This unique box set explores the deep bond between Ludwig van Beethoven's music and literature-from Schiller and Goethe's poetic inspiration to Beethoven's theatrical scores like The Ruins of Athens, Egmont, and Fidelio. New text versions and insightful interpretations breathe fresh life into rarely heard works, highlighting Beethoven's belief in music as a moral force. A powerful journey through music shaped by words, and words inspired by music.

In the pieces under this title, I sought to convey the complexity of our relation with the Divine. Inner Temple is that sacred place in our soul, heart and mind which contains the most precious spiritual treasures of each of us, a kind of a personal Holy of Holies. The Day of Atonement for all Jews is the most important, somber annual Holiday, a day of reflection, during which we ask Almighty’s forgiveness (and people’s forgiveness) for all our transgressions, mistakes and misdeeds during the past year. The two movements of this composition are filled with ritualistic fervor, with intensity of the searching spirit, and the mystery of connection to the Divine through repentance. At the very end of the 2nd movement, there is a moment of light – a token of forgiveness.

–Alla Elana Cohen

Laura van der Heijden joins the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth for this album of British cello concertos. Frank Bridge's Oration, composed in 1929 - 30 was intended as an outcry against the inhumanity of warfare, and a tribute to the victims of the First World War. It's arch form single continuous movement exhibits the intense chromaticism typical of Bridge's output from this era. Commissioned by the Ukrainian-born cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, Walton's Cello Concerto suffered a number of difficulties with regard to first performances (Piatigorsky suffered a mental breakdown; Walton missed the UK premiere because of a nasty road accident) but it has nevertheless become a staple of the repertoire. It was with this concerto that Laura van der Heijden won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, in 2012. The young British composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School and then the University of Cambridge and King's College London, and rapidly established herself as one of the most talented and prolific composers of her generation. Earth, Sea, Air was written for van der Heijden, who gave the work's premiere in Glasgow in 2023, a week before making this recording with the same forces.

Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762), son of the violinist Giuliano Geminiani. After a season at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples and a two-year spell at the Cappella Palatina in Lucca, Francesco left his homeland for good in 1714 to pursue a career in London, Dublin and Paris. The flourishing public concert life and optimal publishing conditions in London were attracting a great many Italian musicians, who were adored by the English public, achieving cult-like status - Arcangelo Corelli most of all. As a pupil of Corelli's, Geminiani inherited that legacy, while at the same time promoting an independent development in violin playing. Geminiani not only skilfully used the cult of Corelli and his own privileged position as an Italian musician to market himself; he also cultivated close contacts with powerful patrons, made a name for himself as an event organiser and painting dealer, and published several treatises. Among those, his The Art of Playing on the Violin, which he published at his own expense in 1751, was pioneering. He was responding to a pronounced culture of violin enthusiasts, whose great demand caused a proliferation of amateur schools and rudimentary music compendiums in England. Geminiani's treatise, however, was one of the first in Europe meeting professional standards. It differs significantly in scope and conception from other treatises of the mid-18th century from German-speaking countries, focusing intently on seeking the true nature of musical expression as the highest purpose of music. This is also reflected in the term 'Ornaments of Expression' coined by Geminiani to describe ornaments. He lists a rich selection of ornaments in another method, Treatise of good taste in the Art of Musick, published in 1749, designed to help the musician practise the art of ornamentation and variation. This treatise, along with his Rules for Playing in a true Taste published in 1746, include arrangements and variations based on well-known Scots tunes. The fashion of choosing simple folk songs as the basis for compositions was also utilised by other Italian composers in order to meet the needs and preferences of the English public. Geminiani's variations uniquely combine the Italian art of variation, inspired by the example of Arcangelo Corelli, with the simple grace of Scottish folk songs and ornamentation techniques developed under the influence of many years spent in Paris. The compositions contained in Geminiani's treatises go far beyond mere didactic use. His skilful, idiosyncratic use of harmony, rhythm and ornamentation tells the story of a highly trained, experimental and unconventional artist moving between nations and compositional styles. Other information: - Recorded April 2021 in Gartensaal, Germany - Bilingual booklet in English and German contains liner notes and profiles of the musicians - Francesco Saverio Geminiani was born in Lucca. He began his study at an early age with his father, but his most important lessons followed in his years with the great Roman Master, Arcangelo Corelli. Composition lessons with Alessandro Scarlatti helped inspire and solidify his craft. In 1714 Geminiani settled in London, where he quickly gained fame as an ensemble player, concert violinist, and teacher. Here he became friends with Handel and led the orchestra during many performances together. Geminiani enjoyed great success not only in London, but also in Ireland where he spent a considerable amount of time, settling in Dublin in 1760. - Geminiani's playing was distinguished by it's great expressiveness, richness of dynamic coloring, extraordinary liveliness, and a strong temperament. Tartini called Geminiani "il furibondo" - the furious one! - One of Geminiani's most enduring legacies is his treatise The Art of Playing on the Violin, published in 1751. This influential work is one of the earliest comprehensive guides on violin technique and interpretation. Unlike previous violin tutors, which often focused on basic fingering and bowing, Geminiani's treatise provided detailed insights into expressive playing, ornamentation, and the subtleties of articulation. It reflects the evolving style of violin playing in the 18th century, emphasizing musicality over mere technical proficiency. It covers topics such as bowing techniques, left-hand positioning, and vibrato, offering exercises to develop precision and expressiveness. He also stresses the importance of dynamic contrast and phrasing, essential elements in Baroque performance practice. - Played on period instruments by Anna Kaiser (violin), Johannes Berger (cello) and Solrun Franzdottir Wechner (harpsichord).

