Beloved songs by Stanislaw Moniuszko are presented here in a striking new sound world, inspired by the tradition of 19th-century home music-making, where the piano gives way to plucked instruments-lutes and guitars. This bold artistic vision is further enriched by masterful spoken interpretations of poetry by writers close to the composer, delivered by acclaimed actor Krzysztof Gosztyla. Two contrasting vocal voices-a light, luminous female timbre and a strong, resonant male voice-come together to tell a story in which wit and humor intertwine with moments of tender, nostalgic reflection.

In June 2026, Metier Records is proud to present "Infrastructure: The Songs of David Sisco" from the award-winning US composer, featuring over 25 years of his output of art song, performed by pianist David Fung, singers Laura Strickling, Elizabeth Mondragon, Michael Kelly, and David Sisco himself. The album mixes beautiful and thought-provoking settings of both contemporary and historic poetry with entertaining and often touching song cycles based on online posts and reviews, unusual inspirations for art song. David Sisco believes one way the genre can continue to thrive and engage with today's audiences is through the use of contemporary texts, whether by living poets such as the three he has collaborated with here, or from the myriad virtual town halls one encounters on a daily basis. Song cycle Italianate captures the wit and tenderness of his friend Linda Dini Jenkins' poetry about her travels in Italy, and is performed by the "mesmerizing" baritone Michael Kelly, who premiered the cycle in 2014 at Carnegie Hall. Infrastructure by Barbara Worton is performed by the composer himself and was set as a gift for a birthday celebration, perfectly encapsulating a typical New Yorker's skepticism and even a touch of neuroticism. Also performed by David Sisco is Where Memories Go to Die, the final piece in Sisco's song cycle 'Six Dennis Rhodes Poems', and like the poet himself, is a delightful, vulnerable, and joy-filled piece. Turning to writings of past centuries, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Mondragon gives a powerful performance of the stunning setting of Amy Lowell's epic poem Patterns about a woman's loss during the First World War. Michael Kelly returns in My Best Beloved. Sisco was struck by the raw passion of the work of metaphysical poet Francis Quarles and has brought it forward in this gorgeous and sensuous art song. Missed Connections was written for Sisco's longtime muse, Elizabeth Mondragon, and won the 2010 NATS Composition Award. Set to anonymous posts from classified ad website craigslist. Com, these musical vignettes reflect the human desire to find (or avoid) one another and are surprisingly affecting. The Wrong Kind of Fountain Enthusiast is a song cycle set to colourful online reviews across the United States, often savage and hilarious, and, as with Missed Connections, uses a variety of musical idioms. Dear God, a cycle of children's prayers, tenderly captures the delicious mix of simplicity and complexity in these miniature compositions. Both feature the "powerful and expressive voice" (Classical Scene) of soprano Laura Strickling. Throughout the album, the superb voices are supported by the "poetic" (Washington Post) performances of pianist David Fung. David Sisco is an award-winning composer whose vocal and theatrical works have been performed at major venues such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. He has received commissions from choirs and ensembles across the US. An alumnus of the esteemed BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop and the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, he currently serves on the adjunct voice faculty at NYU Steinhardt and maintains an international presence as a voice teacher and pedagogue. Pianist David Fung has performed as a soloist and with leading orchestras throughout Europe and Asia, collaborating with artists such as Gustavo Dudamel, Marin Alsop, and Yuja Wang. Soprano Laura Strickling is a two-time GRAMMY� award nominee for Best Classical Vocal Solo Album and is celebrated for her work in opera, oratorio, concert, and chamber music. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Mondragon's performances range from opera and art song to musical theater and oratorio, often in new music. American baritone, librettist, and poet, Michael Kelly, is an avid interpreter of new music, and much of his focus is on the queer experience and LGBTQ+ advocacy.

This album presents a new arrangement of Franz Schubert's song cycle Die schone Mullerin, performed by baritone Roderick Williams with the Carducci Quartet. Originally composed in 1823 for voice and piano, the cycle sets poems by Wilhelm Muller that trace the emotional journey of a young miller through hope, love, jealousy and despair. In this recording, the piano part is reimagined for string quartet, drawing out the implied instrumental textures in Schubert's writing while preserving the narrative flow of the songs. The arrangement offers a fresh perspective on the work's structure and atmosphere, highlighting it's central Romantic themes of nature, longing and reflection.

