Among the many recordings of The Matthew Passion, two have always stood out for their historical importance and for their diffusion - one conducted by Otto Klemperer for EMI and the other one, conducted by Eugen Jochum for Phillips. Urania is now proposing that the second, recorded in Amsterdam in 1965 with an extraordinary voice cast. This release is complete in all parts and has a fabulous sound for all listeners. The Bach by Jochum is vast, but not romantic - on the contrary - he puts the Passion under a light of sweetness and sorrow, without the harshness and coldness, typical of the recent interpretations. Urania has also added Bruckner's Te Deum, recorded in Monaco of Bravaria in 1954 by the same Jochum.

Rossini: La Cenerentola

The ensemble is composed by one or two recorders (or flutes), continuo, and other additional instruments with the common aim to focus on the repertoire of the flute (both soloist and in chamber formation) during the XVII and the XVIII Centuries. The musical philology and the original performing practice are essential for a real comprehension of the early and baroque music and it is the basis to put in touch this repertoire with the sensibility of nowadays, in a sort of ideal reconciliation between the spirit of “Les Anciens” and of “Les Modernes”. On this new release they present Couperin’s Les Concerts Royaux. The focus on the recorder in this interpretation sets this album aside from other recordings of this work.

The Great Live Concerts

Nabucco is an Italian opera in four acts, composed by Giuseppe Verdi in 1841. The work, featuring libretto by Ternistocle Solera, is based on biblical stories from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Jeremiah, as well as the play by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Cornue. This recording features the Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Roma della RAI, conducted by Fernando Previtali, as well as soloists Paolo Silveri, Mario Binci, and Caterina Mancini, among other talented vocalists.

In the corpus of recordings made by I Musici on behalf of Phillips, in the mid-sixties, it still counts the recording of Vivaldi's Op. No. 3 - L'Estro armonico. This is not the case to deepen the artistic element of the famous chamber music ensemble. Suffice it to say that despite the contributions of the executive philology, this traditional recording remains a landmark in the discography of Vivaldi, ever actual for the executive equilibrium, for the solo contributions and for its beauty in general.

POWER OF FATE

Tchaikovsky: The Masterworks

Conductors Profiles: Réne Leibowitz

The present release features the 1967 Decca recording of Bellni's Norma, with a stellar cast including Mario del Monaco and Elena Suliotis. The studio recordings of Norma are very few. Of great fame are essentially those starring Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, followed by the RCA edition sung by Montserrat Caball. Since then very few official publications have contributed to enrich the discography of this important work. One of the greatest interpreters of the role of Pollione was certainly Mario Del Monaco. His Decca version with Elena Suliotis as the protagonist is however very rare to find on the market as Decca, no one knows for what commercial choice, has almost never reprinted it. With this album, we make available this precious document that really fills a gap in the international opera discography.

Giovanni Battista Columbro and the Orchestra Barocca Di Cremona perform Corelli's 6 Concerti Grossi, Op. VI. The Opus number VI presents itself as the 'quintessenza di una ben altrimenti fluida e ricca prassi orchestrale' ('quintessential fluent and rich orchestral practice). On the wave of the transcriptions of opus VI, in this album the musicians employed wind instruments in addition to the strings. This choice is a filological one seeing that, after years of research it has been proved that in the Corellian orchestras there was a significant presence of wind instruments. In this version, the original tonalities have been maintained (which does not often happen in other transcriptions) and the original parts of the two solo violins have been assigned to two transverse flutes as it happened in the first decades of the XVIII Century.

With the exception of the Sonatina No. 25, long considered a minor work, this box set contains the last Piano Sonatas of the Titan of Bonn. In a recording landscape already rich in this repertoire, this release focuses entirely on the performances of Carlo Levi Minzi, who, in his artistic maturity, delivers his personal vision of these works: refined, meditative, exquisitely personal. In addition, the Klavierst�ck WoO 61a.

Among the few Brahmsian chamber pieces that also include wind instruments are the two Sonatas for clarinet and piano op. 120. In these works, however, there is an optionality between clarinet and viola, and in today's concert scene, it is almost more common to hear them in the viola than in the clarinet version. The 'Scherzo' from the F.A.E. Sonata was part of a Sonata for violin and piano composed as a collective homage to Joachim by Albert Dietrich (author of the first movement), Robert Schumann (Intermezzo and Finale) and Brahms (Scherzo). The abbreviation F. A. E. refers to Joachim's personal motto frei, aber einsam (free, but alone), but also corresponds to three musical notes and the motif thus derived is naturally used as a theme in various parts of the Sonata.

