The recent Kozeluch revival, featuring recordings of his solo, chamber and orchestral music, has demonstrated his status as one of the most important figures in the whole of Viennese Classicism. This double album dedicated to Kozeluch’s works for fortepiano four-hands provides further confirmation of his compositional mastery, on a level bearing comparison with his contemporaries.

Leopold Antoniìn Kozeluch was born on 26 June 1747 in Velvary, to the north-west of Prague. He began his musical career in 1771 as a composer of ballet music and in 1778 decided to abandon the study of the law and to move to Vienna, where in a short time he was able to establish himself as a composer and performer thanks to his indisputable musical qualities and his ability to cultivate good relations to sustain and expand his activities. Building upon stylistic influences inherited from his teacher Frantisek Xaver Dusek (the first Czech composer to approach the four-hands piano genre in a manner neither frivolous nor didactic), Kozeluch committed himself to composing for keyboard duo, raising its aesthetic and technical level and contributing to the evolution of a concert hall repertoire worthy of the same attention as solo sonatas. The large-scale works were recorded on an original fortepiano constructed in Vienna by Johann Schantz in the early years of the 19th century and therefore contemporary with Kozeluch. The Duo Op.19 and Trio Sonatas Op.12 Nos. 1 and 2, with their domestic character, were recorded on the Longman & Broderip square piano, a type of instrument extremely popular in the households of the day and therefore appropriate for Hausmusik.

The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (the original spelling: Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach) is a collection of keyboard music compiled by Johann Sebastian Bach for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, who went on to become one of Europe's greatest improvising composers. The book has a clear didactic purpose. Most of the pieces included are better known as parts of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions and Sinfonias. The pieces in the collection are sequenced by complexity, beginning with the simplest works. The works are for “Keyboard” so they may be played on any instrument of the time: organ, harpsichord, spinet, or clavichord. Bach, however, considered the clavichord the best instrument for personal use, because it is able to express most adequately the cantabile way of playing.

Played on the clavichord by Yuan Sheng, “China’s premier interpreter of Bach” (International Piano Magazine) and a pupil of Solomon Mikowsky and Rosalyn Tureck, Yuan Sheng extensively studied the performance practice of Baroque music. Equally at home at the piano as at the harpsichord, he has an instinctive feeling for the possibilities, sonorities, and touch of the instrument at hand, so that “the listener might easily have imagined the composer at the keyboard” (Boston Intelligencer).

A New York Times profile of Pietro Yon (1886-1943) portrayed him as an adopted New Yorker who moved in high-society circles and enjoyed ragtime and vaudeville, and he welcomed the likes of Caruso and Toscanini to his home as friends. When he died in 1943, the world-famous conductor numbered among the 1300 mourners at St Patrick’s, where the Italian émigré Yon had become director of music in 1929. Yon’s music has a post-Romantic, mid-Atlantic flavor reflecting his background without belonging to a single ‘school’. He composed over 70 Mass settings and major works, including the oratorio The Triumph of St. Patrick which premiered at Carnegie Hall. Among his most popular works at the time was a Concerto Gregoriano for organ and orchestra, later rearranged for organ and piano and then solo organ, in which version Tommaso Mazzoletti performs it here.

Album 1 concludes with a pair of Easter-themed works, while album 2 features Christmas music including an Advent Suite, some gentle pastorales and finally the Gesù Bambino song which travelled the world in performances and recordings by Luciano Pavarotti, as well as countless other arrangements such as the solo-organ version played here. This album marks the climax of a seven-year project in which the Italian organist Tommaso Mazzoletti has become the world’s foremost exponent of his countryman’s music. As Mazzoletti remarks in his booklet essay, Yon knew exactly what his audiences enjoyed, and was prepared to experiment, rediscover and astonish.

Alfredo d’Ambrosio (1871-1914) was born in Naples and perhaps became a student of Marco Enrico Bossi, but he made his career around the turn of the last century once he moved to France. As the composer of small- and large-scale works for the violin that were premiered and performed by virtuoso soloists of the day, published internationally and appealing in different forms to both amateur and professional musicians, D’Ambrosio enjoyed a measure of fame that seems rapidly to have waned after his death, at the early age of 43. The present album has the field to itself (for now) in attempting a complementary survey of D’Ambrosio’s work as a salon musician. D’Ambrosio wrote a violin concerto, premiered in Berlin, and an opera, first heard in Nice in 1903, but his slender claim to fame rests on the album leaves recorded here, in which he records his friendship and esteem for distinguished colleagues. Aside from his publisher Decourcelle and his daughter Suzanne, D’Ambrosio pays tribute to the friendship of fellow violinists such as August Wilhelmj, Jacques Thibaud and Jan Kubelík. Then there is a trio of fellow violinist-composers, the best known of whom is Vittorio Monti (author of the Csardas which remains popular encore fare). There are elegies, canzonettas, ariettas, serenatas and romanzas, most of them just a minute or two in length, all written to be enjoyed equally by the musicians, the dedicatee and by their audience. They are revived here with native flair by the Gran Duo Italiano, who have made a series of acclaimed albums for Brilliant Classics, including the sonatas of Saint-Saens (94848) and the music of other lesser-known late-Romantic Italian contemporaries such as Santoliquido (96589) and Scalero (96160).

With this second volume of Tosti’s songs, Brilliant Classics takes listeners just half-way through a prodigious, career-long output, in which the key-notes are unfailingly memorable melody, lively charm and a gift for story-telling that rivals the very greatest song-writers past and present, from Schubert to Dylan. Many of his songs have never been recorded, so this set makes a unique contribution to the catalogue. There are a few French songs on Vol 2, reflecting Tosti’s great popularity in Paris, but most of the texts here are by Italian poets, mostly contemporaries such as D’Annunzio and Panzacchi. The album works chronologically through the decade 1886-1895, during which time he was singing teacher to the English royal family. Perhaps in deference to his pupils, there are songs by the likes of Longfellow and Weatherly: the release concludes with his delicately wistful setting of In the Hush of the Night. The first volume of this extraordinary project on Brilliant Classics won wide critical praise. ‘All the singers are careful over nuances,’ remarked MusicWeb International. ’Tosti’s songs have, through the years, been bawled out of recognition by leather-lunged tenors, and it is a blessing to hear so many beautiful pianissimos and diminuendos in this repertoire. The accompaniments are discreet and the recording is well-balanced and natural-sounding.’ This release will be an essential acquisition for all lovers of art-song.