Glinka wrote his piano trio of substituting violin for clarinet and/or cello for bassoon. He was a 28-year-old teacher at the conservatoire in Milan when he composed it, having left Russia and travelled south for his health. A note on the autograph score reads: 'I have known love only through the pain it brings,' yet the prevailing mood of the work is genial rather than tragic, full of Mediterranean sunshine rather than icy Russian chill. Glinka's lovely trio makes a unique yet natural coupling on record with three collections of fantasy pieces by Robert Schumann. These are all late works, written between 1849 and 1853 - a generation after Glinka's trio - and yet they share a predominant mood of playful high spirits alternating with wistful reflection that never spills over into outright tragedy. The M�rchenerz�hlungen are fairy tales without words - perhaps a giant appears in the second, a princess in the third - while the trio of Romances plumbs a deeper vein of expression, especially in the popular version for clarinet rather than the original for oboe. Principal clarinet of the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra, Giovanni Punzi made this new album with colleagues from the orchestra alongside the Bulgarian-born, multi-award-winning pianist Galya Kolarova, who is also based in the Danish capital. Punzi's previous album for Brilliant Classics also focused on a German Romantic composer, Max Bruch (BC95673): according to the Fanfare magazine review of May 2019, 'There is a pronounced Italian snap to these performances that provides an intriguing alternative coloration to these works.'

Brilliant Classics proudly presents the brand-new 5-album sets series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Beethoven complete symphonies, Bach Passions, Schubert symphonies, Mozart piano sonatas, Telemann Tafelmusik, Vivaldi 4 Seasons plus concertos, Shostakovich string quartets, Dvorak symphonies, Grieg Lyric Pieces, and Haydn London Symphonies. World class performers include Staatskapelle Dresden with Herbert Blomstedt, Staatskapelle Berlin with Otmar Suitner, Klara Wurtz, Hakon Austbo, Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra with Adam Fischer, Rubio Quartet and others. The fresh and colorful artwork is eye-catching while the booklet contains liner notes in English. A new series at an unbeatable price! The present installment features Antonin Dvořák’s complete symphonies performed by the Staatskapelle Berlin under the baton of Otmar Suitmer.

Excerpt of a review from a previously released edition of this cycle:

Suitner’s versions of the symphonies came as a big and really happy surprise. Sample the vitality and freshness Suitner brings to the scherzo of the Second Symphony, or the dramatic power at the climax of the Seventh’s first movement. The performances are all of a piece: vibrant, propulsive, wonderfully played, without a single dead spot or interpretive misstep. They belong in any serious Dvořák collection.

-- ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

Brilliant Classics proudly presents the brand-new 5-album sets series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Beethoven complete symphonies, Bach Passions, Schubert symphonies, Mozart piano sonatas, Telemann Tafelmusik, Vivaldi 4 Seasons plus concertos, Shostakovich string quartets, Dvorak symphonies, Grieg Lyric Pieces, and Haydn London Symphonies. World class performers include Staatskapelle Dresden with Herbert Blomstedt, Staatskapelle Berlin with Otmar Suitner, Klara Wurtz, Hakon Austbo, Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra with Adam Fischer, Rubio Quartet and others. The fresh and colorful artwork is eye-catching while the booklet contains liner notes in English. A new series at an unbeatable price!

The present installment features Franz Schubert’s Complete Symphonies and Rosamunde performed by the Staatskapelle Dresden with conductors Herbert Blomstedt and Willi Boskovsky.

Excerpt from a review of a previously released edition of this set:

Blomstedt grinds out the menacing climax of the first movement development in the “Unfinished” as well as anyone, and in “The Great” C major Symphony he shapes an eloquent interpretation without a single dead spot, culminating in an overwhelmingly energetic finale.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

