When the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals revived the solo suites of Bach in the first decades of the last century, he reminded both audiences and composers of the huge potential of his instrument to hold the stage in its own right, no less than a violin or a piano. Inspired by his charisma, and that of his successors such as Tortelier and Rostropovich, many modern composers have followed Bach’s example. The Italian cellist presents music by ten of them on this exciting debut album for Brilliant Classics. Tortelier and Rostropovich are represented by their own, little-known but highly imaginative works – a Circus Suite and an innocently titled but fearsomely challenging study respectively. Carter Brey, the principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, has also written for the instrument with inside knowledge, in a tango of big, seductive gestures preceded on Tarantino’s album by Latin-themed showpieces from Albeniz, Piazzolla and Rogerio y Taguell. Each half of the album is brought to a reflective close with a soliloquy by the modern Italian composer Giovanni Sollima. The cello’s melancholy moods are further explored by Ilse de Ziah and Sebastian Diezig, but Tarantino has chosen and ordered his repertoire to display the cello’s expressive range to its fullest. Mixing familiar and little-known composers, it’s a perfect introduction to the ever-expanding universe of solo cello music beyond Bach. Born in 1977, Luciano Tarantino is a performer and teacher with his origins in Puglia, in the far south of Italy. He has played with many of today’s greatest conductors and founded a music festival in the region of his birth. On this recording he plays a fine 1736 cello by Antonio Testore.

Poulenc once declared that ‘the musical transposition of a poem must be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.’ By the age of four he was already able to recite Mallarme’s Apparition by heart, and while still very young he made his first efforts at setting verses to music. He loved listening to poets read their own work, and he was a voracious reader, who saw his purpose as a composer to embellish to enrich but never to obscure the words or their meaning. Poulenc loved singers and good singing as much as poetry. All these cycles were written with particular artists in mind; several of them for his life partner, the baritone Pierre Bernac, but he also worked very closely with Clare Croiza and Denise Duval, among others. Thus his vocal lines reflect their individual personalities while being couched in his own, very singable, jazz-inflected idiom. Valentina Coladonato has chosen a path less travelled through Poulenc’s song oeuvre, avoiding the Chansons villageoises and Air chantes. Yet in La Fraîcheur et le feu, setting Poulenc’s contemporary Paul Eluard, we find an intensity and urgency of expression to rival his masterpiece, the Dialogues of the Carmelites. Motifs from the opera recur in another Eluard cycle, Le travail du peintre, which addresses seven modern painters in turn from Picasso to Villon. A bittersweet air lingers over the Dernier poeme by Desnos, Aragon’s C and the monologue La dame de Monte Carlo; but his extrovert, amusing music-hall side comes to the fore in Les chemins de l’amour, based on Jean Anouilh’s Leocadia and dedicated to Yvonne Printemps, who was a singer of light music. Even within the same cycle there are contrasting moments that eloquently illustrate Poulenc’s own artistic credo: ‘My music is my portrait’. A specialist in early and new music, the soprano Valentina Coladonato has worked with conductors including Riccardo Muti and Claudio Abbado. She and Claudio Proietti have also recorded the Shakespeare Sonnets of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for Brilliant Classics (BC95548).

Born in 1971, Marco lo Muscio is an organist, pianist and composer who has performed on the great organs of Europe and the US. His own music been performed by the likes of Christopher Herrick, Thomas Trotter and David Briggs. This album focuses on another, more intimate side of his output. There are pieces dedicated to his mother and to the memory of his late father; tributes to both Debussy and Satie; meditations on literary themes from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in a neo-medieval style; a pair of ricercari originally composed for organ, paying homage to Renaissance-era counterpoint; and to begin with Three American Preludes. Composed in 2001, the first two of the preludes were also Lo Muscio’s first works intended for the piano. Their bluesy harmonies and ostinato bass lines are inspired by the playing of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. The third of them (from 2009) is a homage to Jarrett, but composed in the style of prog rock – an idiom that the organist adopted with such success that he began to work with the guitarist Steve Hackett, founder member of Genesis. Since first meeting Hackett in 2008, Lo Muscio has made many transcriptions of prog rock classics (by Genesis and others) in a parallel career to his own compositions. The two careers intersect here with Horizons, written by Hackett in 1972 for the Genesis album Foxtrot, and itself derived from the Prelude to Bach’s G major Cello Suite. In 2009 Lo Muscio composed his own Meditations on Horizons, which transforms elements of Hackett’s piece with a habanera rhythm Having established a career as a pianist with a speciality in the music of Bach (as winner of the 1995 J.S.Bach International Piano Competition), Andrea Padova has attracted international praise for his performances and recordings. His performance of the Goldberg Variation has won glowing encomia: The Washington Post wrote that he ‘conveys the sense of successfully exceeding the limits of human possibility.’ This is his debut recording on Brilliant Classics.

