Completely forgotten today, Friedrich Schwindl (1737 - 1786) was a highly esteemed violinist and composer in his time. His name appears repeatedly in the writings of Leopold Mozart, Charles Burney, and Daniel Schubart, yet his biography can only be reconstructed in a very fragmentary way. Born in Amsterdam, the stages of his life can be traced along the Rhine, from the Netherlands to Switzerland. The focus of his work was instrumental music, especially symphonies, of which 31 survive. They are influenced by the compositions of the Mannheim School but have a more folk-like character. A fascinating discovery of music history, brought to life virtuously and authentically by the musicians of the L'Arte del Mondo orchestra under Werner Ehrhardt.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose present the world premiere recording of Lysistrata, or The Nude Goddess, an opera by Mark Adamo. Far removed from the fa-miliar outlines of Aristophanes' ancient comedy, this daring reimagining reshapes a ca-nonical text into something far more psychologically intricate and musically electrify-ing. Set within a richly variegated score of shifting textures and mercurial transformations, the opera unfolds as a labyrinth of mirrored themes - where melodies change alle-giance, identities blur, and every gesture carries double meaning. The familiar premise of women withholding intimacy to halt war becomes the starting point for a deeper ex-ploration of desire, power, and identity. Adamo's libretto dismantles classical certain-ties, replacing caricature with complexity, and recasts Lysistrata as a figure who must confront not only the politics of war, but the far more disquieting ambiguities of love itself. Under the leadership of conductor Gil Rose, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project has become an unsurpassed advocate for 20th and 21st century American music. Alongside Adamo, this marks their collective return to PENTATONE, following their GRAMMY-nominated recording of John Corigliano's The Lord of Cries (2023).

Antonio Stradivari's 1700 'ex Cristiani-Stauffer' cello, considered to be one of the master's finest works, was purchased by the Walter Stauffer Musicology Center in Cremona. It is now on display at the Violin Museum in Cremona. The history of this cello, though at times uncertain, suddenly becomes clear when it comes to Lisa Cristiani, a Parisian cellist who acquired the instrument, definitively linking her name to Stradivari and the cello. Lisa died very young in 1853 at just 26 years old, a fleeting star on the musical scene of her time: in just a few years, she enchanted audiences with her extraordinary cello. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy dedicated his Song Without Words, Op. 109, to her. But today, you can hear 'The Voice of Stradivari,' the voice of this precious cello, on this CD released by the Italian label MVcremona. The excellent performers are the cellist Giovanni Gnocchi, born in Cremona like Stradivari's cello, and the pianist Alessandro Stella. According to the renowned Italian critic Angelo Foletto, on this CD, 'Gnocchi exploits with loving interpretative skill and virtuosic ease every quality of the 18th-century 'Stauffer ex Cristiani' Stradivari cello, constructing a listening adventure of intriguing poetic subtlety and an intelligent assortment of accents.' SUONARE news, dicembre 2025 This cd includes some pieces written by cellist-composers themselves (Popper and Klengel). Other pieces were transcribed by famous concert performers and cello virtuosos of modern and contemporary times (Piatigorsky, Schiff, Isserlis). Others were dedicated by composers to their cellist friends, as in the case of Dvorak and Hanus Wihan, Liszt and Bernhard Cossmann, the living composer Ducros and Jerome Pernoo and Mendelssohn, who dedicated his Romances sans paroles op. 109 to Lisa Cristiani, then owner of this beautiful Stradivari. The final piece is an Italian masterpiece composed by Gioacchino Rossini: 'Une larme, theme et variations'. The combination of elegiac cantabile and explosive virtuosity encapsulates the characteristics that have inspired the musical choices in this CD. Rediscovered only in recent decades, it belongs to the Peches de vieillesse, the 'sins of old age' as Rossini called the many compositions he wrote in his later years and never published because, as he said, 'I do not publish anything; I only write because I cannot do anything else'. Composed in 1858, it offers the musician all the most typical elements of Rossini's genial style.