The seven Lachrimae Pavan of 1604 are widely held to mark not only the high point of Dowland’s work but the entire genre of viol consort music. Dowland takes a lamenting pavan that he had written some years earlier and develops its theme into a cycle which takes the listener through different states of tearfulness, from loneliness to despair through hope to love and finally joy – the ‘true tears’ of the final pavan. In its contrapuntal mastery and its ingenuity in the treatment of a single theme, the Lachrimae cycle stands alongside The Art of Fugue composed by J.S. Bach a century and a half later. Most recordings of the Lachrimae use the standard instrumentation of a consort of viols, ranging from treble to bass and accompanied by a lute. For his second recording of the cycle, however, the Italian violist Cristiano Contadin has boldly created a broken consort performance which mixes the recorder and also early violin and viola in with the uniquely grainy timbre of the viols. Such an instrumentation exploits the long association of the recorder with music of lamentation, and makes a historical connection with, for example, the cantatas of Bach. Contadin explains with a booklet essay that his aim in performance is to recover the ‘passionate’ nature of this music as Dowland envisaged it in his own written preface to the score, and indeed there is nothing dry or constricted about the performance he directs from the treble viol. Now, with three generations of period performance research and practice under their belts, musicians are beginning to play this music with the kind of freedom and spontaneity and emotion they would accord (in other ways) to Brahms, and this new recording deserves comparison with the most distinguished accounts from the recent past.

Two previous albums on Brilliant Classics have introduced audiences to the music of Bartolomeo Campagnoli (1751-1827), an early-Classical violinist and composer whose music had until recently been almost entirely lost to history. And yet these recordings of string quartets (BC95037) and flute quartets (BC95399) have shown how charming, unaffected, original and enjoyable is Campagnoli's voice, at least in performances sympathetic to the performing style of his time. The quartets album was awarded five stars and nominated for Album of the Month by CdClassico. Com: 'Required listening'. The duos on this new recording are two- or three-movement sonatas in all but name. Some of them have been recorded before, but Stefano and Francesco Parrino present here the only available complete recording. The works illustrate how Campagnoli could write of his own music as combining 'German erudition and Italian soul', and without false modesty. Spohr heard him play in 1804 and described his style as elegant and fluid but somewhat old-fashioned, which fits Campagnoli's duos too. He wrote them between 1780 and 1796 while in the employ of Charles of Saxony, Duke of Courland, in Dresden, and they are expertly calibrated to appeal to aristocratic tastes for pleasant and lively music in the galant style, always falling easily upon the ear. As well as performing and recording in duet for many years, the Parrino brothers have been members of orchestras across Italy and beyond. As one half of the Quartet DuePi�Due they recorded the Flute Quartets of Cambini for Brilliant Classics (BC95081), 'a close-knit and well balanced ensemble,' according to the Critica Classica website, 'producing excellent interpretations which should delight a wider public without courting banality. '

'What touches and appeals to me most in the music of Monteverdi is the ultimate symbiosis between music and text,' says the Dutch soprano Wendy Roobol. 'He unites the two in such a way that the outcome is more than the sum of the parts. As a result, his music has enormous sincerity, richness and drama.' As a central member of the vocal consort Le nuove musiche directed by Krijn Koetsveld, the harpsichordist on this album, Wendy Roobol has performed the complete madrigals of Monteverdi in critically acclaimed recordings for Brilliant Classics. Her first solo album draws on that expertise to present a unique programme of Marian hymns from around Europe. The great names of the Italian school are naturally represented, opening with the title-song by Francesca Caccini (talented daughter of Giulio Caccini) and reaching a fitting climax with Salve, O Regina by Monteverdi and the Lament of the Madonna from his Selva morale e spirituale collection. In between those unchallenged masterpieces of the late Renaissance, Wendy Roobol ventures across Europe, first to Switzerland, for a sensuous Ave Maria by Johann Melchior Gletle, then to mid-Germany for a Magnificat by Philipp Friedrich Boddecker. These marvellous but little-known pieces have been recorded before, but not in their originally intended format of solo soprano with consort accompaniment, and these performances are graced by intense sensitivity and a spirit of intimacy that captures the devotional atmosphere of a Marian chapel. Giovanni Felice Sances is another little-known composer represented here, but whose 1636 Stabat mater is touched by rich and affective dissonance. It makes a fine complement to the plainer declamation of the Sancta mater by the German-Italian lutenist Girolamo Kapsberger.

