The Quartets in this 3-CD set are not in chronological or catalogue order because the full cycle of 15 Quartets will be realized with a second upcoming 3-CD release, and it was decided instead to create a common thread with the tonalities and musical development among the quartets.

The only complete available recording of a landmark in Elizabethan keyboard music. With a huge catalogue of Brilliant Classics recordings to his credit, Pieter-Jan Belder has won particular praise for his ambitious project to record the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), a treasury of English keyboard music from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era. Now he focuses his attention on the greatest English composer of that age, with a volume dedicated to William Byrd, and to his largest single collection of music for the keyboard.

My Ladye Nevells Booke embraces the most popular genres of its day. Its contents are typical fare for English Renaissance composers: dances, variation sets, marches, contrapuntal fantasies and programmatic pieces, and the repertory comes from a period beginning in the mid 1560s. Byrd makes each of these genres his own with consummate ingenuity; the variety and the beauty of the collection as a whole rewards players and listeners alike. The CD booklet contains an extensive essay on My Ladye Nevells Booke by Jon Baxendale, who is co-editor of the latest edition of the score.

Showpiece variations, folksongs, little-known trios and an early masterpiece: an unrivalled survey of Beethoven’s flute writing in new recordings by experienced Italian chamber musicians.

In writing his sets of folksong variations, the result always falls easily upon the ear while putting amateur musicians through their paces, technically speaking, and demanding far more of their expressive imagination. The other pieces here date from Beethoven’s earliest years as a composer in Bonn. The Trio for flute, bassoon and piano shows a strong Mozartian influence; the B flat Sonata for flute and piano is a striking example of the apprentice musician learning his craft and refining his voice, which emerges in the unexpected context of a modest Duo for two flutes. However, it is the seven-movement Serenade Op. 25, scored for flute, violin and viola, where we find Beethoven most elegantly adapted to the role of ‘occasional’ composer.

These new recordings are led by the flautist Ginevra Petrucci, who is now based in New York as a performer, editor and author of several volumes on the flute, and a specialist in new music. ‘A a very talented and well-educated musician,’ according to the Fanfare magazine review of her Brilliant Classics album of flute concertos by Briccialdi (95767).

The history, legends, culture, art and music of Naples were constant companions to composer Angelo Gilardino in his formative years. Never attracted as a composer to pictorial music, he does feel that the impressions derived from the experience of places and literary works leave profound imprints on the emotions and the intellect, which can provide the impulse to write music associated with a particular place. A project to create music based on the mythical Parthenope (precursor of modern Naples) began with a conversation between Gilardino and two Neapolitan masters of the guitar: Aniello Desiderio, virtuoso guitarist acclaimed throughout the world; and Lucio Matarazzo, who embodies the forthright Neapolitan style so typical of the school of Eduardo Caliendo (the guitarist who collaborated in the performances and recordings of Roberto Murolo). Having joined forces in a new duo, the two guitarists asked Gilardino to compose a concerto for guitar and orchestra, and he replied with the Concerto del Sepeithos for two guitars and orchestra in 2013. The river Sepeithos (Sebeto) flowed through ancient Neapolis, and Gilardino was drawn to accounts of the raging current making its way through the city and into the sea at today’s Piazza del Municipio. The duo’s response to the Concerto del Sepeithos was another request: for Gilardino to write a Sonata for two guitars for them, as well. In 2014 they were rewarded with Riviera di Chiaia – Passeggio reale, a piece evoking an imagined Naples informed by impressions ranging from Cimarosa to Anna Maria Ortese, Leonardo Leo to Nicola Pugliese. In particular, the composer was reading Pugliese’s novel Malacqua (Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples) while writing the second movement, ‘Pioggia’ (Rain).

