Chamber music aficionados of older generations will remember LPs of Brahms and Beethoven as performed by the Trio Santoliquido. The ensemble took its name from its pianist Ornella Puliti Santoliquido, who herself took the name when she married the composer Francesco Santoliquido. For several decades in the middle of the last century, husband and wife formed something of a power couple on the classical-music scene – especially in the field of chamber music – in Rome. However, Francesco Santoliquido’s own music has fallen into almost complete obscurity, a state which this attractive new recording by the established partnership of the Gran Duo Italiano should help to improve. Born in Naples in 1883 and trained in Rome, Santoliquido never espoused even the mild brand of modernism or the neoclassicism of contemporaries such as Casella, Malipiero and Pizzetti, and he issued diatribes against the evils and origins of modernism in the fascist press. Beyond the precepts of a classic-romantic style, then, the individual flavor of Santoliquido’s music owes something to his residence in Tunis during the 1910s, and subsequent support of a culture for classical music in north Africa, including the foundation of a concert society and music school in Tunis. Thus the piano music featured here includes a pair of Acqueforti Tunisine, as well as orientally scented nocturnes which were written for his wife to play. The album concludes with Ex Humo ad Sidera, a piece that describes mankind’s terrible struggle in rising from the dark, savage state towards Light. The main work here is a traditionally structured Violin Sonata in A minor with a turbulent opening movement, a languid and dreamy Andante and then a stormy finale. It is revived here with tremendous conviction by Mauro Tortorelli and Angela Meluso.

A highly regarded representative of the new generation of cellists, Benedict Kloeckner has been championed by such maestros as Daniel Barenboim and Sir Simon Rattle. With a discography including an acclaimed recording of the Schumann Cello Concerto nominated for the German Record Critics prize, Kloeckner also demonstrates a great interest in new music. He plays an Italian Cello by Francesco Rugeri (Cremona 1690), formerly played by Maurice Gendron. In this three-album set he tackles the sacred summit of the solo cello repertoire, rightly pointing out that the lack of original manuscripts for the Six Suites leaves them especially open to individual interpretation. Yet he takes a further step in making this recording his own, interpolating between each of the suites miniature compositions for solo cello that he commissioned from composers on six different continents under the motto “Sounds of Light”, thereby placing Bach’s Western European masterworks in dialogue with music from across the globe in our own time.

Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann were two composers leading a double life: Educated as serious classical composers who worked for the concert hall, they found their greatest success and life-long careers in the medium of motion pictures – more specifically, in Hollywood. Both men composed some of the most distinguished film scores of all time: Double Indemnity, Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, El Cid (Rózsa); Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Psycho, and Taxi Driver (Herrmann).

Miklós Rózsa’s String Quartet and String Trio are vigorous and powerful works, rooted in the traditional German school around Max Reger, but also inspired by the rich folklore of his native Hungary (like his compatriot Bela Bartók).

Bernard Herrmann’s string quartet “Echoes” is cast in a single movement with ten identifiable sections. The work features several of Herrmann's stylistic obsessions, like the Valse triste and the fandango, prominently featured in many of the composer's film scores, expressing both pain and bittersweet nostalgia.

The “ensemble merian” was established for the purpose of this and possible future recordings. Comprised of seasoned players from Frankfurt's two full-time symphony orchestras, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, “ensemble merian” is devoted to the recording of neglected classical works by composers more closely associated with motion pictures.

Recorded at the only extant Spanish organ dating from the time of Aguilera de Heredia (16th century)

The booklet contains liner notes by the artist about the composer and works, a biography of the artist, and information about the organ including a stop list

Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia has gone down in history of Spanish music as one of the most important figures of the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, comparable to the Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), who was his contemporary. His style reflects the polyphonic tradition of the Spanish Renaissance combined with elements of the early Baroque, thus forming the bridge between Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) and Francisco Correa de Araujo (1584-1654), the most important exponents of the organ school in Spain in the Renaissance and the Baroque respectively.

Aguilera adopts a style in which the serious counterpoint of vocal polyphony, of which he was an accomplished master, is infused with elements from popular music and dance forms and rhythms.

Played by Miguel del Barco Díaz, a specialist in early Spanish organ music, on the only surviving historic organ from the time of De Heredia, the Renaissance organ of Santa María de Garrovillas de Alconétar, Cáceres, Spain, the technical specifications of which are included in the booklet.