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)

The First Symphony was largely inspired by the composer's tempestuous love affair with the widowed Baroness Imma von Doernberg, whom Walton met in 1929 and with whom he was living on the Continent in the early 1930s. Although the work was long in gestation, with a particular delay in the composition of the finale, the result was universally acclaimed as an outstanding success, with John Ireland commenting "unlike any other English symphony, this is in the real line of symphonic tradition. It is simply colossal, grand, original, and moving to the emotions to the most extreme degree... It has established you as the most vital and original genius in Europe". Walton's star was in the descendent through the 1950's, with a poor reception to his opera Troilus & Cressida, and equally negative comments for his Cello Concerto, which was widely considered to be embarrassingly old-fashioned in it's essentially neo-romantic idiom. Commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky (at the suggestion of Heifetz), the work was first performed in Boston under Charles Munch in January 1957, with the UK premiere under Sir Malcolm Sargent following a month later. Walton was unable to attend that concert as he was hospitalised following a car accident on the journey to London from his home in Italy. Now widely perceived as one of Walton's most important late scores, the work is performed here by Sinfonia of London's principal cellist Jonathan Aasgaard.

At the Festival Hall, on 24 April, 1960, an 80-year-old Sir Thomas Beecham gave what would turn out to be the final concert he conducted with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. SOMM Recordings is releasing the last work on that historic programme as part of it's continuing Beecham Collection of live recordings-the Bacchanale from the opera Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saens. Unbeknownst to them, the audience's tumultuous reception of this performance proved to be a farewell to Beecham on the London concert platform. In June 1960, he suffered a cerebral thrombosis and never conducted again; he died on 8 March 1961. Jon Tolansky, a former musician at the Royal Opera House who has since specialised in making documentary features on composers and performers, recalls hearing this programme as an 11-year-old. "I had never heard anything remotely like it," he says, "as Sir Thomas, now standing fully upright on the podium, became a generator of electric lightning and as the Royal Festival Hall seemed to be shaking, most especially in the last two minutes or so, in a catastrophic earthquake." This historic release also includes live recordings of Saint-Saens's First Cello Concerto and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Once again, audio restoration is by the renowned audio recording engineer Lani Spahr, whose work has recently been honoured with four Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice Awards-for Bruckner from the Archives Vols I and IV and, more recently, Bliss, the Composer Conducts and E.J. Moeran's music conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. Beecham was always what The Times called "a quietly persistent advocate for Saint-Saens," and he offers attentive support to the 1958 reading of Saint-Saens's First Cello Concerto by Ukrainian-born soloist Mischel Cherniavsky. The concerto is in one continuous movement with three tightly structured sections sharing interrelated ideas. Cherniavsky came from a family of nine musically gifted children, and he played in the Cherniavsky Trio with two of his brothers from 1901 until 1934, after which he was mostly based in London and France. The live performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade on this release was given at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 March, 1957. This fell right in the middle of recording sessions when the orchestra was immersed in the piece for three days, which goes some way to explaining the glorious quality of the playing in the concert. What Rimsky-Korsakov described as the "various fairy-tale wonders" he had in mind when composing the work come across in Beecham's live performance with a freshness and brilliance that make for an unforgettable experience. A 24-year-old Steven Staryk became leader of the RPO shortly before these recordings, earning the title "king of concertmasters" from The Strad magazine. About his performance on this concert The Times wrote "the solo playing of the new leader, Mr Steven Staryk, must have due acknowledgment."

