Played by Jeroen van Veen, the solo-piano collection (95129) of themes from Yann Tiersen’s film scores is a Brilliant Classics best seller. Now also available, some of Tiersen’s best-known melodies arranged for guitar by George Tossikian, who has given many successful concerts of this repertoire. Tiersen shot to worldwide fame with his quirky, haunting score for the Oscar-winning Amélie (2001), but by that point he had gained considerable experience composing soundtracks for short films and incidental music for plays. Several of these pieces ended up on his first album, Valse des Monstres (1995); they also featured intricate arrangements incorporating various instruments. Borrowing from French folk music, chanson, musette waltz, and street music, as well as rock, avant-garde, and classical and minimalist influences, Tiersen’s deceptively simple style has a classical base in the music of Chopin, Satie, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. His gentle melodies lends themselves to the intimate language of the guitar, and Tossikian has selected pieces from throughout Tiersen’s career, focusing on these two albums but also including the title track La Plage. Since the days of Segovia, guitarists have practised the art of transcription, and the Greek guitarist George Tossikian continues that tradition with this album. In pieces scored for solo piano or violin, he has aimed for close fidelity, whereas in the ensemble numbers he has taken a freer, more creative approach in order to recreate the colors of Tiersen’s score using guitar techniques such as natural harmonics and tremolo. The result is no less delightful or captivating than the originals.

Who was Marco Antonio Centorio? Given how little attention has been paid to his music in modern times, a surprising amount is known about him. Born around 1600 in the Piedmontese town of Vercelli, Centorio was blessed with a fine treble voice that secured him an education at the town’s Collegio degli Innocenti. When his voice broke he moved to Milan and studied both organ and theory there, before moving back to his home-town, where he became the titular organist by the age of 18. A decade later he became maestro di capella, and held the post until his early death in 1638. Most of his extant music was preserved in the Vercelli Chapter Archive, which supplied the manuscripts for these world-premiere recordings. The album opens with the elegant chant La Centoria, ‘to be played on two organs’ (with the option of adding string instruments), a singularly fine piece in the style of the late 16th-century Milanese canzone that was already in decline. There are several pastoral canzone: non-liturgical music written for the enjoyment of the aristocracy and clergy, which display Centorio’s melodic gifts and contrapuntal skills. They alternate here with instrumental interludes and with accompanied motets, of the same character as the pastoral works but composed to sacred texts. The performances here enjoy unparalleled authenticity, having been made by modern heirs of the very ensemble which Centorio once directed, and in the fine domed basilica of Vercelli cathedral for which these works were conceived four centuries ago. Collectors of late-Renaissance era rarities will not hesitate to add the name of Centorio to their libraries.

Marcelo Nisinman is one of the most remarkable bandeonists of today. He created a post-Piazzolla Buenos Aires tango style, completely personalized, fusing elements of traditional tango, the inevitable inspiration from Piazzolla and the current modernist (jazz) styles.

On this new recording Marcelo Nisinman is joined by Alberto Mesirca (classical and electric guitars) and Winfried Holzenkamp (bass and ukulele). They play a wildly varying program, ranging from arrangements of Bach and Buxtehude, through traditionals like La Cumparsita and Ojos Negros, to Nisinman’s own compositions, notably the extravagant Der Makabere Zirkus.

An irresistible recording, brimming with joy, passion and virtuosity!