The Swedish composer Moses Pergament (1893-1977) - Finnish-born of Lithuanian-Jewish stock - chose the poems he set to music from a wide range of sources: those heard in this first-ever recording of his songs are mostly in Swedish but also in a variety of other languages. They likewise cover the gamut of human emotion, from buoyant folksongs and children's verses via lyrical expressions of love and loss to stark meditations on suffering and death. Many of Pergament's poets evoke the natural world in their expression of emotion, but his music never yields to sentimentality: he treats each song as a microcosm, expressed with drama and dignity. Time was when Pergament's songs were performed by singers of the calibre of Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth S�derstr�m and Nicolai Gedda; it is high time they were rediscovered.

Toivo Kuula (1883-1918) is one of the many composers who died at a tragically young age - 34 in his case: he was hit by a bullet fired after a brawl at a victory celebration at the end of the Finnish Civil War. The immediacy of the music he wrote during his short life points to the immensity of the loss not only to Finnish culture but to music more generally - as this second album of two, presenting his entire output of songs for solo voice and piano, makes abundantly clear. The range of moods captured here is striking; the most passionate of these songs generate an operatic intensity in their short span, in a style that balances directness of expression and rich late-Romantic harmonies.

The compositional career of Robin Stevens, Welsh-born (in 1958) and Manchester-based, is divided into two periods, separated by a period of illness. The first mainly produced chamber music and works for the church that employed him; restored to health, he found an appetite for larger forms, writing three substantial concertos and a number of other orchestral works. Stevens' substantial, four-movement Cello Concerto is something of a symphony-with-cello, casting the orchestra in kaleidoscopic discussion with the soloist. Here the Concerto sits between a charming orchestral miniature and a searching symphonic poem.

Werner Heinrich Schmitt, born in Mannheim in 1961, began to study the piano in boyhood, and soon started to compose as well. Since then he has earned his living as a pianist, writing music as time permitted. This first album of his works reveals a composer of considerable substance, particularly in the two moving song-cycles that book-end this album. The sensitivity and resourcefulness of Schmitt's aural imagination are confirmed in the chamber and piano pieces heard here. Some are infused with joy, others with sorrow, but they all speak a musical language that aims to speak to the listener directly.

This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. This first-ever complete recording of all his German-language Lieder – setting folksongs as well as more recent Romantic poetry – shows him bridging both French and German traditions with a style somewhere between Fauré and Brahms. Written early in Jaques-Dalcroze’s career, these songs span a wide range of emotions, from innocent rural idylls to the contemplation of existential pain and heartache.

The composer Peter Gast (1854-1918) - real name Heinrich Koselitz - is best remembered as a friend and posthumous editor of Friedrich Nietzsche rather than for his own music, which was kept under lock and key in communist East Germany for half a century; only recently has it begun to be performed and recorded. 'Il faut mediterraniser la musique', Nietzsche argued, and Gast's Lieder, in a reaction against Wagnerian gloom, do just that, singing of love, life, springtime, drinking and youthful ardour; even the more wistful songs have a spring in their step.

The star of tenor John Matthew Myers is rapidly in the ascendent. His debut album, Desiderium, coincides with his Metropolitan Opera debut in Brett Dean’s Hamlet. Desiderium – “an ardent desire or longing, a feeling of loss or grief for something lost” – beautifully showcases Myers’ mellifluous voice.

His thoughtful program of works by American and American émigré composers opens with Samuel Barber’s yearning Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – rarely heard sung by a tenor – and transitions to Charles Griffes’ similarly searching settings of 3 Poems of Fiona Macleod, and Andre Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano. What follows is A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, set to the words of a poignant letter by an American Civil War officer, by John Kander (of Kander and Ebb musical theatre fame). Rounding out the recital are 4 Walt Whitman Songs by German-born composer Kurt Weill, including the classic O Captain! My Captain! John Matthew Myers says, “Call me a big-hearted Romantic. Each song on this album conveys yearning, separation, loneliness or distance but also a sense of intimacy and longing for connection.” It certainly does. Desiderium is an auspicious debut album, and one especially attuned to our times.

