Belonging to the generation of Respighi but dying several decades later, Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) is a far more varied composer than listeners to his post-Romantic chamber and orchestral music would guess. This album is both the most comprehensive publication ever issued of his song output on record, and a valuable opportunity to reappraise an often under-rated 20th-century composer. Malipiero wrote songs throughout his career, and in his late 20s found an affinity with the visionary and influential poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. Their artistic partnership began in 1909 with I sonetti delle fate, full of Wagnerian yearning in the spirit of Debussy’s incidental music to d’Annunzio’s St Sebastian play. The composer’s literary leanings and gifted word setting soon produced equally idiomatic settings of French poetry in a set of Cinq mélodies and an elliptical cycle of three poems (titled in English) by Georges Jean-Aubry, Keepsake. With Le stagioni italiche, however, Malipiero shows himself up to date and in sympathy with the latest developments in expressionist song writing from the pens of Mahler, Schoenberg and Webern, and with an ambition to match: a 40-minute cycle of four varied texts ranging from the 15th century to Malipiero’s own day. Like much else here, the cycle has previously been recorded but never in the context of Malipiero’s other songs which help us to understand the composer’s stylistic evolution. Three years later, there followed a through-composed drama based on the ancient legend of Philomel (immortalized by Ovid in the Metamorphoses) from which Malipiero extracted a cycle of three songs. He continued to refresh his style and innovate with Le sette allegrezze d’amore from 1945, but little in his music prepares the listener for the pointilliste precision of the Sette canzonette veneziane from 1960.

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.

A veritable tour de force: the arrangement of Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons and Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata for violin solo! Violinist and arranger Mauro Tortorelli about this unique project: “This recording is not only a challenge in terms of performance (playing both the solo part and the orchestral part at the same time), but also in terms of arrangement. Having to simulate all the orchestral timbres, the various voices in counterpoint, the sound contrasts on only four strings of the violin was not at all easy. Paganini's ingenious technique of double trills and left-handed pizzicati (used for the second movement of L’Inverno and the second movement of L’Estate), Bartok's pizzicato (for the rifle shots in the last movement of L’Autunno) and the formidable bow technique used by Henryk Szeryng, handed down to me by his pupil Georg Monch, have certainly suggested the best instrumental solutions to obtain the clearest possible clarity of execution between the various voices of a complex piece, enabling me to overcome the obstacles that the original scores presented me with. The decision to transcribe for solo violin these two famous works was also inspired by their great melodic power. In fact, every time I studied both pieces to perform them in public in the original formation, I had the feeling that they were already functional without accompaniment. As I am not a "Baroque" violinist, I preferred to perform the pieces with current technique and interpretation, respecting as much as possible the score revised by Gian Francesco Malipiero for Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and the manuscript score of Giuseppe Tartini's "Devil's Trill", adding my own Cadenza. “ Mauro Tortorelli already successfully recorded for Brilliant Classics violin sonatas by Saint-Saëns, Scalero, Milhaud, Ševcik/Auer and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

A highly regarded representative of the new generation of cellists, Benedict Kloeckner has been championed by such maestros as Daniel Barenboim and Sir Simon Rattle. With a discography including an acclaimed recording of the Schumann Cello Concerto nominated for the German Record Critics prize, Kloeckner also demonstrates a great interest in new music. He plays an Italian Cello by Francesco Rugeri (Cremona 1690), formerly played by Maurice Gendron. In this three-album set he tackles the sacred summit of the solo cello repertoire, rightly pointing out that the lack of original manuscripts for the Six Suites leaves them especially open to individual interpretation. Yet he takes a further step in making this recording his own, interpolating between each of the suites miniature compositions for solo cello that he commissioned from composers on six different continents under the motto “Sounds of Light”, thereby placing Bach’s Western European masterworks in dialogue with music from across the globe in our own time.

“That man can do anything!” exclaimed the late, legendary recorder player and conductor Frans Brüggen when asked by Tijdschrift Oude Muziek about his young colleague Erik Bosgraaf. “He had an upcoming concert of the music of Van Eyck at the Amsterdam Amstel church and sent me an invitation. His playing was superb, so inspired and technically impeccable.” It was Brüggen’s birthday, but that didn’t stop him attending. When soon afterwards Brüggen conducted Bach’s Actus tragicus (Cantata BWV106) in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, he invited Bosgraaf to play the first recorder part.