The opulent soundworld of a Dutch late-Romantic master, still too little known outside his native country. Rarefied spirituality and refined sensuousness are the hallmarks of Hendrik Andriessen's (1892-1981) idiom, which offers an ethereal synthesis of Franckian chromaticism with an individual interpretation of classical forms and church modes. Though he trained as an organist, his writing for other solo instruments is fluent and idiomatic. The concertos for violin, cello and oboe share the silken textures of his better-known orchestral music, and this album won glowing reviews when first released in 2000. The album’s headline work is Miroir de peine, a languorous song-cycle to Henri Vangeon’s poems of religious ecstasy describing the suffering of Christ from the perspective of the Virgin Mary. It has attracted the advocacy of great sopranos from Elly Ameling to Christiane Stotijn. This 1991 recording by Roberta Alexander won an enthusiastic welcome from the critics for the poise and beauty of her performance and the richness of the engineering. Andriessen esteemed Franck as ‘a musical philosopher in the truest sense of the word,’ who drew ‘intense sentiments from the intuitive side of his genius into an orderly gestalt.’ Much the same could be said of Andriessen’s own idiom throughout his career, as this half-century retrospective over his career confirms, from the solemn lushness of Magna res est amor of 1919 to the Chromatic Variations and Cello Concertino of 1970. The Violin Concerto (1968-9) is still essentially couched in a Romantic vein, but shaded with more 20th-century accents of tonal anxiety, akin to Vaughan Williams and Casella in the 1930s. Any listener for whom conservatism is not a dirty word will relish becoming acquainted with Andriessen’s powerful expressive voice in these beautifully prepared and engineered performances.

Roberto Valentini (1671-1747) was born in England in Leicester in 1671, the fourth child of a fairly wealthy family. He remained in his homeland until his twenty-first birthday, when, to complete his musical studies, he emigrated to Italy, settling in Rome. He made his name as a multi-instrumentalist (he played flute, violin, cello and oboe) and started in the music publishing business, successfully publishing his own works. Valentini’s style was first influenced by the instrumental tradition of Corelli, but in his later works he embraced the then upcoming Galant Style, with a strong emphasis on melody, charm and brilliance. This new recording contains the 12 sonatas for flute (that is the recorder) and basso continuo Op.5, as well as “La Villeggiatura’, a set of 6 sonatas for two flutes. Performed by the Cappella Musicale Enrico Stuart, with Carolina Pace and Romeo Ciuffa on recorder, accompanied by viola da gamba, theorbo, guitar, harpsichord or organ. The group already successfully recorded chamber music by Boismortier for Brilliant Classics.

The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.

This pocket history of the piano duo opens – as it must – with the F minor Fantasy of Schubert. All elements of Schubert's art can be found in the Fantasy: his gift for a sublime, gently unfolding melody; melancholy harmonic turns from major to minor; high drama within a spacious symphonic design; intricate counterpoint in the finale. Less well known but no less accomplished in its way is the set of Beethoven variations by Camille Saint-Saëns, a polished transformation of a minuet theme. This 1992 studio recording concludes with a pair of 20th-century pieces which capitalize on the energy and momentum of the piano duo genre as a whole: La valse of Ravel and the Paganini Variations of Lutoslawski, which never fail to raise the pulse and receive here barnstorming performances. The adrenaline level increases further with a sequence of live performances on album 2, opening with Rachmaninov’s gorgeous Russian Rhapsody and continuing with The Rite of Spring in the version which Stravinsky first performed with his friends in Paris prior to the ballet’s notorious public premiere in 1911. In his Monologue of 1964, Zimmermann developed the thread of his Dialogue for two pianos and orchestra with a collage technique which quotes from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in which the two pianists muse almost to themselves at times. Rounding off this collection in epic style is the apotheosis of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen.

REVIEW:

This is a spectacular piano duo release. Of the 2 discs one was recorded in the studio (one piano) and the other in concert (two pianos). The repertoire here is mostly “famous works”, but the Zimmermann falls outside of the title’s range. There are a lot of brilliant, virtuosic pieces here, and the Ravel and Stravinsky are best known in their orchestral guises. Among people who listen to a lot of 4-hand repertoire, everything here, except perhaps the Zimmermann, will be in our libraries. This is a release I’ll keep on my active listening stack for quite some time.