REVIEW:

For his debut recital disc John Matthew Myers has chosen songs and groups of songs by five American composers, active during the 20th century. The common denominator is a feeling of loneliness, and it all stemmed from Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, which is the only really well-known work in this album.

It goes without saying that the overriding mood is that of melancholy and gloom, but the texts and the musical expressions differ greatly, which vouches for a varied program. Barber’s Knoxville was composed in 1947 for a high voice and orchestra, and has almost exclusively been soprano territory. Since James Agee’s dream-like prose poem from 1938 is written in the persona of a 5-year-old male child, it’s logical to have it performed by a tenor. John Matthew Myers sings the many lyrical sections with soft beautiful tone, but he is also apt at expressing the desperation and sorrow in the work's crucial lines. It is a deeply felt reading.

Composed in 1918 The three Griffes songs, to poems by Fiona Macleod (William Field), were orchestrated in 1919. Like Barber’s Knoxville the orchestration has an attractive colouring that the piano cannot measure up to, but still it has its own attraction, and since it is the original it’s valid and gives the music a more intimate image, more chamber music like. I am happy to have both versions in so convincing readings.

I must say that André Previn’s 4 Songs for Tenor and Piano is a harder nut to crack. Composed in 2004 they are dressed in a rather knotty harmonic language. The mood is gloomy, also in the up-tempo last song, The Revelation. I believe that repeated listening might open them up, but at present I must content myself with admitting that the singing and playing are of the highest order. As far as I have been able to find out, this is a first recording, even though the liner notes don’t specifically say so.

The setting for John Kander’s A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, a major in the Civil War, is wonderful and gripping. John Kander is known, at least to Broadway musical enthusiasts, for his collaboration with Fred Ebb in Cabaret, Chicago, and other Broadway successes. Here, in a quite different vein, he catches all the shifts and nuances of the letter so sensitively. There are certainly echoes from his musical background, which in no way is a drawback. John Matthew Myers reading is appropriately sensitive.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 triggered Kurt Weill to set three of the Walt Whitman poems recorded here. He “structured the original three as a gradual decrescendo of militarism from the bullish opening to the wistful intensity of the final dirge”, as Julian Haylock says in his notes. Five years later he added Come Up from the Fields, Father, which here is placed third in the suite. Weill was a great admirer of Whitman, and said as early as 1926 that he was “the first truly original poetic talent to grow out of American soil.” The music is warlike and sturdy in the first song, reminding me of his style in the 1920s, the second song is a funeral march, and the whole suite – I wouldn’t call it a cycle – is deeply engaging.

John Matthew Myers can feel satisfied with his debut album, and he is excellently supported by Myra Huang’s accompaniment.

-- MusicWeb International (Göran Forsling)

Virko Baley was born in Ukraine in 1938 and came to the USA as a refugee in 1949, eventually making his home in Las Vegas. He has long been fascinated by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as can be heard in the two moving works recorded here – one an orchestral song-cycle setting her texts, the other a suite for violin and piano inspired by those settings. They display an acute ear for orchestral colour, a fondness for dramatic gesture and a strong sense of lyricism, occasionally inflected by distant echoes of Baley’s eastern European origins, the richness of the song-cycle placing him downstream from Mahler and Berg and the restraint of the Songs without Words occasionally evoking Arvo Pärt.

Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881–1950) was given the sobriquet of ‘the conscience of Russian music’ thanks to his dignified bearing and quiet wisdom – qualities reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation this series hopes to remedy. This second album presents his entire output of songs for baritone and piano, most of them early works responding to Russian lyric poetry with the calm dignity typical of his compositions – though there is the occasional flash of passion.

On his second Pentatone album Sogno, tenor Javier Camarena pays tribute to Francesco Paolo Tosti, together with pianist Ángel Rodríguez. Camarena and Rodríguez have curated a collection of Tosti’s songs that not only include some of his greatest hits but also highlight lesser-known works, including songs in French and English.

The songs selected for this album give us an overview of the different facets of Tosti’s style. Some are deeply sentimental, exemplified by 'Vorrei morire!' — one of the composer’s most famous pieces — while others, such as ‘Marechiare’, draw inspiration from folk traditions. Although Tosti is not often remembered in the history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music, Javier Camarena is inviting us to rediscover the enchanting world of his songs. Javier Camarena stands as one of the preeminent tenors of our time, and Sogno marks his second album following the successful Signor Gaetano (2022). Pianist Ángel Rodríguez makes his Pentatone debut.

