A prolific composer, at just over 20 years of age Giovanni Pacini wrote the first of a staggering 90 operas in a career lasting 44 years and covering a wide range of styles. He worked with Rossini, achieved success quickly with his own operas and was the subject of much gossip over an affair with Paolina Bonaparte which went on mainly between Viareggio and Lucca, where Pacini settled. Having nailed his colors to the Borbone mast in Lucca, Pacini fell from grace for a time but came back to even greater professional success with his appointment as director of the San Carlo opera house in Naples. Renowned in his day, Pacini was however soon out-shone by Bellini and Donizetti and although he continued to write operas, he devoted more and more time to teaching. Pacini's output was not wholly original, often mannered and hurriedly put together yet it includes several gems such as Saffo, Medea a Corinto and this Il Convitato di pietra, a farce in two acts which its composer always called an ''operetta''. Pacini explicitly took Mozart's masterpiece Don Giovanni as his model and created a parody of it. There is no Donna Elvira, however, and several scenes traditionally featuring her now centre - at the cost of some suffering to the plot - on the character of Zerlina. In line with standard practice, the servant takes a new name - in this case Ficcanaso, i.e. Nosey - and the opera shifts its centre of interest from the relationship between Man and God to teh world of women and relations between father and son, since the characters are supposed to be members of the composer's family. The opera is written well, properly constructed on the lbiretto by Gaetano Barbieri and is not without difficulties for the performers, even when they were members of the composer's own family. The score calls for a chamber orchestra, comprising four first and four second violins, two violas, a cello, a double-bass and two flutes, and a small male choir with the part for the tenors often divided into two lines. The opera is particularly suited to performance in small venues but requires highly capable singers. The libretto is light-footed and clearly inspired by the many Don Giovanni that had gone before, from Mozart-Da Ponte down. The recitatives are spoken but speech is also used for events of major importance, for instance the attempted rape. The storyline is simplified and Zerlina carries great weight and replaces Donna Elvira in several scenes. Her great importance in the plot turns this character from a naive country girl into a cunning, calculating woman along the lines of Goldoni's Elisa. Shortly before the finale she also has an aria for a prima donna of great worth. It makes an ideal concert aria for a coloratura soprano: overall, teh role demands a light, soubrette-style voice with a great range and considerable agility. The aria for Donna Anna, ''Care sponde'' and the tuneful aria for the tenor are both instances of Pacini's compositional abilities at their best. Indeed, overall the music is competent and confident, light-footed and holds the listener's interest.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The music on this release belongs mainly to Ferruccio Busoni's youth and is certainly indebted to the great romantic appraoch to the piano of Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn, apart from the Contrapunctisches Tanzstuck of 1889 with its more futuristic broadening of the tonal palette. Later in his life Busoni leaned towards a young new classicism, generated by his instinctive identification with the great J.S. Bach.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Jascha Heifetz (1900-87), the greatest violinist of the 20th c., transcribed and recorded dozens of pieces intended for the general public as well as for his own use in the so-called WWII war concerts, situations demanding agile programs, immediately and simply enjoyable by all, which he performed for American troops at various fronts. The pieces on this CD intend to represent a plausible reconstruction of a typical program, suitable for one of these war concerts, through the proposal of a relaxing, enjoyable and enticing repertoire, full of references to American tastes.

Classical Music

Until the middle of the 1700s the bassoon suffered from a series of technical limitations that retarded it's appreciation until new improvements allowed the classical bassoon (to distinguish it, as we do today, from the baroque instrument) to emerge as a fundamental instrument of ever more complex orchestras. The Ensemble Devienne and bassoonist Massimo Martusciello's new Bongiovanni release features a program of bassoon chamber works by four composers, one from the Classical era (Devienne), an early-Romanti (Danzi) and two 20th c. modernists, Jean Fran�aix and Roberto Molinelli.

Classical Music

Pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin, according to one calendar, was born on Christmas Day, 1972. His highly idiosyncratic figure as both man and musician endeared him to the poets of his time, who were able to understand him, but made him unpopular with contemporary composers, who were too different from him. He was a small man, with genteel and affected mannerisms. He studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1892 with perfect marks and a medal for merit. He was often struck by nervous fits and tormented by dark thoughts. He was a strange man, who walked with an unusual skip. His early musical production reflects his great skill as a pianist (which was universally acknowledged.) His writing builds on the tradition of Chopin and Liszt. In Scriabin’s vision there is a creator Spirit that permeates matter with light and the matter brought to life becomes “waves” (A in Russian, a word that evokes a cadenced flow). Sound, which exists because it propogates through spherical waves, and color, both constituitive elements of matter, are defined by their vibrations. Sound and color fill up the cosmos, a cosmos made of time and space.

Classical Music