-- American Record Guide (James Harrington)

A capacious library of Baroque-era works bears the name of the Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) as an assiduous and pioneering editor, arranger and promoter of music for his instrument. Much less familiar are Piatti’s own original pieces. This is the first modern recording and the only available collection on record of all six sonatas by a man hailed by Liszt as ‘the Paganini of the cello’. Ever true to his word and generous, Liszt presented Piatti with a replacement instrument after the Italian had been forced to sell his cello, having fallen into reduced circumstances. Piatti played with him in concert, as he did with Joseph Joachim and many other luminaries of mid-19th-century Europe. Of all his own music, Piatti was apparently proudest of the sonatas. They were written over an eleven-year period begun in 1885, during the last part of Piatti’s creative life, long established as a celebrity of musical life in Victorian London. He gave the first performances of each one at the series of Popular Concerts, and to huge acclaim. While many virtuosos have written for their own instruments, the cello sonatas of Piatti stand out for their artistic confidence, their balance of extroversion and well-wrought sensitivity to form.

All the Sonatas embody qualities associated with Piatti, especially in the handling of melody, which is distinctly operatic in its lyricism. The slow movements share the passion that Verdi put into the lead characters of his operas. In terms of construction they are also highly varied, while remaining true to the traditions of cantabile and display which underpin his Italian heritage. Born in 1987 in Piacenza, the cellist Lamberto Curtoni introduces this new recording of Piatti’s sonatas with an invaluable survey of the works within the context of their times and their place in the composer’s career.

Each one of Bohuslav Martinu’s (1890-1959) three cello sonatas belongs to a significant period or event in his life. Composed in May 1939, the first seems indelibly marked by the tension and anxiety which gripped Europe in the months before war broke out, though the composer was also going through a crisis in his personal life, having lately had an intense extramarital affair with Vítezslava Kaprálová, a young composer and conductor. The First Sonata is a tense and often angry work, even in its brooding central movement, and the mood carries over into the beginning of the Second , which was one of the first works completed by Martinu after his emigration to the US with his wife and children. This was another period of stress and homesickness, which may be heard in the Czech character of the melodies growing stronger during the sonata’s course, until the finale synthesises old and new worlds with a fusion of jazz and Bohemian folk melody. Like much of Martinu’s later music such as the last symphony and The Greek Passion, the Third Sonata of 1952 is more elusive – often almost naïve in character, and finding release in a neoclassical gigue which perhaps symbolises the composer coming to terms with a homeland whose soil he would never again touch. Many cellists of distinction have been attracted to these compact but challenging works, and audiences with them. Rivera Lazeri is an Italian cellist at home in the world of new music, partnered here by a pianist, David Boldrini, who has made critically acclaimed Brilliant Classics albums of music by Cimarosa and Czerny, among others.

New recordings of Goethe and Heine settings by a master Russian song-writer, by performers thoroughly versed in the composer’s complex harmony and heritage. While Nikolai Medtner only emigrated from Moscow to Berlin in 1921, eventually settling in London, the Russian composer traced a deep connection to German culture through the ancestry of his mother. He was familiar with the German language and culture from his childhood, and made his first visit to Berlin in the winter of 1904-5, then returned for most of 1907 and the summer of 1909. It can be no coincidence that these original-language settings of two of Germany’s greatest poets date from this period in Medtner’s life. In his mid-20s at this point, Medtner had become internationally known as a pianist of formidable technical and interpretative gifts, but he continued to compose and to teach, taking up a post at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1909. While Medtner’s pianism often lends the quicker songs a scintillating brilliance, such as the Elfenliedchen which is third in the Opus 6 collection of Goethe’s songs, the overall mood of the collection is imbued with the feelings of love and longing which are key-signatures of Romanticism (German or Russian). Medtner was always drawn towards musical contemplation of life’s deeper themes, and he accordingly sets both poets at their most philosophical and visionary, in the Wandrers Nachtlied of Goethe and the Bergstimme of Heine.

