Musici: a real legend in the history of classical disco, in Sixties and Seventies of twentieth century of the rediscovery of the great eighteenth century Italian instrumental repertoire that was too long neglected and put in a second plan than one of German-Austrian origin. This release presents one of the greatest classical works of the eighteenth century- the famous Albinoni Adagio in F minor recorded by Musici in 1961 with three incredible violin Concertos by Pletro Antonio Locatelli the most important predecessor of Paganini’s Italian virtuosity.

The five-part writing for strings has its period of greatest development in the 16th and 17th centuries, only to fall into a progressive obsolescence. The most commonly used instrumental ensemble included two violins, alto and tenor viola da braccio, cello and basso continuo. Of this quintet, the instrument that undergoes a progressive dismissal is the viola tenore, which in this recording we propose in its original late seventeenth century mounting.

ALBINONI: 8 CONCERTOS PETRI,

Classical Music

Classical Music

Recorded in: All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London 6, 8 & 9 January 1996 Producer(s) Nicholas Anderson Sound Engineer(s) Ben Connellan Jonathan Cooper (Assistant) Richard Smoker (Assistant)

Recorded in: All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London 8-9 January 1996 & 9-11 July 1996 Producer(s) Nicholas Anderson Sound Engineer(s) Ben Connellan Jonathan Cooper (Assistant) Richard Smoker (Assistant)

ALBINONI: Oboe Concertos, Vol. 1

ALBINONI: Oboe Concertos, Vol. 3

Classical Music

ALBINONI: Oboe Concertos, Vol. 2

Classical Music

During Albinoni’s lifetime (1671-1751) four separate collections of sonatas with violin were published under his name, though only the Trattenimenti armonici Op.6 were prepared by their composer. The works in Op.6 have accordingly dominated the record catalogues and obscured the virtues of the others, which Federico Guglielmo presents here with his customary flair and feeling for the Italian Baroque which has previously yielded the much-praised Brilliant Classics collection of Vivaldi’s Opp 1-12 (95200) as well as the Op.1 Trio Sonatas (94789) by Albinoni himself. In common with Venetian contemporaries such as the Marcellos, Albinoni observed the conventions of post-Corellian sonata form: four movements configured Slow–Fast–Slow–Fast, where the first pair is more formal (dignified) in character and the second pair more informal (expressive). However, in vocal and instrumental music alike, Albinoni’s style was highly individual, even slightly idiosyncratic: dignified, wary of technical or expressive excess and very attentive to the cantabile side of violin-playing. The sonatas here are drawn from the six Sonate da chiesa issued by the Amsterdam publisher Estienne Roger in 1707 or 1708; Roger’s later collection of five Sonate a violino solo composed for the virtuoso Pisendel and augmented by a sonata by a Giovanni Battista Tibaldi; and then the six Sonates da camera brought out in 1742 by the Parisian engraver and music publisher Louis Hue. Both dates and even authorship of some of these sonatas remains uncertain, but only the third of the Sonate a violino solo has been omitted from this new recording as authoritatively attributed to the German-born composer Nicolas Pepusch. This recording is thoroughly illuminated by a new booklet essay from Michael Talbot, pre-eminent scholar of music in 18th-century Venice, and demands the attention of all Baroque-music collectors.

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Valentine Michaud was the first ever saxophone soloist to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic. She and her regular collaborator, pianist Akvilé Silekaité, comprise the award-winning AKMI Duo. They debut on AVIE with Beyond the Wall, an album of contrasting 20th century sonatas linked by history and geography. Edison Denisov’s Soviet serialism, tinged with forbidden jazz influences, took a cue from the American modernism of William Albright. Austro-Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff embraced avant garde and jazz idioms, leading the Nazis to brand his music “degenerate”; he perished in the Wülzburg prison camp in 1942. Paul Hindemith fell in and out of favour with the Nazis, leading him to immigrate to Switzerland and later America. His popular Saxophone Sonata is by turns lyric and dramatic, imbued with irony and humour.

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A Gramophone TOP CHOICE' 'Dickinson has made Satie's music a centrepoint of his repertoire, and his thoughtfull approach to this highly rewarding music is all his own. His variety of articulation and colour is fully at the service of the composer.

For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, a project which Robert described as ‘a record of our wishes and our hopes, and the means whereby we may convey to one another any requests we may have to make, for which words may not suffice...’ In the imaginative recital Album für die Frau, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton combine songs by both composers into something similar – the depiction of a relationship seen through the eyes of both parties. Using the eight songs from Robert’s song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben to poems by Adalbert von Chamisso as the framework, they add songs as well as some piano solos in order to create a fuller and more complex picture. The result seems to suggest that the experiences of our ‘Frau’ are richer than Chamisso and Robert Schumann imagined: while love, marriage and motherhood dominated much of Clara Schumann’s life, Robert’s death in 1856 signaled the start of a four-decade widowhood during which she resumed her stellar career as a pianist. As a team, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have released a number of acclaimed discs, including ‘Fleurs’, featuring flower-themed songs by composers from Purcell to Richard Strauss and Britten, ‘A Verlaine Songbook’, exploring settings of the poetry of Paul Verlaine, and ‘A Soprano’s Schubertiade’, a Schubert anthology.

REVIEW:

Amid formidable recorded competition, Sampson is close to the top of the Frauenliebe pantheon. It is high time Joseph Middleton made an album of solo Schumann piano music.