Rheinberger's chamber music work bears witness to his deep roots in the classical tradition, particularly in composers such as Mendelssohn and Brahms. His compositions are characterised by clear formal structures, melodic elegance and harmonic richness.

An exciting young Dutch-based ensemble, performing on gut strings, brings flair and historically informed style to four little-known examples of repertoire from the dawn of the string quartet. Founded while it's members were students of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, the Butter Quartet gives vibrant historically-informed performance focusing on Classical-era repertoire. Within it's short history, the Quartet has appeared at several important early-music festivals. At the 2019 York Early Music International Young Artists Competition, they were awarded a place in the prestigious EEEMERGING+ professional development scheme for young European ensembles. With this collection of rarely heard 18thcentury quartets from Italy, the Butter Quartet makes a thrilling debut on record. The individuality of each composer is accentuated by their mutual juxtaposition. In their booklet essay for the album, the Quartet members recount combing libraries for early quartets which have been overshadowed by Haydn's mastery of the genre. All of the composers featured in Scintilla were famous violin virtuosi, with the exception of Boccherini who was a cellist. Their work as performers was inseparable from the music they composed. Italian galant music and performers were characterized by gorgeous tone, operatic sensibilities, and elegant ornamentation. An E flat major Quartet by Gaetano Pugnani (1731-1798) retains traces of Baroque grammar to it's phrasing, while a C minor Quartet by Boccherini (1743-1805) is marked by the surges of pathos that belong to the key signature as reinterpreted by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Maddalena Sirmen (1745-1818) wrote six quartets of which No.5 in F major is a remarkably close-woven and reflective work, hardly a display piece in the tradition of her teacher Tartini but touched throughout with the spirit of subtle innovation we associate with Haydn. Finally, the C major Quartet of Felice Giardini (1716- 1796) is distinguished by an unusually rich viola part which may arise from the circumstances of it's composition in London, where the composer played his violin with both the painter Thomas Gainsborough and the Prince of Wales, who became King George IV

It took a move from his native Seville to Paris for Joaquin Turina (1882-1949) to discover an authentically Spanish voice for himself, principally encouraged there by his countryman Isaac Albeniz. The Piano Trio in F now numbers among the first works of Turina's maturity, though it was lost for many years and only rediscovered in 1999. The distance of over two decades between this early work and Turina's first numbered Trio is mirrored in stark terms by the contrast in idioms. An essentially outgoing, Romantic temperament has been refined by the passing of time and life into a more angular melodic style, supported by more chromatic and allusive harmony - no less 'Spanish' in it's way, perhaps even more so. This is the piece that for many years was Turina's best-known chamber piece, beyond the Danzas fantasticas which delighted many listeners to Alicia de Larrocha and (in their orchestrated form) Ernest Ansermet. Now the First Piano Trio may be appreciated in a broader context of Turina's writing for a notoriously challenging genre, and we hear how in each work the three instruments gain a greater degree of independence. From 1933, the Trio No.2 continues this process of refinement and distillation, notwithstanding the Brahmsian hemiolas which destabilise it's opening theme. Turina's masterpiece in the piano-trio genre is probably Circulo, a concise three-movement essay which he composed on the eve of the First World War. It charts the passing of a single day, from the slow stirrings of dawn to a dance in the middle of an Andalucian day through to the gradual falling of dusk, which begins in wild exuberance and ends in peace under a starry sky. The Orphelion Ensemble was founded in Vienna by the Spanish violinist Deborah Gonsalves Deborah Gonsalves and the Austro-German cellist Berthold Hamburger. For this new recording of Turina's trios, they are joined by the Spanish pianist An Eva Browning Artist-in-residence Associate Professor of piano at Texas Tech University, Daniel del Pino. Based in Spain, Orphelion gives concerts across the world with a flexible line-up of artists in order to pursue an artistically ambitious programme which sees them work with leading visual artists, writers and actors. - Joaquin Turina was born in Sevilla, Spain, where he received his first music lessons. Later he went to Madrid and subsequently settled in Paris, where he took composition lessons from Vincent d'Indy at his Schola Cantorum de Paris, while studying the piano with Moritz Moszkowski. Inevitably he came into contact with Debussy and Ravel, and his early compositions were clearly influenced by the Impressionists. However he returned to his native Spain and developed his own style in which the rich folklore, folk music and atmosphere of Spain is predominant. Together with Albeniz, Granados and de Falla he established the Spanish Nationalist School. - This new recording presents Turina's complete works for piano trio, clearly showing the development of his compositional style. It is music of great imagination, colouring and instrumental brilliance, in which the sounds and perfumes of Spain are nearly palpable. - Excellent performances by the Orphelion Ensemble, consisting of Daniel del Pino (piano), Deborah Gonsalves (violin) and Berthold Hamburger (cello).

