The Antegnatis were a family of organ builders who produced some of the best-known instruments of the 16th century, many of which can be found in churches across northern Italy. In total, they constructed an estimated 400 organs. Costanzo Antegnati was perhaps the most influential member of the family, and his set of 12 ricercars – the centrepiece of this recording – was published alongside his treatise on organ tuning and registration. The compositions were of such high quality and popularity that they were subsequently included in the Intavolatura d’organo tedesca, the most extensive manuscript source of keyboard works known today, containing a good 1,770 pieces by composers from Italy and Northern Europe. Interwoven between Antegnati's pieces are works by other composers of the same period. Notable among these is Anton Holzer's three canzoni, of which this is the first complete recording, and Agostino Soderini's Canzon La Ducalina, a fascinating short piece in which the keyboard writing closely follows the pronunciation of a virtual text and at times sounds like poetry being recited. Federico Del Sordo is a renowned continuo player who has devoted himself for more than 15 years to the study of the alternatim repertoire. For this recording, he performs primarily on a 17th-century organ installed in a Brescia church by Graziadio Antegnati III; variety is added to the set by the inclusion of harpsichord and clavichord performances.

This release is the final installment of the Schubert Complete String Quartet cycle. The entire series has proved to be an outstanding achievement by the German Diogenes Quartet. A centerstone of this album is the G major quartet, which was Schubert’s final quartet, and one of the finest ever written. The Diogenes Quartet was founded in 1998, when four musicians came together to dedicate themselves to chamber music. The ensemble is consistently praised for their commitment and interpretive playing.

Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) was a German composer and arguably the master lutenist of the 18th century. In addition to being one of the greatest players of all time, he was one of the most important and most prolific composers of lute music in history. He wrote around 600 pieces for lute, most of them grouped into ‘sonatas’ (not to be confused with the later classical sonata, based on sonata form) or suites, consisting mostly of Baroque dance movements. This recital features some of Weiss’s sonatas (he called them ‘Suonate’) for solo lute. They have come down to us in a variety of tablature manuscripts, and many are missing their preludes, which were usually improvised. Weiss’s music is characterised by a unique understanding of the capabilities of his instrument, its strengths and its weaknesses. Like J.S. Bach’s, his music represents the culmination of a high Baroque style a little at odds with the more progressive aspirations of his younger contemporaries. The cantabile style of playing heard in these marvellous performances is directly inspired by the instrument, a lute-harpsichord built for Mr. Rübsam in 2015 by the acclaimed American instrument-maker Keith Hill. It consists of one manual with one set of gut strings at eight-foot pitch, and two sets of jacks which pluck the strings in two different places. One, positioned farther from the nut, produces a flutey sound, and the other, closer to the nut, produces a more nasal timbre. A second set of strings, made of brass at four-foot pitch, produces a halo-effect by resonating with the eight-foot register played by the performer. It gives the rather dry sound of the gut strings a much more singing quality of tone.

Izhar Elias has produced several successful and imaginative albums for Brilliant Classics. None of them have confirmed to a ‘Spanish guitar’ stereotype but all have engaged in various original ways with the developing heritage of the instrument during the 19th century, from ‘Paisiello in Vienna’ (BC95301) to ‘Beethoven and the Guitar’ (BC94631) to Giuliani’s astonishing transcription of Rossini’s grand tragedy Semiramide (BC93902). His latest recording brings the classical guitar up to date with works by composers from four different countries; within them may be heard influences from classical music, avant-garde, Caribbean music, Spanish folklore, flamenco, Arabic music, blues, Argentinean tango and even trip-hop and heavy metal: provocative testament to the world’s most versatile instrument. The Guernica Suite by Pujol (b.1959) focuses on different aspects of Picasso’s painting in six movements, with a tentatively positive conclusion. The Triptych of Roberto Sierra (b.1953) evokes some nocturnal sounds from his native Puerto Rico, including the tropical tree frog as well as a night on the tiles. The three Danzas Concertantes pulse and glide with the rhythms of Leo Brouwer’s native Cuba, offset by some astringent harmonies that place the guitar’s usual role as purveyor of folkloristic colour under threat. Finally there is the Schattenspiel Suite by Florian Magnus Maier (b.1973), who also plays electric Moog guitar on this recording. Maier pursues a diverse career as a composer, guitarist and vocalist with bands including Alkaloid, Dark Fortress and Noneuclid; this tripartite suite inspired by shadows is his best-known work in the classical tradition, and for this recording he has made a new arrangement for two guitars and string quartet. There is something for everyone on this album: it’s essential listening for guitar-music enthusiasts who want to broaden their horizons.