– Gramophone

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Alchemia Garden: the album's wonderful title, creates an enchanting, ambiguous effect. Lucas Niggli relates the organic, biological and growing, which develops on it's own and is cultivated and maintained in the form of the garden, to the metamorphosis of material, the scientific search for something unknown which historically has been seen to generate something new. During his thirty years of playing live Lucas Niggli recorded with many musicians like Aly Kei�ta, Barry Guy, Sylvie Courvoisier, Luciano Biondini, Michel Godard, Andreas Schaerer, Nils Wogram, Elliott Sharp, Steamboat Switzerland, Erika Stucky. He has occasionally given solo concerts, for example a performance at the big John Cage Festival in Switzerland in the late 1980s at which Cage himself witnessed Niggli's performance of 27' 10.554" for a Percussionist. It is time, in the best sense, for Lucas Niggli to release a solo album. What a great way to celebrate one's own 50th birthday - with this gift to himself and the listener. New York critic Laurence Donohue-Greene writes in the liner notes: "as a drummer blessed with a percussionist's intuitive sense and virtuosic capability and range, Niggli's memorable solo performances here unquestionably add to the tradition of the great solo drummers who preceded him while keeping an eye on the horizon."

Contemporary American music for wind band is among the most varied, colorful and brilliant to be heard anywhere, not least when performed by one of the genre’s leading young ensembles. Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Schwantner is represented by his evocative concerto “Luminosity.” David Maslanka has helped to reshape the wind band sound and “Hosannas,” some of which are based on chorale melodies, are full of moments of self-reflection. These qualities of quiet and timelessness are shared by the first movement of Steven Bryant’s “Alchemy in Silent Spaces.”

ALCHEMY

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

Like alchemists of old, attempting to recombine the four elements, here Fábio Brum presents four distinct musical languages in a program forged during lockdown. Gabriele Roberto’s Tokyo Suite charts the astonishment of a traveler dazzled by the vast megapolis, whereas Dimitri Cervo’s The Brazilian Four Seasons offers a colorful, energetic panorama of the natural and human worlds. Fábio Brum’s very personal musical journey is highlighted by the contrast between the Talmudic contemplation of Menachem Zur’s De Profundis and the abstract ruminations of Nicola Tescari’s Trumpet Concerto ‘Nine Moods.’

Aldre svenska strakkvartetter (Memorable Swedish String Quar

This CD recording is part of the Henry Aldrich Choral Project, an ongoing research project to bring original choral works by Henry Aldrich to a wider audience through the creation of modern performing editions and CD recordings. Edited by Dean Jobin-Bevans, Professor of Music at Lakehead University, Canada, the collection includes verse and full anthems, choral arrangements, recompositions, and occasional music. Each of the choral scores has been edited to include standardized barring and time signatures, modern vocal clefs, organ reductions, and instrumental parts for accompaniment.

Set just before World War I, Sinclair Lewis�s incendiary novel Elmer Gantry tells a story of old-time religion, illicit romance and revenge. Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein�s operatic adaptation is a �marvelous amalgam of toe-tapping accessibility� (Opera News) full of hymns, gospel songs, marches and dance, evoking the period in a score which echoes Gershwin and Copland. This all-American production combines a first-rate cast of singers and a world-class orchestra for an intoxicating experience.

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

Described by Opera News as “an important addition to the American operatic canon,” Sister Carrie takes as its themes the lure of money and social standing. Robert Aldridge’s inventive score is richly melodic and unapologetically tonal. Herschel Garfein’s libretto is based on Theodore Dreiser’s groundbreaking 1900 novel, which depicts a small-town girl’s tortuous path to fame and her lover’s abject descent into despair. Aldridge and Garfein’s Elmer Gantry was a two-time Grammy Award winner. Here, the lead roles are played by Mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala, baritone Keith Phares, tenor Matt Morgan, and soprano Alisa Suzanne Jordheim.

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REVIEW:

Robert Aldrige’s Sister Carrie is obviously one of the most important additions to America’s present day operatic repertoire. The music is purely tonal and traditionally consists of solo arias, duets and ensembles, it general tenure remaining in the world of mainstream popular opera. Based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser, the plot, too complex to detail here, examines the need for women in the early 20th-Century to use anything — sexual attractions being a good starting point — if they want to climb the social scale, not concerning themselves too much who they hurt on the way up.

In the part of Carrie, the American mezzo Adriana Zabala sings with a dramatic intensity that is ideal for this ‘nothing will stop me’ girl. Keith Phares, as the ill-fated Hurstwood, has a warm baritone voice, and his two joined arias as the central point in the second act are deeply moving. As a foil the light tenor of Matt Morgan makes an ideal Charlie Drouet, who has the good fortune of escaping her clutches. In the cameo role of the socialite, Mrs. Vance, Ariana Douglas, is outstanding, with Alisa Suzzane Jordheim as a vibrant actress, Lola Sterling. Presumably recorded ‘live’ at the opera’s premiere in Milwaukee last October, the balance between singers and orchestra is very well handled, the recording creating an effect of a small venue. There are no stage noises, and thankfully no audience applause during or at the end of acts.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

This album features three works by distinguished composer Alec Roth, each setting poetry on themes of nature and human reflection. A Road Less Travelled is a cantata for tenor and guitar using poems by Edward Thomas, written before his death in 1917. The Garden Path is a cycle for mezzo-soprano and string quartet setting poems by Amy Lowell, many inspired by her garden. Other Earths and Skies sets Vikram Seth's translations of LI Bai's poems for tenor and oboe. Performers include Mark Padmore, Morgan Szymanski, Martha McLorinan, the Sacconi Quartet, Hugo Hymas, and Nicholas Daniel.