Born near Naples, Egidio Romualdo Duni (1708-1775) enjoyed success with operas presented in Rome and Milan in the 1730s before moving to London in 1736 and then to the Netherlands for a decade. The six trio sonatas were published in Rotterdam around 1739, while the attractive collection of minuets and contredanses appeared in London the previous year. Together they form Duni's only published collections of chamber music; the greater part of his output remained opera, both serious and comic, and the melodic flair of these works displays the artistic signature of a composer for the stage. The trio sonatas follow the template for the form laid down by the likes of Corelli and Geminiani. Scored originally for two violins and continuo, they proceed in fast-slow-fast fashion with a melodic flair offset by an unusually elaborate bass line: unlike many comparable collections of domestically scaled music, Duni's trio sonatas are written not for amateurs but for court musicians both to enjoy for themselves and to give pleasure to others. The minuets and contredanses bear an obsequious dedication to an English noblewoman, indicating that they too were composed to tickle aristocratic palates. The DuniEnsemble presents the first complete recording of both collections, on period instruments and according to historically informed performance principles - which in this case include a liberal attitude to the instrumentation. The chosen pair of melody instruments is not confined to violins but extended to include flutes and recorders, while the basso continuo part is brought to life by a richly colored ensemble of bassoon, guitar, mandolin, theorbo, cello and harpsichord, varied work by work. The musicians of the DuniEnsemble presented this music in concert in 2018 at Duni's birthplace of Matera, but they have been performing as a group since 2003.

Aurelio Bonelli's life is shrouded in mystery and today little remains of his creative output. The set features works from the collection Il primo libro de ricercari et canzoni a quattro voci of which only two copies remain. An artist by day it's thought he learnt painting from Agostino Carracci, a key figure of the Bologna School. They worked together on the frescos of Bologna's Olivetan monastery of San Michele in Bosco and in approximately 1611 Bonelli was appointed monastery organist. The set opens with eight four-part Ricercari. This gives a fascinating insight into how the Italian ricercar evolved from simply a vessel for compositional experimentation with few formal structures, to a defined style governed by rules, eventually making it the keyboard equivalent of the liturgical vocal motet. Bonelli's ricercari can be placed in the middle of this transition period. Ricercar del Secondo Tuono and Ricercar del Quinto Tuono for example have identifiable forms but irregularities occur with the introduction of new stylistic and formal elements at the end of the second section which contradict received ideas about the tripartite form. Classical themes are reflected in the eight four-part canzoni where names are drawn from mythology and epics: 'Licori', 'Arete', 'Urania', 'Istrina', 'Nisa', 'Irene', 'Artemisia' and 'Erina'. Again, we hear the conflict between experimentation and modern rules, and the pieces all feature four or five different themes and regularly change metres. This gives the impression there are as many as four or five different parts while only 'Urania' strictly follows the ternary structure. Federico Del Sordo plays the organ of the Abbey of San Magno. Dating from the 1600s, it is the oldest organ with surviving double pedals, allowing works written for two organs to be performed. The artist also plays a harpsichord strung with iron wire rather than brass to replicate the sound of the period. This release is a rare find and offers us a comprehensive overview of Bonelli, and his repertoire provides a detailed snapshot of the era's musical progression.

'O Rosa Bella' is the title of two popular 15th-century chansons, the earlier composed by Johannes Ciconia and the latter originally attributed to John Dunstable, but now to John Bedyngham. The text is based on a poem written by Leonardo Giustiniani (1300-1446): 'O lovely rose, My sweet soul; Let me not die In courtly love.' More than 20 works were based on this popular theme by composers including Johannes Ockeghem, and a Mass attributed to Gilles Joye. Born around 1420, in the Belgian town of Courtai, Joye worked as a singer and lived beyond his means. Having taken up a prestigious ecclesiastical post in Bruges, he was sent by the church fathers on a pilgrimage in order to atone for misdemeanors, but he continued to accumulate debts which compelled him to sell all his possessions; he died in penury. The song which Joye took as the basis for his Mass circulated widely during the 15th century; by a curious coincidence, Rosabella was also the name of Joye's lover with whom he lived openly (and imprudently). The recording follows performance practice of the time by using only male voices doubled by instruments for the two Masses and mixed voices for the Chansons. The chosen instrumentation includes shawm, slide trumpet, sackbut, cornetto, recorder, lute, gothic harp and psaltery: an authentic but richly colored ensemble. Although there are previous recordings of the Mass and the chansons, all the music recorded here has been newly transcribed from original sources by two of it's performers, Min J. Kim and David Brutti. The recording took place in the Umbrian church of San Francesco in Trevi, where the original organ survives, dating from 1508, and thus retaining a sound-world that resembles one known to the likes of Dunstable and Joye.