A unique pairing on record of 20th-century clarinet concertos, full of musical laughter and mischief. As principal clarinet of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana based in Lugano, Paolo Beltramini may be seen on many films of the orchestra in action such as a beautifully shaded set of the Brahms symphonies filmed by Sony and conducted by Markus Poschner. Beltramini shines in Brahms's slow movements with many solos of doleful and consoling ease. For this album, his debut on Brilliant Classics, he leaves his chair and stands out front for two clarinet concertos which have enjoyed strikingly different fortunes. The Nielsen is a classic of the genre, probably the best-known and most-played example from the last century, abounding in Nielsen's zany humor and rebellious temperament. This four-movement work opens conventionally enough with a cheeky little melody soon taken on a gentle flight of fancy by the soloist, but it's clear, as so often with this composer, that danger and even catastrophe lurk around the corner. Nielsen intended as a portrait of a leading Danish clarinetist of his time, Aage Oxenvad, who was reportedly 'somewhat choleric in temperament, irascible but warm at heart.' The concerto, it was said by those who knew him, captured the very soul of Oxenvad. Outside his native France, the reputation of Jean Francaix has not flourished like that of Nielsen, especially since his death in 1997. Francaix was a fluent musician to a fault, born and brought up within a deeply musical family unlike Nielsen, and blessed with a ready way with melody. In 1968 he wrote this four-movement concerto and dedicated it to the bassoonist and conductor Fernand Oubradous; the first soloist was one of his students, Jacques Lancelot. Francaix admitted (not without pride) that the concerto was 'a kind of aerobatics display for the ear, complete with loops, wing-turns and nose-dives which are fairly terrifying for the soloist' - and indeed both works here stretch the technique of any clarinetist to the limit.

Brilliant Classics proudly presents the brand-new 5-album sets series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Beethoven complete symphonies, Bach Passions, Schubert symphonies, Mozart piano sonatas, Telemann Tafelmusik, Vivaldi 4 Seasons plus concertos, Shostakovich string quartets, Dvorak symphonies, Grieg Lyric Pieces, and Haydn London Symphonies. World class performers include Staatskapelle Dresden with Herbert Blomstedt, Staatskapelle Berlin with Otmar Suitner, Klara Wurtz, Hakon Austbo, Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra with Adam Fischer, Rubio Quartet and others. The fresh and colorful artwork is eye-catching while the booklet contains liner notes in English. A new series at an unbeatable price! The present installment features Edvard Grieg’s complete lyric pieces and piano music, performed by Hakon Austbo.

Having studied with the great Bach bass Peter Kooy - who has made his own distinguished recordings of these solo albums - David Greco has established himself as a fine interpreter of oratorio and opera throughout Australia and Europe. He has sung with Ton Koopman's Amsterdam Baroque Soloists as well as Monteverdi with Le Nuove Musiche - acclaimed for their Brilliant Classics recordings of the madrigals - and taken the role of Aeneas in Purcell's opera at the Brisbane Baroque Festival. David Greco's partnership with Luthers Bach Ensemble stretches back to his time as a student in The Netherlands in 2009, and this album marks the culmination of over a decade of performing the works of J.S Bach together. These solo bass cantatas are often reserved for singers of more mature years due to their weighty themes of worldly fatigue, death and redemption, but the interpretations here are infused with youth and cosmopolitan openness, with the aim of finding a united expression and interpretation in order to pay tribute to the universal nature of J.S Bach's music, and to the personal, touching expression at the heart of each musical phrase. 'I've always had a deep affinity for this music,' says David Greco, who enjoyed a breakthrough moment in appearances with Dame Emma Kirkby, doyenne of early-music sopranos. 'I think it's an aesthetic thing because I find it to be super passionate and Romantic in the truest sense of the word. The boundless possibilities of expression interest me very much and I just feel so at home with it.' These three cantatas all date from the full flower of Bach's maturity as Capellmeister to the Church of St Thomas in Leipzig. All three explore the very Lutheran longing for death as a state in which the soul is reunited with God in peace, finally relieved from earthly torments. Lamentation and consolation are thus united in arias of sublime beauty.