This release marks the debut on record of Galàn, a spirited, UK-based young ensemble committed to rediscovering the exciting and neglected sound world of three soprano voices and continuo. Specialising in European Renaissance and Baroque music, the group is accompanied by theorbo and harpsichord, and takes its name from the old English term for 'enchantment' and 'to sing'. The group was originally inspired by the Concerto delle Donne, at female trio that performed in Ferrara at the end of acceptance in Europe for the female voice the 16th century. This ground-breaking ensemble led the way in gaining as a worthy instrument for respectable entertainment. The title track is a brief but ardent meditation on the madness of love by one of Monteverdi’s most accomplished contemporaries, the Roman priest Domenico Mazzochi. More expansive is the cantata Siam tre miseri by another Roman composer, Giacomo Carissimi. Luzzasco Luzzaschi, with O Dolcezze and Non sa che sia Dolore, ranks alongside Monteverdi and Sigismondo d’India as a pioneer in the seconda prattica style which privileged the declamation of text over the smooth polyphony cultivated by Palestrina and his school. Monteverdi’s mastery of sacred and secular idioms are both represented here, with O viva Fiamma and Cantate Dominum as well as the harmonically tortured Ohime, dov’e il mio ben. The most significant rarity here, probably receiving its first recording, is Lo Specchio: a 20-minute cantata by the Vienna-based Antonio Draghi (1634-1700), who gradually advanced through the ranks of the Hapsburg Court to become Kapellmeister in 1669. Plaintive, passionate and always dramatic. It is music that cannot fail to capture the imagination.

Vincenzo Petrali (1830-1889) was an organist-composer active in the north of Italy. Acclaimed in his own time as a master improviser, the equal in this regard to French contemporaries such as Guilmant and Widor, he left a small, beautifully crafted body of original work for ecclesiastical use, around a third of it presented on this new album. He wrote two organ Masses in the tradition of 17th-century Venetian school composers such as Merula and Merulo, in which each verse of the text and its associated Gregorian chant inspires an instrumental meditation: Paolo Bottini has recorded the lesser-known F major Mass, which includes an especially dramatic, march-like Sonata for the Offertory and an ebullient final Allegro festoso. He belonged to the Cecilian movement, exemplified by the sacred works of Mendelssohn, which sought to establish a new and distinctive idiom for church composition, which is heard to best effect in a quartet of Communion pieces at the end of the first album, which fully exploit the size and array of tone-colors available to him on the newly built instruments of the time. In this spirit Petrali also composed 71 studies ‘for the modern organ’, collected in two volumes, and Paolo Bottini presents almost half of them on album 2. While composed with didactic purposes in mind, training pedal technique, introspection or melancholy but often rhythmic precision, sensitivity and imagination in handling different registers and stops and the like, the studies are delightful character pieces in their own right, not much given to surprisingly sunny in character.

Giuseppe Rosetta (1901-1985) studied in Rome under Respighi but soon returned to his Piedmontese birthplace of Vercelli. There he remained, leading and enriching the local musical culture as an organist, choir conductor and music teacher. He spurned fame and dedicated himself to his vocation and to God. His beautifully crafted music is accordingly modest in expressive ambition: elegant, reflective, at times melancholic, generally characterized by introspective, meditative qualities – nothing brilliant or demonstrative. Very little of it has been recorded, making this new album a valuable contribution to a wider appreciation of postwar Italian music. Rosetta taught composition to Angelo Gilardino, who eventually encouraged him to write guitar music, resulting in the Preludi per GIlardino of 1970. These are beautifully and idiomatically written for the instrument after close consultation with the guitarist. Also from 1970, the Canti della Pianura (Songs of the Plain) is a personal evocation of the countryside of the Po Valley where Rosetta lived and worked. The four movements correspond to times of day: the dawn (Mattutino), the afternoon (Meridiana), the evening (Vespertina) and the night (Serenata). The Fantasia dates from 1979, but Rosetta’s conservative idiom recalls the language of his teacher Respighi and contemporaries such as Casella and Pizzetti: he wrote out of time, vividly evoking a lost era of Romanticism on an instrument that sings naturally of nostalgia and regret. As a student of Gilardino, Gian Luca Barbero has become intimately familiar with the private musical world of Giuseppe Rosetta, and is himself a guitar teacher of renown in Italy. The present release marks his debut on Brilliant Classics within the label’s ever-growing library of guitar music.

