Der Musikalische Garten's second recording "A Visit to the Blue House: Trio Sonatas" continues their exploration of the collection of 18th century Basel merchant Lucas Sarasin. Building on the strengths of their debut with the uncommon scordatura tuning, the depth of Lucas Sarasin's music collection is further revealed with these trio sonatas that showcase the breadth of composers working in southwestern Germany and northern Italy, the two centers of instrumental chamber music of the day. The 'Blue House' of the title references Sarasin's home which doubled as a salon and performance space and this recording allows us indeed a visit to eavesdrop during a fertile time of transition that bridged the Baroque and Classical eras.

Antonio Vivaldi's bassoon concertos convince not only with their astonishingly authentic composition, but also with their almost inexhaustible ingenuity and their extraordinary musical quality. On her second release for Ars Produktion, featuring bassoon concertos by the Venetian composer, Miho Fukui also plays works in which the oboe takes part as well. Miho Fukui was born in Japan. After receiving her degree in Tokyo, she went on to study in Frankfurt and Lubeck. She plays regularly in several different orchestras and ensembles in Switzerland, Japan, and Germany, where she performs on both the modern and baroque bassoon. In 2009 she founded the “Ensemble F,” which is dedicated to Vivaldi’s 39 bassoon concertos.

Program music refers to music explicitly created to evoke a mood or circumstance, or to illuminate occurrences in nature or acts of humanity and while arguably the form was most predominant during the Romantic era, program music has a long history beginning with the madrigals of the Renaissance. On this record Susanne Branny and the Dresdner Kapellsolisten (Dresden Chapel Soloists) presents two different approaches to program music from the Baroque era with perhaps the quintessential example of Vivaldi's Four Seasons along with a lively version of Telemann's Don Quichotte Suite.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Alfredo Casella was born in Turin in 1883. His exceptional musical talent was discovered early on and supported by the composers Giuseppe Martucci and Giovanni Sgambati. On the advice of Martucci, the thirteen-year-old was sent to Paris, where he took piano and composition lessons from Gabriel Faure, among others. Casella stayed in Paris for nearly twenty years and began to write his first major works there, including his first and second symphonies, which show the stylistic influence of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Casella was among the first to recognize the significance of Mahler's oeuvre and introduced his works to French audiences. He was a friend of Ravel, with whom he collaborated between 1911 and 1913, on the composition of a series of pastiches entitled ''A la maniere de...'' - piano miniatures that demonstrated his ability to cover a wide variety of styles with ease. Fabrizio Ventura was born in Rome. After appointments as general music director of the South Thuringian State Theatre in Meiningen and the Istanbul Opera, he became general music director of Munster in 2007. He has conducted opera productions for the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Royal Opera, for the Vienna Volksoper, the Prague State Opera, the Rome Opera, the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, the Arena di Verona, the Nice Opera and Opera Australia in Sydney.

A program combining the musical traditions of Western Europe and Ukraine. The first part presents two composers, whose work is rooted in the classical traditions: Levko Revutsky and Viktor Kosenko. The remaining three, Kolessa as well as Igor and Juri Shamo, strove to draw on a greater number of folkloristic motifs. It was the piece Carpathian Fantasy by Juri Schamo, which gave her the idea to this program, because the work itself stands for the combination of musical traditions.

The selection of works on this recording is intended to provide no more than a brief introduction to and not a comprehensive overview of this late 20th c. period.The repertoire is too broad and too multi-faceted to be presented here in all its diversity, so the selection was limited to works for ‘normal’ flute, played by the Netherlands-born Mirjam Nastasi, a noted contemporary music specialist and also transverse flautist, who recorded the series’ preceding four volumes.All volumes present a broad spectrum of both well-known and rarely-heard, as well as entertaining and demanding pieces.

The award-winning Ensemble L'Ornamento comes from the Basel area. The four founding members are bound together by a common chamber music path and a sound forged in many years of collaboration that makes this ensemble so distinctive. The young musicians have already played more than 200 concerts in many parts of Europe. On their debut album they present chamber music by three of the most important German composer of the late Baroque. An ensemble to remember!

