Joining the extensive library of guitar music in the Brilliant Classics catalogue, Franco Cavallone is a worthy successor to Italian guitar composers from Giuliani to Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He is an accomplished performer himself, having studied with the likes of Leo Brouwer and Angelo Gilardino, and the pieces recorded here have been composed with an intimate knowledge of the guitar’s technical and timbral possibilities, which Cristiano Porqueddu exploits to the full, with the composer’s enthusiastic approval: ‘He has managed to create a kaleidoscope of sound and sense that is truly rewarding for the listener. I am convinced that this album set is a benchmark recording for my music for the guitar.’ Cavallone’s mastery of diverse idioms is engagingly broad, making these four albums full of discovery and surprise. The four sonatas on album one are each conceived in homage to a different style: ‘to Ponce and Ravel’, American composers, neoclassicism and to 20th century modernism. While Cavallone embraces rich dissonance and an impressionistic handling of chromaticism in the 12 Studies, he also writes with a moving simplicity in the homage to Tarrega, Di tante lagrime. A collection of six Hebrew melodies – dedicated to Porqueddu – demonstrates how effectively he can embroider and enrich folk and popular melodies, enhancing rather than detracting from their original character. Another ‘homage’ piece dedicated to Porqueddu is a three-movement sonata written with Benjamin Britten in mind, and recapturing some of the English composer’s deft, economical sketching of situation and place in his late music, especially Venice. There are three vivid ‘Suggestions’ inspired by the paintings of Lia Laterza and a haunting set of variations on Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna’. A collection of 12 Short Preludes encapsulates Cavallone’s eclectic language in microcosm, continually delighting and intriguing to the curious listener.

An audiophile LP transfer for an
immersive tribute to a remote island
off the coast of Brittany.
Having become celebrated for his score
to Amélie (2001), the French composer
moved to the island of Ushant
(Ouessant/Eusa), and this album is a
musical tribute to his home, comprising
ten pieces about ten specific places on
the island. In 2016, Tiersen published a
collection of pieces called Eusa, which
Jeroen van Veen has combined with his
2021 collection, Kerber, named after a
chapel on the island, to produce Island.
The album has been a best-seller on CD
for its contemplative mood and beauty.
Among the 10 tracks, some offer the
perfect soundtrack for contemplation on
a long walk or staring out of a window on
a train journey. Others seem predestined
to be background music for study or
relaxation. The pieces sound at times
dreamy and wistful, at times bittersweet,
at other times happily playful. With each
song, your imagination can easily conjure
a scene from a movie: a breakup after a
fight in a cosy café or a nature
documentary showing two baby birds
opening their eyes for the very first
time.
This isn’t a collection about isolation;
it’s more an expression of awareness of
your own environment and your place
within it: a sonic encapsulation of the
hyper-local. Tiersen relates this
approach to a night spent studying the
stars – which he himself does. ‘You can
look at things that are thousands of
light years away and relate your own
existence to this really cosmic element,’
he says. ‘But you get that same feeling
with the things all around you.’

The forgotten figure of a 17th-century Dutch recorder virtuoso, illuminated by a unique synthesis of art history, scholarship and modern musicianship.

Der Fluyten Lust-hof (The Flute's Pleasure Garden, or Garden of Delights) is the largest collection of music for a single wind instrument ever published by a single composer, and has supplied recorder players, amateurs and professionals, with music for reflection and entertainment ever since the publication of its initial volume in 1644.

An overlooked detail is the dedication of the first volume, to one Adriana vanden Bergh. Who was she? This book and CD tells the full and fascinating story, shedding light along the way on many aspects of culture, religion and everyday life in Amsterdam during the 17th century. As both a musicologist and art historian, Thiemo Wind is uniquely placed to tell this story. He has identified Adriana as the subject of a famous painting by Jacob Adriaensz Backer (1608/09–1651), hitherto anonymous but considered one of the most beautiful portraits of the Dutch Golden Age.

Through original research, Thiemo Wind has assembled an eventful biography, which moves in short and lively chapters, each of them illustrated with a telling image, from her family background to her birth in 1631, her complex religious inheritance of both Protestant and Catholic observance, her apparently rapid mastery of the recorder, her participation in Amsterdam’s lively performing culture and her status as a musical celebrity even as a teenager, to her marriage in 1650, which probably occasioned the commission of Backer’s portrait. Thereafter the story turns darker, with a tale of bankruptcy, child-birth and -death, family splits and reconciliations, obscurity and ultimately Adriana’s death in 1668, having given birth to her ninth child.