Though his star has fallen since his death in 1859, Louis Spohr was once commonly ranked alongside the greatest of his contemporaries. Like Beethoven he gained fame in Vienna and wrote prolifically in all the classical genres, but he travelled more widely, and his operas and oratorios won particular acclaim in France and England respectively. Spohr’s curse and gift was fluency: whether written in serious or popular vein, his music is unfailingly mellifluous and beautifully written, falling easily on the ear while offering a satisfying challenge to its performers. As a violinist Spohr was considered second only to his friend Paganini. His brilliant virtuoso style and great skill in phrasing effectively founded a German school of violin playing. He understood equally well how to write for soprano and for clarinet, and the centrepiece of this collection is his set of Sechs Deutsche Lieder Op.103 (1837), which follow the example of Schubert’s late and sublime song Der Hirt an dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) in weaving a clarinet obbligato around the vocal line. Spohr himself had produced several previous sextets of German-language songs but in this cycle he was inspired to new expressive heights by his long friendship with the clarinetist Johann Simon Hermstedt. This fruitful partnership had also resulted in two clarinet concertos and the lighter fantasies included here: the Potpourri Op.80 based on themes by his German contemporary Peter von Winter and the less-familiar Op.21 Fantasia on themes from his own unstaged opera Alruna. Both of them are gloriously melodic as well as affording ample opportunities for brilliance. More Mozartian in its lyricism is the Andante variation movement from his Op.34 Nottorno, originally scored for wind ensemble and arranged here for clarinet and piano.

The German-born Christian Friedrich Ruppe (1753-1826) made his career in the Dutch city of Leiden, where he had originally arrived in 1773 as a student of mathematics and literature. In 1784 he married Christina Chalon (1748-1808), the daughter of the lead violinist the of the Nederlands Theater in Amsterdam. In 1890 he was appointed as music director of the city’s renowned and ancient university, and from 1802 he taught theory of music there, having in 1788 become organist of the city’s principal Lutheran Church. In 1796 an orphanage choir was founded in Leiden on Ruppe’s initiative, consisting of girls and boys from the Holy Spirit or Poor Orphanage and Children's Home near the church. During the following church year he then composed a pair of cantatas on anonymous Dutch texts, designed for the orphanage choir. Despite their musical richness and evident beauties, the scores remained in the archives of the orphanage, only to be rediscovered in 1987. Two centuries after their first performance, they received the recordings reissued here by an accomplished team of experienced Dutch early-music performers. While comparing the cantatas to the music written by Handel for the Foundling Hospital would not flatter Ruppe, his music nonetheless exhibits many charms of its own: unfailingly graceful phrasing, for one, fresh melodic charm and sympathetic writing for voices. There appears to be a clear Haydnesque imprint to both works, but operatic models are more evident in the sinfonia that opens the Christmas Cantata as well as the style of the dramatic recitatives which move along each development of the familiar story. The work concludes with a trumpet-and-drum chorus in the style of oratorios such as Messiah and The Creation, rising to the grand harmonization of an Easter chorale designed for singing by the choir and entire congregation.

Forced into exile from his native Italy by the onset of Fascism, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco sailed to the US in 1939. He arrived at dawn one muggy summer morning, and immortalized the moment, a turning point in his life and his music, in the finale of his Third Violin Concerto. The piece was commissioned from him by Jascha Heifetz, both to give himself an impressive new commission from a young and talented but not too radically inclined composer and as a way of helping a fellow émigré find his feet in a new and strange land. Castelnuovo-Tedesco certainly wrote with Heifetz’s technique in mind as well as his predilection for big cantabile melodies. Despite its concerto title, the piece was conceived for violin and piano like a sonata. The moods of the work, cast in traditional three-movement form, mirror the composer’s own, shifting from initial confusion to nostalgia to ebullience. However, Heifetz did not care for the piece, especially the finale, and it lay unplayed until this pair of Italian musicians gave its first performance of modern times in 2016. Writing in the booklet, Fulvio Luciani considers it ‘one of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s major works’; this is its second recording, but Luciani and Motterle enjoy a familiarity with the music unrivalled by any other living interpreters. As well as several attractive miniatures dating from the composer’s pre-war years in Italy, Luciano and Motterle also present the first recordings of his postwar arrangements of piano music by Chopin and Brahms. They are acts of love on the part of a pianist that engage with the violin, and the outcome is remarkably fresh and persuasive.