On their second album of this series, Ensemble Esperanza is looking south. Just as on their debut album, Nordic Suites, Ensemble Esperanza has selected dance-like pieces, this time from the highly variegated musical landscapes of Southern Europe. Although only one of the works is in the form of a traditional dance suite, all four move with a swaying motion. The works on this recording date from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. All four are highly individualistic in character and share a quest for essence and for the sublime, with a formal clarity and lucidity inspired by the great model of Classical Antiquity, which first gave rise to this vast cultural landscape. The warmth of the underlying sentiment allows the pieces to align with their own luminous ideal of Mediterranean beauty. Ensemble Esperanza was founded in 2015 as part of the integral musical education programme of the International Academy of Music in Lichtenstein. With the exception of the concert master, the ensemble is made up of grantees of the International Academy of Music who are coming together for their musical projects from all over the world.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

When Kamilla Schatz plays the violin, she becomes one with her instrument; she revels and sings”- with these words the Berliner Togesspiegel hailed the debut of Swiss violinist Kamilla Schatz at Berlin’s Philharmonie Concert Hall. Since then, she has appeared as a soloist with the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande, the SWR Symphony Orchestra Freiburg/Baden-Baden, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and the Basel Symphony Orchestra. She performed as a chamber musician at the Berliner Festwochen, and the Lucerne Festival. Since 2017 she has been the artistic director of the ‘Laudinella’ Cultural Centre in St. Moritz. She is joined here by pianist Benjamin Engeli, one of the most versatile musicians of his generation. His career as a soloist and chamber musician has taken him to venues across the world, and he has performed with such orchestras as the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. Here they present Violin Sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven as well as his variations on ‘Se Vuol Ballare’ from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Up until recently, the little tip of the Sergei Lyapunov (1859-1924) iceberg that emerged, in particular of his piano music (some forty opuses), was represented by three or four Transcendental Etudes. Since then, a few emboldened pianists have given in to curiosity and become attached to music that is fascinating, its qualities repaying them a hundredfold for all the effort that it may cost them. And the music lover is beginning to follow, quite astonished that these treasures could have been hidden from him for so long. Let yourself be surprised by Florian Noack on ARS PRODUKTION.

Today Camille SaintSaëns is classified as a conservative classicist by many people. By his contemporaries he was considered as a musical revolutionary who demanded "dreams of the future" his audience. His oratorio Le Déluge courted the pope's resentment; he criticized it as too secular. It certainly is a significant contribution to the French Oratorio, whose composer is finally rediscovered as one of the great personalities in the history of music.

It was not so much the hunger for self-education and thirst for knowledge about past eras, distant lands and their customs which were the reason for corresponding themes and locations in Romantic opera, but more a type of escapism from the all too mundane and oppressive aspects of everyday life. The overtures in particular provided plenty of space for vivid imagination, as their purpose was to direct the fantasy of the listener in a particular direction without having to focus specifically on the concrete rigidities of the plot as subsequently depicted on the opera stage. The Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen under the direction of Ola Rudner present a selection of lesser known examples of Romantic overtures on this recording.

Antonio Rosetti was born around 1750 in Litomerice, a town in Northern Bohemia, and was originally called Franz Anton Rösler. In 1773 he left this native country and joined the Hofkapelle of Prince von Oettingen-Wallerstein, whom he served for sixteen years. With the retirement of Joseph Reicha in 1785, Rosetti rose to the position of Kapellmeister of Fürstlichen Kapelle and stayed there until 1789, before becoming Kapellmeister to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1789. Rosetti wrote a great deal of music, including symphonies, concertos and vocal works. He is perhaps best known today for his horn concertos, which Mozart scholar H. C. Robbins Landon suggests may have been a model for Mozart's four horn concerti. Horace Fitzpatrick writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: 'Rosetti's contemporaries ranked him with Haydn and Mozart'. Rosetti is also known for the Requiem (1776) which was played at a memorial service for Mozart in Prague in December 1791 (the work was originally written as Requiem on the death of the Mrs. Krafft-Ernst in Oettingen-Wallerstein in 1776). This recording presents this work as world premiere recording accompanied by smaller sacred works and the symphony Murray A23.