This survey is the sequel to comparably comprehensive Brilliant Classics collections of 20th-century guitar preludes and sonatas. The sonatinas included take their place as part of a long process of study conducted by Cristiano Porqueddu over the past few years. The high percentage of world premiere recordings - more than half of the entire tracklist - should give a good idea of how the research was conducted: as with the two previous releases, space has been given to those works that rarely appear either in concert or on record, in order to give voice to a considerable amount of excellent music almost completely ignored. Porqueddu made a longlist of over 60 sonatinas by 20th-century and by living composers, before narrowing down the final choice to the 17 performed here. Before Porqueddu, of course, there was the pioneer of modern guitar performance a century ago, Andres Segovia, who commissioned and inspired countless composers to write for him. One of those was the English composer Cyril Scott, and while Segovia expressed some misgivings about the result – ‘I’m not head over heels about it’, he wrote to his friend Manuel Ponce – the three-movement Sonatina makes a fine test of any guitarist’s musicianship and effectively inhabits the Spanish guitar tradition with its mysterious slow introduction and hypnotic central, Flamenco-style slow movement. The sonatinas by Mark Delpriora, Carlos Surinach and Albert Harris are no less compressed in expression, using the sonatina form to pack ideas into ten minutes that would occupy half an hour in the hands of lesser composers. The seven works of Angelo Gilardino are more expansive, though full of character, testifying to the unique relationship between composer and performer: Porqueddu himself. The pieces by Alberto Franco and Franco Cavallone were also composed with Porqueddu in mind, while the Sonatina Lirica by Segovia’s English pupil John Duarte is a hidden gem. ‘a most compelling collection from five composers, none of whom were guitarists… coruscating variety, fine recorded sound and lovingly shaped playing.’ (MusicWeb International). ‘Porqueddu’s work is once more of excellent quality and shows how he is able to create individual interpretations of contemporary repertoire.’ (Seicorde).

Born in 1941, Angelo Gilardino enjoys an extensive discography on Brilliant Classics, which has won international acclaim both for the beauty of the music and the authority and sensitivity of the performances. In 2008 Gilardino arranged a set of his solo studies based on the music of Mauro Giuliani and dedicated them to the ensemble on this album, the Quartetto Santorsola. They comprise seven brief pieces, with a dashing tarantella at their heart. The year previously, he had written a three-movement Sinfonietta expressly for guitar quartet, in which each movement pays tribute to an inspirational figure in the history of the instrument from the early part of the last century: Ferenc Farkas, Alexander Tansman and finally Teresa de Rogastis, evoking their musical personalities and playing styles within a fast-slow-fast design that makes for a substantial work in its own right. Gilardino’s own work is complemented here by his transcription of ‘Andalucia,’ a piano cycle by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, as Gilardino himself observes in a booklet essay, the cycle belongs to the Spanish heritage of Albeniz and Granados: “It seemed appropriate to make this version for four guitars that, while not competing with the dynamic range of the piano original, nonetheless lives up to the color and brilliance of Lecuona’s inspiration.”

No one knows who first used the term ‘Folia’ to describe a kind of Portuguese dance, or even when it became associated with a particular theme immortalised by Arcangelo Corelli in the last of his Op.5 violin sonatas. However, as La Folia or La Follia, the theme has been improvised on and updated ever since then, all drawing on the noble dignity of the original and its simple, effective power. Born in 1956, Carlo Pedini produced a half-hour set of variations on ‘La Follia’ in 2007, and scored them for string orchestra: this is the first internationally available recording, made by an ensemble drawn from the string section of the KLK Symphony Orchestra in Ukraine. They are conducted here by a contemporary and countryman of Pedini’s Ferdinando Nazzaro, who founded the new-music ensemble attached to the KLK orchestra. Complementing La Follia here is another neo-Baroque work of Pedini’s, a set of three substantial pieces for string orchestra with a central adagio and a finale dedicated to the art of the neoclassical painter Antonio Canova. The album concludes with a second set of ‘La Follia’ variations by Paolo Ugoletti, also born in 1956 and a fellow student of Franco Donatoni. These take the theme into the territory of pop, with variations marked ‘Boogie-Woogie’ and ‘Funky’ using innovative string techniques. Dedicated to the conductor of this recording, Ugoletti’s rhapsody ‘Il sentiero dei castagni’ (The Chestnut-Tree Path) completes this album which is a must-hear for fans of attractive tonal music by contemporary composers off the beaten track.