Malcolm Martineau follows up his acclaimed complete song collections of Duparc, Poulenc and Faure with a double album celebrating the complete songs of Maurice Ravel, performed by a bumper roster of singers: Lorna Anderson, Julie Boulianne, John Chest, Sarah Dufresne Dafydd Jones, Simon Keenlyside, Paula Murrihy, Nicky Spence and William Thomas. French composer Maurice Ravel known for his musical craftsmanship and clear style drew on elements of baroque, neoclassicism, modernism and later on, jazz in his compositions. His vocal works span 4 decades, from 1893 to 1933. Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau is recognised at the highest international level as one of the UK's leading accompanists, performing worldwide alongside the world's greatest singers and with a discography of over 100 albums, including a number of award-winning recordings.

Hailed by Classic FM as "one of today's most exciting young composers" Rebecca Dale is a London based composer, working most often with large orchestral and choral forces in the worlds of cinema and theatre. Night Seasons is an album about hope, looking for the light in difficult times, written during a time of personal dif- ficulty while her father was terminally ill. With works written for choir and cello it strives to be a hopeful album, reaching for the wonder around us. Rebecca Dale says "It's been one of the great privileges of my life to be able to write for cellist heroes of mine to whom I grew up listening. I also got to have fun setting some famous poems... I am indebted to everyone who has created this album with me".

An album of world premiere recordings of works written to accompany poems by celebrated Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Desmond Earley and the University Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin release their fourth album on Signum Classics. Following their EP "Ireland is My Home" which was Scala Radio's Album of the Week, this new album aims to encapsulate the influence of singing and music in Joyce's work. A tenor himself, it was Joyce's wish that his words be set to music, and through commissioning new works, the choir are proud of their unique connection to Joyce's Dublin story. "It is a pleasure and honour for us to be the first choral ensemble to wrap James Joyce's 'suite of songs' in an Irish choral voice" - Desmond Earley (Artistic Director)

In July 1884, MacDowell and his wife, Marian, spent their honeymoon in England, and were both captivated by performances of Shakespeare plays at London's Lyceum Theatre. The young composer started immediately on sketches based on six characters, but completed only two, Hamlet and Ophelia, which were published the following year. MacDowell recycled some of the music from his sketch for Benedick, from Much Ado about Nothing, as the second movement of his Second Piano Concerto. Having lived in Germany from 1885 to 1888, the couple returned to America and Edward reactivated his career as a concert pianist. The Second Concerto was the perfect vehicle to display his virtuosity, and he gave the first performance in New York in 1889. Composed during the same period as the Second Concerto, the Romanze for Cello and Orchestra was written at Wiesbaden in 1887, and MacDowell dedicated it to the virtuoso Bohemian cellist and composer David Popper. The Suite in A minor was the first work MacDowell composed after the couple's move to Boston, and reflects his lifelong love of nature. Set in five movements, it received it's first performance in 1895 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Emil Paur.