A listening experience entirely dedicated to the sounds of the viola, from classical to contemporary. This is the new album by Luca Sanzo, a musician with an intense concert, recording, and teaching career, and professor of viola at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. A frequent guest at important venues and prestigious chamber music, contemporary, and electronic music festivals, Luca Sanzo has dedicated many compositions to him. The album opens with Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013, performed in a G minor transcription; it is followed by another Bach work, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 for harpsichord, in the 1950 transcription for solo viola by Zoltan Kodaly, a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, and teacher. The first edition was edited by violist William Primrose, who also distributed it. This fascinating and intense sonic journey through different compositional worlds continues in chronological order with Gyorgy Ligeti's Sonata for Viola Solo, composed between 1991 and 1994, in six movements, alternating between slow and fast movements. The program concludes with Lucia Ronchetti's Requiem for Viola Solo (1982), now dedicated to Michele Sanzo, brother of Luca Sanzo. As Lucia Ronchetti explains: 'In the Requiem I tried to create a sonic labyrinth from which there seems to be no escape, making the performance a severe physical and mental test. In this sense, Beethoven's Great Fugue, Op. 133, seemed to me the most extreme and rigorous representation of a sonic prison and a search for liberation and elevation.'

The 12 Sonatas for mandolino and continuo by Francesco Weber represent one of the most interesting collections of compositions for the baroque mandolino that have come down to us. Despite his German surname clearly suggesting German ancestry, Francesco Weber, was an Italian lutenist / theorbist / mandolinist and composer, whose career was mainly in England. My research started from his will - drawn up in London under the name of John Francis Weber on April 13, 1745 - and proved several months after his death on June 5, 1751, in which the 'Republic of Genova' is often mentioned concerning assets and family properties. The 5-course mandolin used for this recording was built in Genoa in 1717 by Andrea Weber (1658-1740). It is the only surviving example by this maker, and one of the very few surviving Genoese baroque 'mandolinos.' It is an instrument recently discovered in a private collection, therefore completely unknown even to early mandolin experts, before this recording. An even more extraordinary aspect that distinguishes this disc is the fact that it represents a truly exceptional case - perhaps unprecedented at least in the field of early plucked string instruments - in which the music of a composer is recorded using an instrument built by his father.

Kraig Grady, an American based in Australia, is a microtonal composer. He explains it thus: 'Alternative tunings are a major inspiration for my compositional explorations. The pivotal point for me was meeting with tuning theorist Ervin Wilson and witnessing Harry Partch's U.S. Highball in 1975. I was convinced that working with different instruments and tunings was going to be a major artistic movement. I began studying tuning with Wilson which continued for as long as we knew each other. I'm interested in using acoustic instruments as sound sources to explore new acoustic phenomena that cannot be mistaken for electronic manipulation.' The starting point for the works on this CD was to record each performer playing individual notes in the given microtonal tuning with extreme pitch accuracy. The recordings are edited to capture the personal expressivity of the players and the individuality of their gestures in the recordings become inseparable from the composition process. These recordings of individual notes are then weaved together to form melodic lines and combined to build harmonies and shifting textures. Liner notes by Grady with illustrated samples.

Flores de Musica pera o instrumento de tecla & harpa is the only known work of Portuguese composer Manuel Rodrigues Coelho. Printed in Lisbon in 1620 and boasting more than five hundred pages, Coelho's Flores de Musica is one of the largest music works printed in the seventeenth century. Celebrating the 400th anniversary of it's original publication, a new edition in three volumes has been published with the research being used to inform this major new recording series. Organist and curator of the new edition Joao Vaz is joined by Capella Patriarchal and Cornetas & Sacabuxas de Lisboa to lend their artistry to this final chapter in an ambitious recording project.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for a century or more. This fourth volume presents his only symphony, a strikingly assured work for a composer in his late teens. Unsurprisingly, it owes a good deal to Schumann in it's dancing rhythms, heraldic bearing and orchestral colours - and the Scherzo might almost be by Mendelssohn on holiday in Poland. The 'Six Episodes' - charming, ingratiating and energising by turn - are all that remain of the lost full-length ballet Laurin. They were saved because Moszkowski excerpted them for concert performance, thereby creating a 'Dance Suite' in all but name.