Established in Rome in 2016, the Quartetto Werther has already carried off several prizes at chamber-music competitions in its native Italy, and its members have been winners of several competitions for young musicians such as the Premio Geminiani awarded in 2019 to violinist Martina Santarone. As an ensemble they have studied with the Trio di Parma and the Cuarteto Casals, among others. With this release, their debut commercial recording, the Quartetto Werther has produced finely calibrated, beautifully engineered versions of the two piano quartets which make an ideal introduction to the voice of Gabriel Fauré in the realm of chamber music. The romantic, passionate melodies of the Op.15 celebrated Quartet in C minor are enclosed within relatively strict classical forms, with a songlike Adagio at its expressive heart. The Op.45 Quartet in G minor – something of a signature work for the Quartetto Werther – demonstrates a much bolder departure from the Classical tradition in terms of both structure and harmony. Some of its most striking moments include a mercurial Scherzo and a languorous Adagio. Despite the association of both keys with tragic and heroic forces – in the Fifth symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for example – Fauré always balances intensity of feeling with a concern for elegance and formal lucidity. As he remarked to his fellow composer Florent Schmitt: ‘To express that which is within you with sincerity, in the clearest and most perfect manner, would seem to me the ultimate goal of art.’ When placed side by side in the Quartetto Werther’s deeply sympathetic interpretations, it is difficult to understand why the superbly crafted and melodically generous Second Quartet has never managed to achieve the popularity of the First, but their recording should win it many new friends.

- From an early age Benedetto Marcello proved to be a man of great versatility: a poet, writer, musician, lawyer, judge, administrator and philologist, holding important posts in these functions during his entire life. As a composer he wrote a substantial oeuvre, covering all important fields of composition: sacred and secular choral works, opera and a large body of instrumental music.

- An important part of Marcello’s life was devoted to the Estro poetico-armonico, a substantial collection of musical settings of the first fifty Psalms in an Italian paraphrase written by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani (1697-1749). They were not compositions intended for the liturgy, instead, each Psalm is a spiritual cantata, a form that followed in the wake of the oratorio and religious music in general, spreading rapidly through Italy from the early 17th century. The aesthetic style of the Estro poetico-armonico avoids excessive use of counterpoint and harmony, and focuses on catching melodies and expression of the emotions of the text.

- This new recording presents the Psalms 42 and 50, performed by the Coro Istituzione Armonica and the Ensemble Il Narvalo, conducted by Alberto Turco.

The only available complete recording, newly made by a stylish Italian early-music ensemble, of a landmark collection of Baroque chamber music.

Antonio Veracini's innovative music forms the bridge between the styles of Vitali, Bononcinim and Stradella on the one hand, and the post-Baroque fashions of his nephew and of Tartini and Locatelli on the other. He played a central role in the civic musical life of Florence during the later 17th and early 18th centuries.

Veracini’s Opus 1 collection, published 1692, consists of ten ‘church sonatas’ of the newer sort exemplified by Vitali's op. 9 collection published two years later, though Veracini’s style is also comparable with Corelli's church sonatas published during the 1680s. Most of the sonatas have two extended quick movements, each preceded by a slower and gravely expressive introduction. Dance rhythms infuse the finales with momentum, and Veracini is fond of trumpet-like fanfares and echo effects. These ten sonatas made a tremendous impression on Veracini’s fellow composers at the time, and it is a wonder that they have only been recorded in selected form until now.

The complete collection abounds in high-spirited diversity, especially in these recordings made by an ensemble with a track record of success in exploring the lesser-known corners of Baroque repertoire.

As a young man, fresh from his first real success as a composer with the opera Aleko, Rachmaninoff was on his way to visit his mentor Tchaikovsky when he saw a crowd gathered outside. The news of Tchaikovsky’s death sent him into a tailspin, and he passed the next few weeks alone, walking and writing this magnificent ‘Trio Elegiaque’ in memory of Tchaikovsky. Although the Trio is an early work it bears the unmistakable imprint of Rachmaninoff’s musical personality.

No understanding of Rachmaninoff is complete without the Trio, and the anniversary year of 2023, 150 years since his birth, Brilliant Classics has produced a magnificent new recording made by the established international collective Trio RoVerde. The trio’s pianist is Ekaterina Litvintseva, ‘the Arctic Circle Pianist’ now resident in Germany, who has several highly praised recordings on Brilliant Classics to her name: ‘Ekaterina Litvintseva has been amassing a distinguished discography – and this…exhibits the combination of sensitivity and self-assurance that have marked her playing up until now.’

Alongside the Trio here are two complementary sets of salon pieces by the young Rachmaninoff, dating from his years as a prodigious student but already infused with the potent strain of yearning Romanticism that would carry his name far and wide: Two Pieces Op. 2 for cello and piano, and two Morceaux de salon Op. 6 for violin and piano.

REVIEW:

The young trio RoVerde documents a live performance of the Trio élégiaque in Studio 150 (Amsterdam) with this album. The interpretation makes a very rounded, well-formed and mature impression.

-- Neue Musikalische Zeitung