On this album, recorded in 2022, Ekaterina Levental and Frank Peters couple the Opp 6, 15 and 18 settings of Goethe with the three Op 12 settings of Heine: a unique but natural pairing on record. The booklet includes both original texts and English translations.

A unique recital on record, for a hauntingly beautiful instrumental combination, featuring several first recordings. The duo of trumpet and organ is a wellestablished one, having attracted composers from the early Baroque period onwards. The combination of flute and organ, while requiring careful balancing so that the organ does not overwhelm the flute, is no less attractive in its way, and has drawn from composers a more varied palette of expression. This new album is made by a duo of Piedmontese musicians who have explored the riches of the flute-and-organ repertoire to come up with a balanced selection of pieces written by 20th- and 21st-century composers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Duo Les Brumes begin with an undoubted masterpiece: the Sonata da Chiesa which the Swiss composer Frank Martin originally composed in 1939 for viola d'amore and organ. Because his Dutch wife Maria Boeke was an excellent flautist, he also produced a version for flute and organ in 1941. The sonata’s three sections enclose a sequence of gentle, neoclassical dance movements between two reflective slow movements. The album’s other substantial work is Ain Karim, a fantasia composed in 1995 by the Swiss
organist-composer Daniel Roth. Aïn Karim is the name of the place near Jerusalem where Mary, mother of Jesus, is thought to have visited her cousin Elisabeth and spoken the words of the ‘Magnificat’. Daniel Roth has taken part of this text ('He puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek') to emphasise the contrast between the ‘small’ flute and the ‘monumental’ organ. In between, Duo Les Brumes present a gallery of vividly coloured miniatures: a suite of Four Pieces composed in 1962 by the Austrian composer Augustin Franz Kropfreiter (1936-2003), within the same kind of ‘modern neoclassical’ vein as Martin’s Sonata da Chiesa; then Five Pieces by Jean Langlais, more extrovert in character. Two Canadian composers are also represented with the radiant, soaring Melodia by Denis Bédard and the Elegy by Michael Conway Baker.

Over a century of captivating French music for the flute, from Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937) to Élise Bertrand (b.2000), including a premiere on disc. From the shepherds-pipe dances of Lully to the pan-flute of Debussy’s faun and beyond, French music has always had a special affinity with the flute. Anna Wierer explores some lesser-known byways of this rich repertoire with her new album, which promises ‘Révélations’ galore. She begins with Lili Boulanger’s evocation of a spring morning, as full of new life as a field of young lambs. Among her contemporaries was Pierre Camus, a student of Fauré: his Chanson et Badinerie presents a pair of contrasting miniatures characteristic of late French Romanticism; the first melancholic and songful, the second lively and of sweeping lightness. The most extended work here is the four-movement Sonata by Mélanie Bonis, known in her time as the androgynous Mel so that her music would not be judged as inferior to a man’s: and indeed the sumptuous modal-oriental harmonies and idiomatic writing for both instruments place it in the front rank of French flute sonatas. A century on, Bonis’s music has belatedly won a place in the modern repertoire – by contrast, Élise Bertrand is at the beginning of a promising career. She composed her Impressions Liturgiques Op.2 at the age of 15, inspired by Maurice Duruflé's Requiem. Dating from 1946, Pierre Sancan’s Sonatine floats in on the breeze as a piece of postwar escapism, as light and sensuous as the creation of a master patissier. Finally, Anna Wierer and Alina Pronina turn to the more complex world of André Jolivet, whose Chant de Linos (1944) shares a theme of antiquity with Debussy’s Prelude but explores a darker, more troubled landscape over the course of its ten eventful minutes. This is the second Brilliant Classics album from the well-established duo of Anna Wierer and Alina Pronina, following on the success of their debut release in 2021, of flute music by the Ukrainian composer Dmitri Tchesnokov. Anna Wierer is the director of the BellClassic Music Academy and the Klangfabrik Music School in Berlin; Kyiv-born Alina Pronina likewise has settled in Berlin, but the duo has given concerts together across Germany and farther afield.