Carmen - in the guise of Borne's Fantaisie brillante - plays a similar role, creating a bridge between Rodrigo's Concierto pastoral and Ibert's Flute Concerto, two of last century's main concertante works for the flute. Soloist Sharon Bezaly will hardly need a closer presentation after her highly praised recordings of the past couple of years. Her recital with pianist Ronald Brautigam (BIS-SACD-1429) and her recording of Mozart's concertos (BIS-SACD-153901), to mention only two, have garnered such high praise and so many distinctions that it would be impossible to list them - suffice it to say that the reviewers have called her 'a sorceress of timbres', 'God's gift to the flute', 'a First Lady among equals' and a 'graceful Mozartean, with limpid tone, an impish sense of humour, and sometimes staggering breath control.' The present recording was made with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and conductor John Neschling, whose performances of the music of Brazilian composers Guarnieri, Mignone, Braga and Santoro have been praised for their vitality, rhythmic vigour and wide range of colours - all qualities that should be just the thing for building a bridge across the Pyrenees.