Navona Live is proud to announce the release of INDIANA COLLECTANEA, which celebrates and preserves composer Michael G. Cunningham’s residency at Indiana University School of Music from 1969-1973. This live recording of Cunningham’s work comes on the heels of his acclaimed album ECUMENICAL SPIRIT from Navona Live earlier this year. This latest release captures a significant moment in time, when Cunningham’s work helped channel the talents of 30 burgeoning musicians. In INDIANA COLLECTANEA, Cunningham expands his palette beyond traditional tonality, painting with chromatic, timbral, and rhythmic nuances. The work opens with Prisms, a four-movement piece in which dense tone clusters shift and refract among the strings like a kaleidoscope. This is followed by Polyphonies, a wild-eyed percussion piece that manipulates instrumental timbres to an exhilarating effect. As the album progresses, each piece is a surprise to the listener’s ears, with its unique assortments of instruments and sounds jolting the audience into new appreciation. The frenetic horns at the start of Concertant are further evidence of this. The penultimate track, Scenario, is particularly inventive, opening with a prelude of ethereal bells. Each musician is assigned to multiple instruments, showcasing both their own skills and that of their composer. Lastly, the album ends with the dramatic Noetical Rounds, which concludes with a soft, descending glissando into oblivion. Despite the decades that have passed since the performances on INDIANA COLLECTANEA, each piece is as startlingly fresh as it was the day of its performance. Listen to hear this collection of talented musicians pushed to their utmost by the challenging and thoughtful compositions of Michael G. Cunningham.

A mid-price reissue of the popular 'Fancies' album, collecting together John Rutter's best-known concert works. As well as the virtuosic 'Suite Antique' (for flute, harpsichord and strings), this disc contains the three choral song-cycles 'Five Childhood Lyrics' (for unaccompanied choir), 'When Icicles Hang' and 'Fancies' (both for choir and orchestra).

The prize-winning Lars Hegaard (b. 1950) has, over more than 40 years, been an important voice in Danish musical life. Centered on the composer’s own instrument, the guitar, we present six of his most important works for small groups. With their refined modernist expressivity, they offer a fascinating picture of the guitar’s possibilities as a solo instrument, as accompanist and as the first amongst equals in chamber music. Lars Hegaard studied guitar with Ingolf Olsen (diploma 1973, music teaching degree 1977), and composition with Ib Nørholm (diploma 1980). He has also taken a music degree at the University of Copenhagen. In 1983 he was awarded a three-year working grant by the National Arts Foundation, and in 1992 the Sylvia and Poul Schierbeck Grant. In addition to that, he has since 1986 received annually working grants from the National Arts Foundation.

Kalevi Aho is one of today’s most prolific composers of large-scale orchestral scores, including 17 symphonies and 32 concertos to date. Less well-known is the fact that he has also written chamber music, as well as an ever-expanding series of solo pieces – starting with Solo I for violin from 1975, the most recent in the series, for clavichord, is the 17th. Some of these pieces has originated as part of Aho’s preparations when composing a concerto for the instrument in question, while others have been written for competitions, including Solo III for flute and Solo IV for cello on the present release. This first volume of Solos gathers seven pieces in all, four of which have previously appeared as part of separate discs. Aho’s Solos share the characteristic that they pose great technical, interpretative and often also physical challenges to the performer. Most of those heard here are performed by the musicians for whom they were written, including Hiyoli Togawa (Solo XII), Piet Van Bockstal (Solo IX), Simon Reitmaier (Solo XIV) and Marie-Luise Neunecker (Solo X).

This twelfth release in the Toccata Classics exploration of the music of Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) once again puts his chamber music with flute in the spotlight – here with an oboe chaser. As with previous albums in this series, the music highlights the characteristics that make Farkas’ music so appealing: catchy tunes, transparent textures, buoyant rhythms, a fondness for Baroque forms and a taste for the folk-music of his native Hungary that marks him out as a true successor to Bartók and Kodály. The works in this recording are all reworkings – by Farkas or the two soloists here – of music first written for different forces and now taking on a new lease of life.