A veritable tour de force: the arrangement of Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons and Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata for violin solo! Violinist and arranger Mauro Tortorelli about this unique project: “This recording is not only a challenge in terms of performance (playing both the solo part and the orchestral part at the same time), but also in terms of arrangement. Having to simulate all the orchestral timbres, the various voices in counterpoint, the sound contrasts on only four strings of the violin was not at all easy. Paganini's ingenious technique of double trills and left-handed pizzicati (used for the second movement of L’Inverno and the second movement of L’Estate), Bartok's pizzicato (for the rifle shots in the last movement of L’Autunno) and the formidable bow technique used by Henryk Szeryng, handed down to me by his pupil Georg Monch, have certainly suggested the best instrumental solutions to obtain the clearest possible clarity of execution between the various voices of a complex piece, enabling me to overcome the obstacles that the original scores presented me with. The decision to transcribe for solo violin these two famous works was also inspired by their great melodic power. In fact, every time I studied both pieces to perform them in public in the original formation, I had the feeling that they were already functional without accompaniment. As I am not a "Baroque" violinist, I preferred to perform the pieces with current technique and interpretation, respecting as much as possible the score revised by Gian Francesco Malipiero for Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and the manuscript score of Giuseppe Tartini's "Devil's Trill", adding my own Cadenza. “ Mauro Tortorelli already successfully recorded for Brilliant Classics violin sonatas by Saint-Saëns, Scalero, Milhaud, Ševcik/Auer and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

When the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals revived the solo suites of Bach in the first decades of the last century, he reminded both audiences and composers of the huge potential of his instrument to hold the stage in its own right, no less than a violin or a piano. Inspired by his charisma, and that of his successors such as Tortelier and Rostropovich, many modern composers have followed Bach’s example. The Italian cellist presents music by ten of them on this exciting debut album for Brilliant Classics. Tortelier and Rostropovich are represented by their own, little-known but highly imaginative works – a Circus Suite and an innocently titled but fearsomely challenging study respectively. Carter Brey, the principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, has also written for the instrument with inside knowledge, in a tango of big, seductive gestures preceded on Tarantino’s album by Latin-themed showpieces from Albeniz, Piazzolla and Rogerio y Taguell. Each half of the album is brought to a reflective close with a soliloquy by the modern Italian composer Giovanni Sollima. The cello’s melancholy moods are further explored by Ilse de Ziah and Sebastian Diezig, but Tarantino has chosen and ordered his repertoire to display the cello’s expressive range to its fullest. Mixing familiar and little-known composers, it’s a perfect introduction to the ever-expanding universe of solo cello music beyond Bach. Born in 1977, Luciano Tarantino is a performer and teacher with his origins in Puglia, in the far south of Italy. He has played with many of today’s greatest conductors and founded a music festival in the region of his birth. On this recording he plays a fine 1736 cello by Antonio Testore.

During his lifetime Dmitri Kabalevsky was considered by the authorities to be one of the top 5 composers of Russia, on a par with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He was praised for his formalism, general popular style and patriotism. He was not a revolutionary, and this caused his fame to decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His music however has a strong identity, vigorous, alternating power with lyricism, and rooted in the rich folklore of Russia. This new recording contains his effervescent 3rd Piano Sonata and the complete 24 Preludes, Op. 38, written during World War II, each based on a Russian folk song, presenting a wide variety of moods, from the pensive melancholy to fiery passion. Played by the highly talented young Italian pianist Pietro Bonfilio, who expresses his love for the Russian culture with this beautiful recording.

Giuseppe Rosetta (1901-1985) studied in Rome under Respighi but soon returned to his Piedmontese birthplace of Vercelli. There he remained, leading and enriching the local musical culture as an organist, choir conductor and music teacher. He spurned fame and dedicated himself to his vocation and to God. His beautifully crafted music is accordingly modest in expressive ambition: elegant, reflective, at times melancholic, generally characterized by introspective, meditative qualities – nothing brilliant or demonstrative. Very little of it has been recorded, making this new album a valuable contribution to a wider appreciation of postwar Italian music. Rosetta taught composition to Angelo Gilardino, who eventually encouraged him to write guitar music, resulting in the Preludi per GIlardino of 1970. These are beautifully and idiomatically written for the instrument after close consultation with the guitarist. Also from 1970, the Canti della Pianura (Songs of the Plain) is a personal evocation of the countryside of the Po Valley where Rosetta lived and worked. The four movements correspond to times of day: the dawn (Mattutino), the afternoon (Meridiana), the evening (Vespertina) and the night (Serenata). The Fantasia dates from 1979, but Rosetta’s conservative idiom recalls the language of his teacher Respighi and contemporaries such as Casella and Pizzetti: he wrote out of time, vividly evoking a lost era of Romanticism on an instrument that sings naturally of nostalgia and regret. As a student of Gilardino, Gian Luca Barbero has become intimately familiar with the private musical world of Giuseppe Rosetta, and is himself a guitar teacher of renown in Italy. The present release marks his debut on Brilliant Classics within the label’s ever-growing library of guitar music.