Born in Genoa in 1819, Carlo Andrea Gambini began his career as a piano teacher to local aristocracy thanks to his family's privileged connections. Showing equal energy and invention in both words and music, however, he soon pursued parallel activities as a composer and a critic. He was friends with both Rossini and Mercadante but held Verdi's music in little esteem. His own music looks to the north of the Alps for it's inspiration: to Chopin and Schumann, Thalberg and Liszt. Though he engaged in operatic composition - writing a Christopher Columbus drama, for example - Gambini focused his compositional energies on piano music and vocal chamber works such as the Romanzas recorded for the first time on this album. This genre enjoyed huge popularity at the time in Italy, though it's format did not translate readily or survive well beyond the 19th century: the nearest equivalents would be English and German ballads, at least until Reinaldo Hahn cast a spell over the drawing rooms of fin-de-si�cle Paris. Cast between a song and an operatic scena, Gambini's romanzas set texts by contemporary lyricists such as Felice Romani (librettist for Bellini's Norma and much else besides) and the Genovese poet Giuseppe Torre. They talk of love and loneliness, the sea and the shore, and Gambini's settings burn with declamatory fire and passionate confession. This is the second album of Gambini's music on Brilliant Classics, following an absorbing survey of his organ music, played by Marco Ruggeri. The soloist here is soprano Benedetta Torre, whose career highlights include singing the High Priestess in Aida under Riccardo Muti at the 2017 Salzburg Festival, as well as Amelia Grimaldi at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Naples.

As a teacher of theory and composition at the Milan Conservatory in Rome, Bruno Bettinelli (1913-2004) had a decisive influence on the careers of Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Chailly, Riccardo Muti and Maurizio Pollini. At least outside his native Italy, his work as a teacher has overshadowed his own music, which is now being recognised as the output of a distinctive voice in the generation between Luigi Dallapiccola and modernist pioneers such as Luigi Nono. Like his chamber music, however, Bettinelli's piano music also reveals a debt to the instrumental composers at the turn of the last century who worked against the grain in this land of lyric and song: men such as Casella, Malipiero and Ghedini, all of them represented on Brilliant Classics with important revivals of chamber and piano music. Bettinelli deserves his place alongside them, as a first listen to the bold Fantasia will make clear. Composed in 1955, the five sections of the Fantasia make free use of tonality in the context of post- Romantic writing for the piano that presents a challenge to the most accomplished technique; one which Chiara Cipelli overcomes with flying colours. The most ambitious work on the album, the Fantasia is preceded by the more picaresque charms of a three-movement Suite agreste and followed by two contrasting collections of miniatures, the 18 Easy Pieces from 1941 - owing something to neoclassical Hindemith - and the 10 exquisite fragments which make up Sintesi. Written in 1970, Sintesi distils Bettinelli's own adoption of atonal technique to it's most poetic essence. Chiara Cipelli is herself active as a teacher, as a professor of piano in Cremona and Reggio Emilia, but also maintains a busy performing career, with concerts across Europe and the US and a repertoire that places emphasis on the music of our time.

The works in this collection attest to the high standard of music-making in Naples. The composers here recorded were at the forefront of the achievements of Neapolitan music in the first half of the 18th century, the golden age of music production in the southern Italian centre. And the Neapolitan style at this time was fashionable beyond the borders of Italy, as well. Among all the composers presented, only Mancini lived and worked almost all his life in Naples. The others spent their lives travelling or serving foreign courts. This programme exploits the felicitous pairing of the voice with flute, two instruments similarly tied to the expressivity of human breath. Throughout this programme a baroque transverse flute, or ‘traverso’, is used, either called for specifically or substituted for the recorder. When these pieces were written the two types of flute still existed alongside each other as equals, as they had done for centuries before the transverse variety began to dominate later in the 18th century. Use of the viola da gamba for the bass part also finds justification in Naples. While in Rome the instrument had almost completely disappeared by the first half of the 17th century, it endured in Naples and continued to be used. Several mid-18th-century viole da gamba, preserved to this day, in various sizes by luthiers from the Neapolitan Gaglian family attest to the much later persistence of this instrument in that area.