Erik Bosgraaf’s quick rise to fame is directly attributable to his debut on Brilliant Classics: a three-disc box devoted to Jacob van Eyck’s (1589/90–1657) “Der Fluyten Lust-hof” (The Recorder’s Garden of Delight). Released in 2007 on the 350th anniversary of the Utrecht composer’s death, the recording was made at the request of the Van Eyck scholar Thiemo Wind who said he had never before come across a recorder player with so much understanding of this virtuoso solo repertoire and such a capacity for playing it: the sprezzatura, the casual ease and spontaneity this music, originating in improvisation, demands. The set was a worldwide hit, even winning over some diehard recorder haters. Erik Bosgraaf was clearly one of the instruments greatest players. This 5-album set offers a sample of Erik Bosgraaf’s achievements in the field of baroque music, beginning with Van Eyck and embracing his milestone recordings of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Telemann.

REVIEWS:

The Dutch recorder player has now proven himself and is regarded internationally as the most important recorder player of the moment. He has already scored highly with recordings of Der Fluyten Lusthof by Jacob van Eyk, the recorder concertos by Bach and Vivaldi and the sonatas by Handel and Telemann. With Barock Edition the best of these records has now been summarized on a five-CD box. An inspiring collection that will transform even the biggest recorder hater into an enthusiast.

-- Klassieke Zaken

Orphaned at a young age, Fortunato Chelleri (1690–1757) was raised by his uncle Francesco Bazzani, the kapellmeister at Piacenza Cathedral, who taught him organ, harpsichord and composition. He rose to prominence first in Italy as a composer of opera seria but also wrote oratorios, cantatas, orchestral music, chamber music and keyboard music during his time as kapellmeister at Würzburg, a post he took in 1724. Unfortunately the majority of his work has been lost. The “6 Sonate di Galanteria” performed on this album were written in the early 1720s, a time when a new compositional style known as the galant was taking hold. (This was a departure from the baroque, with much less emphasis on polyphony and a preference for accompanied melody, making it a forerunner of the Classical period to come.) The 6 Sonate reflect this style with their typical alternation of slow and fast movements and monothematic, binary structure. Some of the movements are based on dance rhythms, including many minuets and some French-style allemandes. In the latter, Chelleri meticulously notates the “swing” or dotted rhythms that would have been implied, unwritten, according to the French notes inégales practice of the time, which suggests that Chelleri wanted to write in a way that players outside the French harpsichord tradition could understand. He therefore represents a synthesis of French, German and (the less well-known) Italian harpsichord music of his era in one composer who channelled all the compositional features he absorbed, embellished and reworked during his training in Europe in the early 18th century into the emerging galant style. This album was recorded on a Franco-Flemish two-manual harpsichord built by Michael Johnson in 2006, a copy of a 1637 Ruckers instrument, tuned at a pitch of a=415 in the Kirnberger III temperament, a common choice for mid-18th-century keyboard music.

From Arturo Toscanini and Sir John Barbirolli to Riccardo Muti and Antonio Pappano in our own time, Italian-heritage performers have often brought special qualities of sympathy and understanding to Edward Elgar’s (1857-1934) music. Now comes a new recording made in the ‘boot’ of southern Italy, lending Mediterranean warmth and passion to a trio of Elgarian masterpieces. The Sicilian-born cellist Giovanni Sollima has made well-received albums for Brilliant Classics of music by Offenbach (94475) and by his father Eliodoro Sollima (96287). His latest recording, made at the Teatro Politeama in the one-time ‘lace capital’ of Europe, Catanzaro, illuminates one of the core works of the cello literature with an affecting sense of line and sensitivity to the melancholy introversion which colors every bar of the Concerto composed by Elgar in the wake of the First World War. Twenty years earlier, Elgar’s reputation was secured with audiences across Europe and America through the whirlwind success of his “Enigma” Variations. The stoic beauty of ‘Nimrod’, the gentle wit of ‘Dorabella’ and the nervous excitement and pride of the autobiographical finale spoke directly to listeners who would never know the composer or his ‘friends pictured within’. The agitated, impassioned voice of Elgar in the Variations belonged to its end-of-Empire time and place, orchestrated with a mastery which would soon draw the admiration of Richard Strauss and many more musicians on the other side of the English Channel. Even that quintessential expression of Englishness, the first of five marches which Elgar collected under the Shakesperean banner of “Pomp and Circumstance” and later repurposed to set ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ for the finale of his Coronation Ode, won the composer standing ovations when he conducted it in concerts across mainland Europe. Under the affectionate baton of their music director Filippo Arlia, the Orchestra Filarmonica della Calabria interpret Elgar’s music with a sensitivity and extroversion worthy of the composer.