Every new sound carries a shadow of what came before: on their new GENUIN album, the piano duo Ekaterina Zhemaitis and Polina Kulikova journey through the dialogue between memory and invention. At it's heart stands the world premiere recording of Rodion Shchedrin's 'Romantic Duets', alongside works that draw breath from tradition while reshaping it into strikingly individual musical languages - from Stravinsky to Taneyev. Performed by an internationally award-winning duo, the program unfolds with rare coherence, revealing hidden lines, lucid structures, and unexpected connections across time.

In 1776, during a spell in Italy early in his career, the Ukrainian composer Dmytro Bortniansky (1751-1825) wrote Creonte, an opera seria based on Sophocles' tragedy Antigone and poised, like early Mozart, on the cusp between Baroque and Classical styles. Although a success in it's day, Creonte then vanished for 250 years, until it was discovered by chance in a Portuguese library. It may have been hidden there because it's tale of love versus power ends with a surprising democratic twist - a daring move in those autocratic times. Since it is the first surviving opera by a Ukrainian composer, it's revival in Kyiv in 2024 became a gesture of defiance, a symbol of national importance underlining the continued vigour of Ukrainian culture even in wartime. This remarkable recording then followed, made in sessions between Russian bombing, black-outs and power cuts - itself a testimony to Ukrainian national resilience.

Martin Romberg's Symphony of Saints stands as a radiant homage to the Northern Saints - Columba, Aidan, and Cuthbert - whose lives shaped the spiritual fabric of early Northumbria. Written with a deep sense of reverence and vision, the symphony draws on Celtic Christian tradition, it's glowing orchestral textures evoking the austere beauty of the Holy Island of Iona. Commissioned and inspired by personal devotion, this album is completed by Romberg's Sacred Songs, written for soprano Joanne Lunn, setting luminous texts by Scottish poet Kenneth Steven. Lunn's artistry, together with the Orchestra of the Swan under Andrew Griffiths, brings to life a cycle of profound intimacy and timeless lyricism. This recording is not only a testament to friendship and faith but also to music's power to embody love everlasting.

Jimin Oh-Havenith dedicates this volume of her Schumann edition to his variations, which form the beginning, the core, and the conclusion of his unique piano oeuvre. In the fourth instalment of her widely acclaimed Schumann edition, Jimin Oh-Havenith turns to his works for piano in variation form. Three of the pieces recorded here occupy a singular place in Schumann's biography: both his first published composition, the Abegg Variations, and his final completed work, the so-called Ghost Variations, belong to this genre. The twelve Symphonic Etudes - situated chronologically at the heart of his piano output of the 1830s, long revered by pianists yet equally feared for their formidable technical demands - are likewise variations on a theme. Whereas the young Schumann, in the Abegg Variations, conjured a sparkling and virtuosic play on musical letters from the name of a Heidelberg acquaintance, the Ghost Variations unfold as a deeply moving dialogue between the gravely ill composer and his great models, Schubert and Mendelssohn Bartholdy. This extraordinary breadth of expression once again affords Jimin Oh-Havenith the opportunity to demonstrate the intensity and originality of her Schumann interpretation.

This recording is a small token of appreciation and a tribute to E.M. Timakin, my first teacher, who taught me how to play piano and helped to set the course of my musical journey that is still unfolding. He was very fond of Grieg's piano works and gave it to all of his young students to study. More than sixty years have passed since that time, but the experience of studying Grieg's Lyrical Pieces with him is still vivid in my grateful memory. For generations of young pianists Grieg's Lyric Pieces have been one of the first encounters with real music, alongside the works of Schumann and Tchaikovsky written for children. At the beginning of their training young musicians and children must dedicate plenty of time and efforts to the development and mastering of the basic technical skills such as playing scale, arpeggios and other exercises that do not carry real artistic values. Because of that the first encounters with real music are extremely important for children and could have a defining impact on their future development and growth. It is good fortune for many youngsters to be introduced to real music through these works of Grieg.

Bruce Heim was the Horn Professor at the University of Louisville from 1999-2021. He is an active recitalist, soloist, chamber musician, orchestral musician, and pedagogue. He has performed in Mexico, Venezuela, Poland, Belgium, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, and throughout the United States.