Especially in his late sonatas, Leopold Kozeluch’s keyboard music belongs no less to the quickly evolving cultural landscape of late 18th- and early 19th-century Vienna than the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. It can even at times be hard to tell which composer influenced whom; Kozeluch is his own man, not gifted in the final analysis with Beethoven’s feeling for dramatic expression, Mozart’s subtlety of formal innovation or Schubert’s melodic inspiration, but sharing a portion of these qualities while bringing to the table something of his own, not least a mood of deceptive simplicity which belongs to the world of his native Bohemia. Kozeluch (1747-1818) seems to have worked with uncommon ease and fluidity, in command of all the technical possibilities of his instrument, writing in the popular galant style and testing both performer and instrument with moto perpetuo passagework, double trills, sudden contrasts and, in the minor-key sonatas, a brooding chromaticism that belongs to the most powerful expressions of Sturm und Drang. In the hands of Kozeluch, as in those of all fine composers, they produce a musical whole that seems far greater than the sum of its parts; and, as in the creations of all geniuses, there is a profundity that cannot be explained merely by description of the processes at work. Jenny Soonjin Kim is a specialist in performances of Classical-era repertoire on instruments of the period. For this recording she performs on a modern copy of an Anton Walter fortepiano from Vienna in 1795.

Two previous albums of pan-flute arrangements on Brilliant Classics have served to showcase the technical brilliance and musical sensitivity of the Swiss pan-pipe virtuoso Hanspeter Oggier, and accordingly been met with critical acclaim. In partnership with the Swiss organist Sarah Brunner he now presents an original combination of folk tunes from the home of the pan-pipe with slow arias and quick dances by masters of the Baroque. Panpipes are difficult to tame, but have an incredibly rich palette of timbres. Hanspeter Oggier plays on a pair of soprano and tenor panpipes built by his father Christoph. Having been fascinated by traditional Romanian music since childhood, Oggier grew up with the records of the Romanian panflutist Gheorghe Zamfir, and he studied with the Romanian panflutist Simion Stanciu, alias Syrinx, for ten years in Geneva. Thus he is familiar with the uniquely irregular rhythms of Romanian folk music. The album opens with Cântec vechi bucovinean, a melancholy-laden song from Bukovina. The round-dance Hora Niculinei makes a lively contrast before the Doina din Transilvania, a rhapsodic love song. Such contrasting expressions also infuse the juxtapositions of Handel’s sublime lament Lascia Ch’io Pianga from Semele with one of Vivaldi’s most typically brilliant concertos originally written for flautino and with a merry dance by Purcell. Not all the Romanian pieces have folk origins, however: Lume, lume (in English: Earth, Earth) was written by the Romanian singer Maria Tanase, known as the ‘Piaf of the East’ who died in 1963. The song is full of sorrow for the passing of life and its drifting qualities are ideally suited to the mysterious, airy sounds of the pan-pipes.

On their new album the Queenz of Piano combine Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata with Thunderstruck from AC/DC to a brilliant piece of music. Beethoven’s Ode an die Freude merges with the infectious joie de vivre of Happy (Pharrell Williams). Chopin’s revolutionary etude meets Eye of the Tiger with energetic dance beats. Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You turns the grand piano into a percussion instrument for intoxicating grooves that create a crackling tension between soft sounds and fast passages. The programme of the two award-winning pianists is rounded off by their own compositions, in which they once again prove their musical understanding beyond genre boundaries. Their original way of playing the piano is transformed by electronic sounds and live visuals into a new Gesamtkunstwerk: a contemporary piano concerto! Virtuosic, enthralling and gripping at the same time!