This box set concludes the recording of all 18 String Quartets by Gaetano Donizetti, who loved these works as if they were his own children. The Mitja Quartet is the first Italian ensemble to have recorded these works in their entirety.

The music that celebrates the agony of Romanticism, lives on a mysticism whose traces our materialism has rendered legendary. Around the artists of Art Nouveau (Liberty), is a proliferation of esoteric movements, in search of that link between soul and cosmic forces, which, in music, becomes sound.

The name of Father Vallotti, a Conventual Franciscan, esteemed musician and valuable teacher, is still known nowadays particularly for his speculative works. He was considered by Bonifazio Asioli, "the greatest of the Italian harmonists", and his appointment at the Berlin court confirms he was appreciated not only in his homeland. His harmonic knowledge and uncommon compositional virtue have given us pages of rare elegance where the liturgical and sacred aspect is distilled in every chord.

Giordani's activity was indeed fashionable, having success both with operas and with instrumental music. The composition of these flute concertos dates back to an unspecified period of the 18th century, but their structure is unquestionably within the golden classical principles of the sonata form, allowing us to place them temporally between 1765 and 1775. The concertos offer the listener a realistic glimpse of the flute technique of the time that would soon see the Romantic Era blossom. In this recording, the instrument used is a copy of a mid-eighteenth-century C. Palanca, with a diapason of about 420 hz.

The manuscript Ms XIV 8751 H.1 came to the Library of the Civico Istituto Musicale Gaetano Donizetti in 1916. It consists of 92 pages entirely in the hand of William Babell, who was Handel's principal copyist from c.1711 until his death in 1723. While none of the movements in this volume is attributed to any composer, internal evidence indicates that most, if not all of the music, was composed by or adapted from George Frideric Handel. If so, this volume represents the most important addition to the corpus of Handel's keyboard works since the publication of the Aylesford manuscripts in 1928.

The series devoted to Vladimir Delman continues with this second album: in the first one Mahler's Symphony No. 9 in D Major; here, by the same composer and in the same key, the Symphony No. 1.

Those who have been following the discography of the Milan Symphony Archive for years will know that Atalanta Fugiens has already released three discs dedicated to the music of Brioschi. That will be the subject of a future re-release by Urania; this album, on the other hand, contains previously unrecorded pieces and is the natural continuation of a work of rediscovery undertaken years ago.

Mjaskovsky and Shostakovich: two giants of the music of the XX Century, two survivors from the stalinism. In their own works they both use technique to triumph over the heaviness of evil: the art of continuous modification, to annihilate the eternal present of violence. These two superb Sonatas are songs of captivity and, together, anthems of resurgence.

In Mosaici di Piazza Armerina, Semini takes up the cloistered music by Respighi with Vetrate di chiesa. The evocation of the figures in coloured pieces is translated into a use of continuously overlapping motifs, which creates a rotating, cyclical effect and alludes to the eternity of art, perpetually capable of dying only to rise again. On his side, Hindemith created 'music of use': art from workshop and craft, bound to live beyond the romantic myth of transcendental inspiration.

Old Russian folk melodies; the traits of human life (joy, love, illness, poverty, death, religion); a high aesthetic-musical realism as a compositional commitment. These are the ingredients in Musorgsky's Lieder, already appreciated by Liszt and Debussy, and now available in this box set.

I always considered Karl Weigl as one of the best composers of the old school; one of those who continued the glittering Viennese tradition. He truly preserves this old culture of musical spirit which represents the best of Viennese culture.

Georg Philipp Telemann belongs to the auroral phases of the Enlightenment, a musician with an inexhaustible and perhaps unparalleled creative vein in terms of the breadth of his catalogue. Johann Michael Bohm was skilled in the violin as well as the flute and oboe; Johann Friedrich Fasch was a very industrious music craftsman, although reluctant to publish his own work, which appeared posthumously. The embarrassment that seizes some commentators is due primarily to little familiarity with the music included in this album, informed by a sound "individualism" and a systematic spirit, yes, but still little inclined to the rigid regularities that perhaps only the late-Romantic school imposed on the view of music.