TYRANNIDE was conceived from the desire to explore the theme of cante jondo as a universal expressive archetype, not confined to the Spanish tradition but deeply rooted in human nature. It's primordial character - often expressed through the insistence of the semitone and microtonal inflections - becomes a symbol of the human condition, forced to confront suffering, death, and their inexorable musical reflection. A tyranny, indeed: that of a lament that does not belong to a single people or era, but which runs through the history of music, re-emerging in the form of appoggiaturas, suspended tensions, and melodic lines filled with longing. Cante jondo, originally connected with Andalusian flamenco, thus becomes, in the programme of this recording, a universal musical principle, capable of manifesting itself even in languages far removed from the Spanish tradition. The programme includes two works never previously recorded: Cantar de mio Cid by the French composer Jean-Dominique Krynen and the Concerto Trois Graphiques by Maurice Ohana in it's original arrangement for guitar and piano. Around these two central works unfolds a musical journey that places cante jondo in dialogue with different historical and stylistic contexts, revealing it's surprising expressive continuity.

While listening to the profoundly perceptive performance by the pianist Jurgis Karnavicius of the entire cycle of 20 etudes, we move together through a shimmering, gentle landscape of changing light: there is a special peace in his playing that does not mean stagnation; rather, it is a slow, deep process, similar to the movement of light through the space of a room when morning is just breaking. This music creates the impression that the pianist becomes a mediator between two silences - the silence that was before the first note, and the silence that will remain after it fades. Thus, the etudes here take on not only the form of sound, but also a slow, plastic movement that continues long after the hands lift from the keys. Some etudes fly with an inexorable driving force, their rhythms echoing human steps, heartbeats, a kind of internal engine. Others unfold like meditations, stretching time until it almost evaporates. A portrait of Philip Glass emerges, not just as a minimalist icon or a composer of large-scale works, but as an artist who understands the true value of simplicity, and invites us to listen with openness and wonder. And perhaps the etudes on this lovingly realised recording will become, for someone, that unforgettable, life-transforming encounter with Philip Glass's music. -Laura Karnaviciute

More than 60 composers have set Metastasio's libretto to music, including Caldara, Vivaldi, Hasse, Leo, Scarlatti, Piccinni, Paisiello, Cherubini and, of course, Pergolesi, who presented his Olimpiade at the Teatro Tordinona in Rome for the Carnival season of 1735. It was to be his last opera seria, as the composer died the very next year, just after he turned twenty-six. His version is considered by many to be the most inspired of all, characterised by a musical originality as ingenious as it is refined, brimming with joyful freshness. Following the rediscovery of the previously unpublished Mass in D major, Giulio Prandi and his Orchestra Ghislieri return to Pergolesi with a recording of his operatic masterpiece made in the 18th-century theatre of Jesi, his hometown: an initiative of the Pergolesi Spontini Foundation, which has been promoting the composer's legacy for many years.

Joseph Haydn not only liked surprising his audiences, he also enjoyed a laugh, writes Christian Moritz-Bauer in the introduction to this sixteenth volume of the Haydn2032 complete recording of the symphonies. Take, for instance, the false conclusion of Symphony No. 90, composed in 1788: the music seems to have reached the last chord but, after a pause, the movement resumes to end with a powerful coda. Another example of Haydn's mischievous wit is the famous Andante "with the drumstroke" that forms the "surprise" of Symphony No. 94, a fortissimo chord designed to wake up audiences who dozed off towards the end of his concerts. In this volume focused on humour, Giovanni Antonini pays tribute to a great admirer of Haydn, Gioachino Rossini, by recording the sparkling opening Sinfonia of La scala di seta (The Silken Ladder), a one-act opera written in 1812.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS proudly presents a landmark recording, the first commercial project to feature Joel Thompson's music exclusively, which brings together this ascendant composer and the Kansas City Symphony led by Michael Stern. The career of composer Joel Thompson has seen a meteoric rise since the premiere of his breakout choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed in 2015. Each of it's seven movements sets to music the last words of an unarmed Black man before he was killed. Joining them are some of the most important performers of today focused on the same crucial topics: cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and the Sphinx Organization's vocal ensemble Exigence, led by Eugene Rogers. This is powerful music of profound insight and uncompromising conviction, brought to life by the passion and artistry of eminently skilled collaborators.