The accompanying CD takes its cue from Der Fluyten Lust-hof, and from the music publications featured in Backer’s portrait, to present new recordings of music with which Adriana would have delighted audiences in her time. Performed by the internationally renowned virtuoso Erik Bosgraaf, in company with his Cordevento ensemble, the recording complements Thiemo Wind’s scholarship to present Adriana’s life and music in the round."

A high-grade LP transfer for a superbly engineered album of Bach at his most life-enhancing. JS Bach may not have composed any concertos specifically for recorder – none have survived, at any rate – but he scored for the instrument elsewhere in his output, most unforgettably so in his earliest surviving cantata, the ‘Actus tragicus’. In any case the uniquely adaptable nature of his inspiration lends itself to the kind of sympathetic adaptation undertaken here by Erik Bosgraaf in partnership with the musicologist and art historian Thiemo Wind. Three of the concertos here have beenadapted from pieces which survive in a scoring for solo harpsichord and string orchestra: BWV 1053, 1055 and 1059. A fourth concerto has been constructed by Wind from transcriptions of cantata arias, adapted from the secular cantata Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen BWV215 and Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen BWV32. The idea is humble but ingenious, answering the question: what might Bach have done, or could he have done, if he had written concertos for the recorder? In doing so, Bosgraaf and his colleagues are following good precedents: after all, Bach himself created and performed many such transcriptions. His oeuvre demonstrates that a composition wasnot regarded as an unchanging work of art, and during his lifetime it was standard procedure to make quite radical adaptations according to the relevant circumstances. In any case, Bosgraaf and the one-per-part musicians of Cordevento perform these concertos with an unfailing sensitivity to the momentum and poetry of Bach’s originals. Now, on 180-gram vinyl, these recordings gain a special warmth and depth while losing none of their pin-point clarity. ‘Erik Bosgraaf’s recorder-playing is fluent and lively in fast music, and his five colleagues provide accompaniments that are lean, stylish and precise.’ (Gramophone)

Among the best-selling composers of our time, Ludovico Einaudi has won a following of millions through his distinctively calm, smoothly unfolding works, which spin unbroken songs from the simplest material and cast a spell of relaxed enchantment over their audience. Jeroen van Veen is the Dutch pianist who has likewise won an international following for his many albums of Minimalist piano music on Brilliant Classics, including a previous collection of Einaudi’s music, ‘Waves’ (9452). ‘Clouds’ is another 7CD collection, which ranges across 30 years of Einaudi’s oeuvre, from the Stanze (‘Verses’) of 1992 to the Underwater collection from 2022. In fact, as a relatively early work, Stanze contains intriguing and uncharacteristic elements: as the composer himself explained, ‘I had one goal: to remove, and leave space. The title refers to the poetic stanzas but also to invisible spaces to be inhabited with the mind.’

In 2012, Einaudi produced a project called Elements as a tribute to the memory of his mentor and teacher Luciano Berio. Each instrumental song of Elements evolves from a small gesture or motif, evoking a journey through fragmented thoughts and feelings. In a similar way, but on a much grander scale, the Seven Days Walking project of 2019 developed from a walking tour of the Alps, where Einaudi had the idea of observing and evoking the times of day and moods across the cycle of an entire week. This cycle finds the composer at his most bewitchingly minimalist, drawing in the listener to a space of private reflection. The Underwater collection thrives on the interplay of pure, sparkling and warm, melancholic sounds and invites you to forget the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The tempo is restful and the pulse flowing even in a seascape such as ‘Swordfish’.

Finally, Jeroen van Veen has selected an album’s worth of Einaudi’s prolific work in the world of film, in which his songs often present a mirror to troubled souls and an oasis of calm amid violence.

The Ukrainian composer Thomas De Hartmann (1885-1956) had undertaken a classic musical training with Anton Arensky and then Nikolai Taneyev before the death of his mother in 1912 prompted him to begin searching for a spiritual teacher. Four years later he made the encounter that would change his life, with the Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff (1877-1949). Gurdjieff had his own musical training, as well as a sharp ear and retentive memory for the folk melodies which he heard on his long travels through central Asia and the middle East. De Hartmann and his wife joined Gurdjieff’s circle of followers, and the two men began to write music to accompany their spiritual exercises. This body of music eventually amounted to around 300 short pieces, of which the indefatigable Jeroen van Veen has recorded the entire published corpus of 170 divided into four volumes.