For their 'commitment, technical versatility, unanimity of ensemble and near-immaculate tuning' (Gramophone) the five musicians of Seldom Sene have won golden opinions in repertoire ranging from songs and dances from Renaissance Spain and England to their own transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations: 'With passionate command, skilful precision, nuanced dynamics and their outstanding potential for colouring, the ensemble succeeds in creating a surprising spectrum of enchanting, unheard-of sounds from Bach's Variations without compromising the "idea" of the work. ' (MDR. De) Now they undertake a new adventure, having commissioned pieces from four composers of diverse backgrounds and idioms. Aspasia Nasopoulou has written a collection of 10 miniatures - 'Dipoles' - which are inspired by opposites such as Male/Female, Bent/Straight, One/Many and so forth, giving rise to a cycle of high contrasts. Her fellow Greek composer Thanasis Deligiannis plays on the talents of Seldom Sene as singers as well as instrumentalists in setting a triptych of texts in English by the poet Iacovos Camhis, with the whimsical title of a bit unfair. S�ren Sieg's work brings together the joyful and relaxed temperament of much African music with the dramatic tension of European music. As a multi-talented composer and performer on wind, string and keyboard instruments he has composed 24 recorder suites: this is the latest, titled Mathongo Amnandi, meaning 'sweet Dreams' in Xhosa. Finally Seldom Sene play Quo quondam victa furore ('Where once madness excelled') by the Dutch composer Paul Leenhouts: a character piece telling a pastoral story from Roman literature which extols the virtues of a simple country life. Leenhouts, too, has a background in early music, as a distinguished performer and director in his own right: like the others, he has composed a vividly communicative piece which is beautifully tailored to the talents of Seldom Sene.

Famed worldwide as a film composer, Ryiuchi Sakamoto began his career as a pianist, creating patterns, phrases and innovative arrangements before joining his first commercial electronic pop band in 1978, the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Around the same time, he worked on his first solo album, the Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1978), which blends up-to-date electronic techniques with an old-fashioned gift for good tunes. Riot in Lagos brought him fame beyond Japan, and he went on to work with many top producers of pop, dance and electro. In 1983, Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence launched Sakamoto's career as a film composer, which has gone from strength to strength with scores for The Last Emperor (1987) and The Revenant (2015). All these pieces feature in Jeroen van Veen's survey, which is based on the best modern edition of these scores and often differs from Sakamoto's own, partly improvised recordings. Classical listeners will appreciate Sakamoto's breadth of reference: to Chopin (Ubi), Bach (Andata, Solari), Glass (Bibo no Aozora), Satie (Opus), Brahms (Intermezzo) and Ravel (Bachata), for example. But his language of minimalist jazz is one enjoyed around the world as music that gives listeners the space to think and work and create for themselves.

Gibbons, Monteverdi and Willaert represent the high watermark of madrigal writing in England, Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Their subtle marriage of music and text has produced enduring miniature masterpieces of love lost and found and pastoral humour. And there are no shortage of distinguished contemporaries in those countries. But Spain, the home of golden-age polyphony, also had a lively tradition of madrigal composition, too little of which is known beyond native shores. This fine new recording should address that shortcoming. In fact Spain already had a flourishing culture of secular songs in the form of villancicos when Italian composers arrived at royal courts and chapels during the 16th century and bringing with them their own traditions of popular music. Mateo Flecha ‘The Younger’ was a Catalan, Carmelite monk who showed himself adaptable to this Italian influence in his own book of madrigals, eventually published in Venice and excerpted here. Joan Brudieu (1520-1591) was a Frenchman also living in Catalonia who published madrigals in Spanish and Catalan (both languages represented in this collection). Even less familiar is the name of Pedro Valenzuela – his dates are lost to us – but he uses a sophisticated harmonic vocabulary with acute sensitivity to text in a trio of Italian-texted madrigals. He had emigrated to Italy as a singer at St Mark’s in Venice, and he was followed by Sebastián Raval, while Stefano Limido travelled in the other direction. Thus as a whole the collection illustrates a stimulating cross-fertilisation of Spanish and Italian styles in consort music. The performances are both polished and authoritative, attentive to original sources and grounded in a thorough understanding of madrigalian style. Founded by its director José Duce Chenoll in 2010, the Amystis ensemble already has an impressive catalogue of recordings to its name. ‘Fervently committed readings,’ remarked Sir Nicholas Kenyon in The Observer of their complete Cabanilles collection.