On this new recording, Coro Victoria offers a portrait of Alonso Lobo (1555-1617) through a cross-section of his sacred output (his works in Spanish are all lost). The group also illustrates the variety of interpretative practices of the period. The concluding O quam suavis est Domine is sung by a single soprano while the vihuela accompaniment supplies the remaining five parts. Church choirs sang this music in the liturgy, but minstrels also played it during processions, and there was free traffic between sacred and secular contexts. Coro Victoria was founded by it's director, Ana Fern�ndez-Vega, to recover and preserve a native, historically informed tradition of singing Spanish polyphony from it's Renaissance-era high noon, exemplified not only by Victoria himself but also his contemporaries such as the Seville-born and bred Alonso Lobo (indeed, Victoria considered Lobo his equal). He is now best known for a haunting, six-voice setting of the Requiem, and his magnificent motet for the obsequies of King Philip II, Versa est in luctum shares the Requiem's tone of mourning and remembrance, established by a dense mesh of overlapping counterpoint. Coro Victoria also presents other sides to a composer whose style is far more various than is commonly assumed. As well as the beautifully handled techniques of canon and counterpoint in Marian motets such as Ave Maria and Ave Regina coelorum, distinguishing features of Lobo's style are his jagged melodic lines, a far cry from Palestrina's smooth curves, and his more animated conclusions, both vividly demonstrated by Vivo ego, dicit Dominus. There is also a complete, portmanteau setting of the Mass, drawn from his Missa O Rex gloriae, Missa Petre ego pro te rogavi and Missa Simile est regnum caelorum, with the Credo filled in by the separate Credo Romano, which is underpinned by a figured bass and continued to be popular long after his death. These polished performances should renew wider interest in Lobo's music.

This recording presents some of the most significant early pieces by the Cuban composer Leo Brouwer (b.1939); it also includes other works, such as Hika from 1994 and the third and fourth series of his Estudios sencillos (1981), which show clear similarities with the composer's early style. First to be composed of the works here is a Danza caracteristica from 1956. A popular song melody forms the basis for an Afro-Cuban flavored fantasy. The Fugue No.1 dates from the following year, when Brouwer was still a teenager: having outlined a theme of Baroque proportions he takes a fairly free attitude to its contrapuntal elaboration, anticipating the concise play of fantasy in the Tres Apuntes of 1959. Having soon after moved to the US, Brouwer composed the first two books of the Estudios sencillos out of financial necessity, but they have proved among his most enduring and successful works, drawing energy not only from his Cuban heritage but the didactic economy of the Mikrokosmos by Bartók. Almost all of the third and fourth books from the series date from 1981; although Brouwer had both moved back to Cuba by then as well as moved on in his own style towards a more neo-romantic language, he rediscovered the lively economy of thought which runs through the earlier studies, combining it with both neoclassical harmonies and even chance procedures to produce among the most significant collections of guitar studies from the second half of the last century. ‘These short pieces reflect all of Brouwer’s creative genius,’ says Frédéric Zigante, ‘and I have always been fond of them, first as a young student of guitar and later as a guitar teacher. To me, they are an ideal method for weaning young guitarists from the didactic repertory of the 19th century.’

After Amelia goes to the ball was staged in 1937 at the Metropolitan Opera with acclaim, Gian Carlo Menotti became hot property. Two further radio operas were comparative failures but it was with The Medium that Menotti really hit his stride. A tragedy in two acts for five singers, a dance-mime role and a chamber orchestra of 14 players, Menotti’s opera is both dramatically astute in the Puccini tradition and composed with an acute ear for mood and mystery: the score, often quite dissonant, conveys an eerie, morbid atmosphere. According to the composer, “The Medium is actually a play of ideas. It describes the tragedy of a woman caught between two worlds, a world of reality which she cannot wholly comprehend, and a supernatural world in which she cannot believe.” Premiered in 1945, The Medium received its first Broadway staging two years later, with a hugely successful run of 212 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. As a curtain-raiser for these performances (and a striking contrast), Menotti wrote a light one-act comedy in the opera buffa tradition, The Telephone, which he sub-titled L’amour à trois. The opera’s central role of Lucy became a huge success for its first interpreter, Marilyn Cotlow, and now the young American soprano Elizabeth Hertzberg steps into her shoes with an assured portrayal. Made under studio conditions in Modena in 2018, these recordings took place in association with semi-staged performances given by artists on the distinguished Raina Kabaivanska Masterclass programme. According to the Giornale della Musica, Hertzberg was ‘excellent’ as Lucy, and more critical praise was directed towards the fluent and insightful conducting of Scogna. There are comparatively few modern recordings to rival the classic 1947 recording; an essential acquisition for avid listeners of 20th century music theatre.