During lockdown, Jeroen van Veen found himself with the time to immerse himself in this music, which ranges across Asian, Arabic and European systems of rhythm, harmony and tuning, so that he could capture its perfumed mysticism and improvisational character. There are solemn hymns of an Orthodox nobility, atmospheric tone poems such as the ‘Night Procession’, freely pianistic transcriptions of melodies from early-Christian sects such as the Essenes, modal-pentatonic melodies to accompany a ‘Sacred Reading from the Koran’ and to aid an awakening of consciousness in an elevated state of awareness, and then pieces simply titled after their date of composition. While overall meditative in mood, there is a tremendous variety to the Gurdjieff/De Hartmann collection, and Jeroen van Veen’s new recording is an ideally comprehensive way to dive into its riches.

REVIEW:

One can approach these pieces as being parallel to the Magyar folk music that Bartók and Kodály collected in the early 20th century and used as a basis for their own music, except that for the most part Gurdjieff and de Hartmann tried to keep the tunes intact as they stood and didn’t try to develop them in a standard Western classical manner.

Taken a few pieces at a time, the music isn’t bad to listen to, but prolonged exposure to the whole six CDs can bore the more imaginative listener. Despite the intriguing Eastern harmonies, the music is repetitive and tiresome. This is not van Veen’s fault; he is a splendid pianist who plays the slow pieces with great atmosphere and the quicker ones with a lively rhythm; he does his best to engage your interest, and there are certainly some very cute and interesting pieces in this collection, but the lack of any development and the unvarying rhythm of each piece eventually take their toll on the listener. If there is such a thing as high quality background music, this is it. I would also recommend this music in the main as an aid to meditation so long as you realize that every so often there are upbeat numbers in the set and this may spoil your getting deeper into yourself (CD 2 has the most uptempo music).

Of course, the real value of this set is to give a pianist, professional or amateur, who may wish to play some of these pieces the chance to hear them performed. There are other recordings out there of some of this repertoire, but having it all in one place is clearly helpful. A second pianist, Daff by Van Veen, plays with Jeroen on nine numbers if Series II of the Asian Songs and Rhythms, five pieces in Music of the Sayyids and Dervishes First Series, and a few other pieces thereafter.

-- The Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

Born in 1946, Vladimir Martynov is one of several composers from the former USSR whose music taps into a vein of perpetual memory and farewell. Literally so in the case of Der Abschied, an eight-movement cycle for small ensemble which stands on the threshold like a guest at a gathering of friends, unable or unwilling to shut the door behind them and venture out alone. One of Martynov’s most distinguished contemporaries was the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, who talked of a ‘genetic aural well’ for Russian music which, like Orthodox prayer, cannot be learnt as a text, but which exists beyond any text. Silvestrov explicitly recognized his own output as ‘meta-music’ or even ‘post-music’, and the same could be said of many pieces in Martynov’s output. Tiny motifs and gestures are layered and expanded across a meditative space in a distinctively Russian form of Minimalism that bears certain similarities with the better-known outputs of Pärt and Schnittke but pursues a consciously more austere path: both the Requiem and Stabat mater are imbued with the timeless qualities of chant and ancient melisma. Martynov’s music began to attract a certain cult following in the West during the 1990s with performances and recordings made principally by the violinist Gidon Kremer and his former partner, Tatiana Grindenko. As both a violinist and conductor, Grindenko has continued to keep Martynov’s flame burning, and she leads most of the performances here, which were made mostly in Moscow over the course of several years and in several cases receive here their first international release.

Blind from the age of two, a prodigiously gifted student, Jean Langlais (1907-91) produced an immense quantity of music. His organ works alone exceed in number those of of Bach. Many have hardly ever been performed. Perhaps not more than half a dozen works are regularly played or recorded today, which is what makes this new complete survey of his organ music – the first ever attempted on record – both unique and invaluable, as the authoritative document of a high point in the distinguished lineage of the French organ heritage.

The first volume of this projected complete survey ranges from his early set of 24 pieces written in the late 1930s and composed in all the major and minor keys, to the sublime economy of his Suite in Simplicitate from 1991. This major project has been undertaken jointly by the Italian organists Giorgio Benati and Fausto Caporali. Benati is a former student of Langlais, and Caporali has a string of successful French organ recordings to his credit. They have made these new recordings on Italian instruments, lending Langlais an ‘Italian accent’ while faithfully observing his expressive and registration markings in his scores. Booklet notes for each piece have been written by Giorgio Benati.

REVIEW:

Benati and Caporati offer an extensive survey of Langlais's sacred and secular output, including several liturgical collections that were published posthumously by his second wife, Marie-Louise Jacquet. The playing is energetic and committed. An excellent introduction to this neglected music, the best of which should be heard more often.

-- American Record Guide