These sonatas were published in 1780 in Venice, where Giovanni Battista Grazioli (1746-1828) had become an organist at St Mark’s Basilica two years earlier; and in 1785 he would be appointed principal organist, on the death of Baldassare Galuppi. He was known in his own time as an especially accomplished performer whose compositions concentrated on work for the church, though these collections of keyboard works were evidently designed for domestic consumption. Nearly all the 12 sonatas are structured in a conventional quick-slow-quick three-movement form, most of them in major keys, and notable for their elegant melodies and wealth of invention. The recording’s coda represents Grazioli’s work at St Mark’s with a Pastorale for organ composed for use over the Christmas season. This is probably the first-ever complete recording of Grazioli’s harpsichord sonatas (not to be confused with the organ sonatas by his son Alessandro). It marks the third appearance on Brilliant by the Veronese early-music specialist Chiara Minali. Her previous albums of Marcello (95277) and Ignaz Spergher (95834) have won glowing reviews for the technical finesse and expressive refinement of her playing. “Chiara Minali is a superb organist and harpsichordist.” La Pagina dell’Organo (Marcello).

The piano duet was an opportunity to have fun and make music with friends for Mendelssohn as it was for many other 19th-century composers, who wrote pieces that far transcended their domestic origins and often arranged their larger-scale works for the medium so that it could be appreciated by listeners where full orchestral performances were much harder to come by. In 1844 Mendelssohn made his own piano-duet arrangement of the Incidental music he had composed to accompany a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Potsdam two years earlier, a suite which itself drew on the precociously immortal Overture he had composed as a 16-year-old. The magical purity of the orchestral score is here translated into a limpid graininess which renders each phrase even more crystalline than in the symphonic version, especially in its most rapid passages. The relationship between the two versions might be likened to that between a sketch and a painting, though with no certainty as to which had been composed first. A comparison of the full-colour orchestral score with the ‘black and white’ of the piano-duet arrangement reveals how the timbres of Mendelssohn’s orchestral imagination stem from the conceptual outlines and regular forms first devised on a keyboard. Thus the arrangement has plenty to reveal about the score to even to listeners intimately familiar with the fully scored original. Having given the triumphant premiere of the overture to The Fair Melusine in Leipzig in 1836, Mendelssohn then arranged it for piano duet the same year. Again, every phrase of the symphonic original resounds with greater emphasis: the yielding swell of the waves is evoked by a delicacy of touch rendered almost liquid by brushing of the damper pedal.

The organ of the Badia Fiorentina monastery in the centre of Florence is one of the finest surviving examples of an Italian renaissance organ, completed in 1558 by the Tuscan organ builder Onofrio Zeffirini. The characteristically Italian timbre of the organ and its historical temperament make it the perfect instrument for performing repertoire from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. In her own booklet-note introduction to the repertoire on this album, Giovanna Riboli explains that she has chosen a sequence of repertoire to display the organ at its most characteristic, but also to give a guided tour to high-points of European organ music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She opens her recital with a pair of toccatas, by the Venetian Gabrieli and the Florentine Frescobaldi, that give voice to the instrument’s most brilliant registers. A variation set by Pasquini enables her to range over the impressive stop-list including rarities such as a Nightingale stop. There are two representatives of the English keyboard school, Byrd and Farnaby, at their most extrovert and virtuosic, and then two substantial pieces by the founder of the North German organ school, Sweelinck, followed by an ‘English masquerade’ by his pupil Scheidemann. Giovanna Riboli rounds off this imaginatively programmed album in reflective mode with the Tiento y discurso de segundo tono by the Spanish composer and organist Francisco Correa de Arauxo. The album’s expressive journey is astutely planned, and her playing of this historic instrument brings out all its antique tone- colors.

 

REVIEW:

 

This disc, another in the series that Brilliant Classics is devoting to Italian organs and organ music, upholds the high standards of preceding entries for Renaissance and Baroque music. Giovanni Riboli is the skilled executant on this Cook’s tour of 16th- and early 17th-century Western European organ repertoire. The instrument is rather closely recorded, but sounds well. The English-Italian booklet provides detailed notes by Riboli on the organ and the composers, including specifications, along with an artist bio and photos. This is an attractive recital disc, and recommended accordingly.

 

– Fanfare