Founded in 1985, the Kammerata Luxembourg has established itself at the centre of the country’s musical life with new commissions, concert series and recordings, supported by its ministry of culture. One recent enterprising series was named ‘The European Union Enlarges’, focusing on the chamber music of future EU states, and others such as this album have constructed enlightening juxtapositions of modern and Romantic-era repertoire. Few composers from the 19th century have exercised so potent an influence upon composers of our time as Robert Schumann. His abrupt changes of mood and intense, passionate commitment to individual expressive states have seized the imagination of many composers as well as listeners. Not the least of them is Schumann’s fellow German AribertReimann, In arranging the Fantasiestücke Op.73, Reimann altered not a note of the clarinet part while arranging the piano accompaniment for the unusual combination of flute, a harp and two violas, which enables him to explore both the sombre timbres and the more ethereal hues of the score. The Op.107 songs are united by both a theme of unrequited love and a mood of wistful other-worldliness, which Reimann accentuates with an often-Expressionist recasting of the piano part for string quartet. The other original work here is the collection of canonic pieces originally written for a pedal piano and arranged by Schumann’s contemporary Theodor Kirchner. Meanwhile, the two contemporary responses to Schumann are undertaken in a spirit of the most sincere love and homage. Kurtág’s instrumentation for clarinet, viola and piano refers back to the Op.132 Märchenerzählungen – fairy tales – and he peppers his score with both literary allusions and references back to the object of his homage. Jörg Widmann likewise evokes Schumann’s Op.23 Nachtstücke in his own trio for clarinet, cello and piano. Anyone fearful of new music need not hesitate: Widmann insinuates himself into a world of Romantic melancholy with uncanny skill.

In these two string trios may be heard the voice of the young Beethoven at its most personal and polished. They were composed just before and just after his critical move from Bonn to Vienna, where he proceeded to establish himself in the wake of Haydn and Mozart. Both composers cast their own contrarian shadows over Beethoven’s trios. Beethoven adopted both the form and tonality of Mozart’s sublime E flat Trio-Divertimento for his first essay in the genre, and yet otherwise went out of his way to distance his own work from its apparent exemplar. The accentuation of weak beats in the first Minuet is typical of Beethoven’s headstrong manner, even if the second is more Mozartian. Elsewhere the young man reveals himself quite capable of inhabiting an idiom of Viennese grace and courtly charm, but equally likely to subvert and rebel against it. From a couple of years later, the Serenade also opens in bold and striking fashion, with a Spanish-accented march, but the peaceful Andante and solemn, French-style Adagio follow older models deriving from Baroque-era trio sonatas. Most unusual – at least in 1795 – is the fifth-movement Polonaise, linking the very different languages of Rameau and Chopin. The Serenade concludes with an expansive variation movement where Beethoven does at last acknowledge some debt to Mozart – yet the overall impression left by both works is of a skilled craftsmanship that owes most to the teaching he received from Haydn and Salieri.

Comprising Alessandro Milani (violin), Luca Ranieri (viola) and Pierpaolo Toso (cello), this trio was founded in 2004, reviving the name of the classic ensemble led by Franco Gulli, with Bruno Giuranna and Giacinto Caramia, who performed and recorded the landmark works of the string trio repertoire in the 60s and 70s.

The romance in music is an often-overlooked, independent genre. Vocal romanzas were popular from the 15th century onwards, with their roots in the songs of medieval troubadours. Many slow concerto movements carry the subtitle, too, with its implication of softness, gentleness and melodic beauty. But more and more composers through the 19th century grasped the possibilities of the Romance as an instrumental song without words and a form in its own right. They had before them a growing audience of non-connoisseur listeners and amateur performers who would take delight in accessible but touching music: these are the origins of the music on this album. From an extensive field, Davide Alogna has constructed a beautifully varied sequence of Romances by celebrated and lesser-known composers. The two best examples of the genre remain those composed on the cusp of the 19th century by Beethoven, though they are little heard in concert these days. Seventy years later, Saint-Saëns enriched the repertoire with his own pair of Romances, more richly expressive compared to Beethoven’s delicacy and restraint. From later still the mood changes again, with the fresh Slavonic rhythms of Dvorák’s F minor Romance, the cool beauty of Svendsen’s G major Romance and the ripe sentimentality of Bruch’s F major Romance (originally for viola and orchestra).

Having completed his studies at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena, Davide Alogna was acclaimed by his teacher Giuliano Carmignola as ‘an amazing talent’. A previous recording was praised for its virtuosity and brilliance by the Italian Musica magazine, and his partnership with the veteran pianist Bruno Canino has delighted audiences throughout Europe.