Written in his late teens: Flight, for solo flute, whose swooping crests and curlicues are fervently relished in Michael Cox's performance. Benjamin describes the piece as 'inspired by the sight of birds soaring and dipping over the peaks of the Swiss Alps'. Listening to the piece you'll hear a panoply of songs surfing the musical thermals in the alpine either: low, long-breathed cries and calls, filigree flocks of ornamentation in the atmospheric heights of the flute's register, a chorus of vapors conjured by a single instrument. Into The Little Hill is based on the Pied Piper story, allowing audiences an immediate entry point into the opera's dramaturgy. But Crimp's re-telling simultaneously updates the story, with its politicians, photographs, and limousines, and opens up further mythic dimensions to the narrative. The drama of Into the Little Hill is concisce, clear and simultaneously ambiguous, even chilling. Benjamin says, 'Martin's text is hard-edged, formal, and hyper-condensed'. The reason for its musical and dramatic success is Benjamin's unerring feeling for expressive characterisation. Each layer of Into the Little Hill's score is immediately identifiable, from the Crowd's baying cries of 'Kill them' rightat the start of the piece, to the rodentine scurrying of the rat's music, and the Mother's lamenting grief in the last scene. Dream of the Song is a mysteriously sensual and sensually strange song-cycle for countertenor, a halo of female voices that are similar in register, but so different in timbre and sound and expression, and orchestra. The counter-tenor sings poems, in English, by Jewish poets of 11th century Andalucia, themselves inspired by Arabic poetry of earlier centuries. There are images of ravishment and wonder here - moonlight, the celestial tent of the sky, a dream of a gazelle, a harp, a flute - but they are always undercut by other ideas. Above all, it's the gossamer rapier of Benjamin's music that cuts to the heart of these settings.

Throughout his lifetime, Antonio Vivaldi – a composer of many lyric operas – penned an enormous corpus of works encompassing countless concertos, sonatas, and sacred music. In his concertos and chamber sonatas, Vivaldi reveals his wonderful melodic talent with both deep and elegant allure. The concertos and the sonata of Antonio Vivaldi offered here are seldom performed and recorded. Recorder virtuoso Maria Giovanna Fiorentino leads I Fiori Musicali. “(IFM is) of Europe’s leading baroque ensembles.” (Journées Baroques sur Vienne)

How would have Bach composed if he had had access to modern instrumentarium: a violin with Tourte’s bow that produces a higher volume of sound, a trumpet with an entire chromatic scale or a contemporary grand piano? Would he be inspired by the art of virtuosos of today, such as the Leipzig ensemble of Collegium Musicum, as he was known to have composed for distinguished artists? Would he forgive pop or computer game composers for using his music? How would he judge changes in the key of pieces, which played a vital role in the intellectual and emotional rendition of music according to Baroque rules? Or else, would he adjust to the vibe of our epoch and make use of samples instead of real performers? In any case, he would definitely appreciate the interpretations by Jaroslaw Nadrzycki, Krzysztof Kaczka and L’Appasionata, a Verona-based chamber orchestra. The energy that these young musicians display while playing Bach’s pieces would certainly match the composer’s spirit. If we observe Bach’s portraits for which he would pose in a dignified wig as we listen to his grand music, we might think that Bach was a placid and serious man. Yet not once did his contemporaries have to cope with his fits of anger or turbulent character; on the contrary, he must have also been high-spirited and humorous, which we may deduce from his numerous pieces.

• Milan-born pianist, composer and conductor Giorgio Gaslini is a jazz musician of international fame, who to his credit has given more than 3,000 concerts, recorded 100 CD's and is a ten-time Critics Award winner. The flute works were composed between 1955 and 2011. Their performer and dedicatee is Roberto Fabbriciani, with whom Gaslini has had a long collaboration."