Soprano Francesca Aspromonte and violinist Boris Begelman present an all-Handel programme exploring the vicissitudes of love, together with Arsenale Sonoro. On Un’alma innamorata, Aspromonte urges us to take ownership of our amorous infatuations, rather than blaming it on Cupid’s arrows. The programme consists of several worldly cantatas with violino concertante - including the famous Mi palpita il cor and a world premiere recording of S'un dì m'appaga la mia crudele - interspersed with instrumental sonatas. The overall chamber-musical approach of Un’alma innamorata increases the emotional impact of the tragic heroines depicted by Aspromonte. Francesca Aspromonte presents her third Pentatone album, after having released Prologue (2018) and Maria & Maddalena (2021). Boris Begelman featured on the latter album, whereas Arsenale Sonoro makes its Pentatone debut.

Magdalena Kožená’s fourth Pentatone album Folk Songs brings together folk-inspired song cycles from across the globe. Ranging from Berio’s Folk Songs to sets by Bartók, Ravel and Montsalvatge, this collection provides a kaleidoscope of twentieth-century orchestral song composition. Kožená performs them together with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle.

REVIEW:

Kožená is on gleaming form in music that largely suits her voice well, and the orchestra plays fabulously for Rattle.

-- The Guardian (U.K.)

This Ondine debut album by the award-winning Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Justina Gringyte, one of the foremost rising stars of the opera world, and pianist Malcolm Martineau is her first solo album and the complete recording of Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) long-forgotten masterpiece, Vingt Melodies (20 Songs), Op. 21. Year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Bizet, one of the greatest French composers of all time. During his short career of little more than twenty years Bizet composed a substantial quantity of music, including 15 operas. Bizet has been compared with Mozart in his sensitivity to the human voice and understanding of it's expressive potential. Several of Bizet's operas predate his twenty songs Opus 21, written between 1854 and 1872. Anyone new to these songs, a collection including many masterpieces, may wonder how music of such consistent quality could be so neglected! Clearly, they must be ranked among Bizet's most representative works.

The settings heard on this disc meld together the talents of two outstanding creative artists, the composer Paul Honey and the poet Gregory Warren Wilson, producing a collection in which the inner life of the listener is both confronted and empowered. Warren Wilson's metaphysically-infused set of haiku, Earth's Imagined Corners, derives it's title from the seventh of John Donne's Divine Meditations, in an evocative setting for sixteen unaccompanied voices and solo cello. It was conceived as a sequence of four individual movements (Willows, Leatherback, Fireflies, Pomegranates), three of which invoke the fundamental elemental forces at work on our planet - water, earth, and fire. The final constant explored here is time, that boundless exponential continuum within which the human experience itself unfolds.

The Romances presented here, are borne out of intense national internal debate, between Western modernity and Eastern nationalism. It is a story of immense personalities, pioneers, revolutionaries, virtuoso pianists, lesser-known heroes and sumptuous revealing poetry that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago. Thanks to the level of fame achieved by their ballets, symphonies and operas, a wide range of composers of Russian origin, who lived between the time of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev have become household names, which has established them a permanent place in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world. However, often overlooked in the West, is the extraordinary contribution that composers in this period made to the world of song. They did nothing short of giving the Russian language a standing in the international musical landscape, by establishing a new canon of Art Song, the Romance

During his lifetime, Oskar Merikanto (1868-1924) was the most popular composer at Finnish homes. Even today, in events such as weddings or funerals, his pieces are widely heard and performed. Merikanto was an excellent pianist and organist and possessed a particular gift in writing memorable melodies. Enjoying great popularity, Merikanto wrote over 200 songs, a number of duets and also several choral works, and nearly 200 piano works. Year 2024 marks the 100th anniversarys from the death of Oskar Merikanto. To celebrate this anniversary year, baritone Waltteri Torikka is presenting 29 melodies by Oskar Merikanto through this album. Signed by Warner in 2015, Waltteri Torikka topped the Finnish pop charts for 3 weeks in 2018, performs frequently in European opera festivals and music festivals, and has also performed at the BBC Proms.

In this debut album, baritone Jonas Muller and the Tomasi Musso Guitar Duo have recorded Schubert's Winterreise. The arrangement for two guitars creates a special new three-dimensional chamber music constellation, which certainly demands a different approach to singing from the singer, who must now internalise what the piano used to bring out. This is particularly in keeping with the idea that Winterreise is not simply a collection of songs composed by a travelling French horn player, but that the existential encounter between the stranger and the hurdy-gurdy man gives rise to new songs that have never been heard before and can only be sung together.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), one of the most influential French organists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, jokingly referred to himself as the substitute organist of the church of St. Sulpice, Paris, despite his 64-year tenure there. While best known for his ten organ symphonies, Widor composed in a wide variety of sacred and secular genres: chamber music, orchestral works, ballet, operatic music, works for piano, and most importantly for this recording, melodies. In his day, Widor won respect as a composer, organist, professor, and cultural ambassador of France. In 1890 he became Cesar Franck's immediate successor as Professor of Organ at the Paris Conservatoire, and, in 1896, he succeeded Theodore Dubois as Conservatoire Professor of Composition. Widor's students in organ and composition included such distinguished names as Marcel Dupre, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Darius Milhaud, Albert Schweitzer, and Edgard Varese. Widor composed over 100 songs which have been overshadowed by his immensely popular organ works. His genius with melody, comprehensive piano writing, and discerning poetic text settings distinguish him as a gifted song composer unusually sensitive to the capabilities of the voice. Throughout his extensive career, Widor was concerned with achieving the best possible musical result in his compositions and continually developed, revised, and republished his works. A publishing custom of the time was to group sets of six songs in a single opus number; however, the songs of each of Widor's sets are not necessarily related by poet or theme. The songs were not intended to be presented as a cohesive cycle. With that in mind, the songs in this recording are not presented by chronological opus numbers. Widor's melodies exhibit a wide variety of musical influences, from the works of the German lieder composers to French vocal genres, such as the bergerette and opera lyrique. His songs range from straight-forward strophic settings to intricate through-composed forms. Widor's harmonic language can find beauty in purely diatonic sonorities while others take advantage of the more remote modulations. Elements of Orientalism, popular in his day, color the exotic musical language and mood of several songs. Widor's songs represent his quest for a perfect marriage of music and text. His melodies feature the poetry of such beloved and respected literary figures as Victor Hugo, Theodore de Banville, Rene-Francois Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Bourget, and Pierre-Jules Theophile Gautier. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Widor - thrillingly - was inspired to include poems by women whose work he admired among his song settings. Some of them are contained in this album's offerings. To quote Widor biographer John Near, "We experience very great charm when happy fortune permits us to hear a page of Mr. Widor, harmoniously vying with Victor Hugo, Sully Prudhomme, or Paul Bourget."

Mario Pilati was born in Naples on 16 October 1903. His life was very short, intense and troubled. Together with his siblings, he was introduced as a child into the study of music, as was the custom in Neapolitan upper-middle- class families. He immediately showed a great talent as a pianist and an overflowing creativeness: at the age of 13 he had already decided that music was to be his profession. His father attempted to thwart his artistic calling by making him enrol in a technical school, but, with the help of his mother, he managed to go on with his musical studies: at the early age of 20 he took a diploma with honours in composition at the Conservatorio S. Pietro a Majella of Naples, under the guidance of Antonio Savasta. He immediately looked for a job, in order to become independent of his family: his father not only disapproved of his musical career, but also never accepted his engagement with Antonietta Margiotta, whom he married in 1928 and with whom he had three daughters, Annamaria, Laura and Giovanna. The award-winning specialists Manuela Custer and Raffaele Cortesi (already protagonists of the recent recording Liriche su testi di Dante, tc 840003) are the interpreters of the rediscovery of the vocal chamber music of the brilliant Neapolitan composer.

Mezzo-soprano Hermine May and pianist Manuel Lange invite you into Wagner's world of Tristan and Isolde where insatiable yearnings are awakened, passions heightened and where the fervent desire to transcend reality finds supreme love beyond death in Liebestod.

With this first Toccata Next album of Mexican music for harp, the American harpist Janet Paulus pays tribute to her adoptive country and to three composer friends, each with a concertante work and music for solo harp – several of them recently written for her. The predominant style is gently Neo-Romantic, occasionally animated with echoes of Mexican folk-music.