Lorna Windsor’s selection of eight 20th and 21st-century composers highlights how the voice incarnates different expressive forms more than any instrument. Left naked in its primeval state, the voice leads each composer to rediscover his personal voice, unfettered by convention. Six of the eight composers represented here were born within the same five years, from 1926 (Kurtág and Feldman) to 1931 (Bussotti, Kagel), in 1929 Pousseur, in 1930 De Pablo. Andriessen was born slightly after in 1939 whilst only Macmillan (b.1959) belongs to the following generation. Bold simplicity is the keynote of Feldman’s brief setting of Rilke, Only: purely diatonic across its two minute span, whereas Henri Pousseur’s equally concise tribute to Baudelaire uses a 12-tone technique to create the illusion of diatonicism. In the hands of Luis de Pablo, Góngora’s evocation of a flight of storks creating patterns in the sky, is suggested by melismatic use of the voice, with arpeggios and filigree in quasi-instrumental notation, with arabesque-like writing which hints at distant Arabic hues of flamenco. In Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, György Kurtág set the caustic aphorisms of a18th-century German physicist and writer with lightning flashes of insight and expression. By contrast, A Song of the Sea by Louis Andriessen requires the singer to sit (in performance) with a doll on her lap as she tells a sad little story with a simplicity redolent of folksong. Bussotti and Kagel both made far more thoroughgoing exploration of vocal technique in the Lettura di Braibanti and The Tower of Babel respectively. Lorna Windsor closes her recital with the most extended work on the album: in angustiis II, a lament by James Macmillan which presents a grief-stricken image of humanity crying out to God. She is a specialist in early and contemporary repertoire who can call upon several languages as mother tongues.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi owes much of his fame to La Serva Padrona, a comic intermezzo designed to be performed between the acts of an opera seria. In it, a maid and a servant conspire to convince their master to marry the maid. When Aldo Tarabella was asked to direct a performance of Pergolesi's intermezzo, he wanted to do more than simply pair it with one of the operas it traditionally sits alongside - so he composed Il Servo Padrone, a companion piece, and a kind of sequel, to Pergolesi's original. At the level of the plot, things come full circle, and by the end, master and servants have returned to where things began, highlighting the difficulty of fundamentally changing social conditions. A kind of emancipation seemed within reach, but is ultimately not achieved - in some senses, the reverse of what one might expect given the transformation of social roles in Europe among (at least middle-class) women in the 17th century and since. Musically, however, this homage to an 18th-century musical form is very much brought into the present day. It's arias are developed in an atonal context and it's recitatives leave traditional Classical form behind to travel symbolically towards the light-hearted episodes found in 20th-century musical comedy. This unique album is the first ever recording of Tarabella's tributary composition.

These are the first-ever recordings of music composed by Jos� (Pepito) Arriola, whose works are virtually unknown. Born in Betanzos in the northern Spanish region of Galicia in 1895, Arriola was a celebrated child prodigy known at the time as a 'Galician Mozart', who dazzled audiences across Europe and American with his piano-playing. Most of Arriola's work was lost when his home in Berlin was destroyed during the Second World War. The manuscripts for the three concertos and two song-cycles presented here were discovered just a few years ago, and mysteriously vanished almost as soon as they had been photocopied for dissemination. They were composed in the final decade of Arriola's life: in 1946 he settled in Barcelona, where he lived quietly until his death in 1954. Arriola's music belongs to the second golden age of Spanish music, that of Alb�niz, Granados, Turina and Falla (and, a little later, Joaqu�n Rodrigo), flavoured by nationalism and the rich Spanish folk tradition, along with a verismo that concerned itself with the ordinary people of Spain and their suffering (as mirrored in Carmen, or Candela in El amor brujo). Yet in common with other post-Romantic composers, Arriola sought out a world of vanished beauty, experimenting with color, texture, unusual tonal combinations and harmony full of color, sensuality and emotion. As a student in Leipzig, Arriola had been taught by Richard Strauss, and his teacher's influence may be heard to positive effect in both the soaring vocal lines of the Tres textos cervantinos and the transplanted Classical idiom of the Horn Concerto. The piano-writing in the Concertino and Divertimento concertante is more compact and Stravinskian, while two songs from the cycle of Seis poes�as de Antonio Machado disclose yet another, more impassioned facet of Arriola's style.

The Antegnatis were a family of organ builders who produced some of the best-known instruments of the 16th century, many of which can be found in churches across northern Italy. In total, they constructed an estimated 400 organs. Costanzo Antegnati was perhaps the most influential member of the family, and his set of 12 ricercars – the centrepiece of this recording – was published alongside his treatise on organ tuning and registration. The compositions were of such high quality and popularity that they were subsequently included in the Intavolatura d’organo tedesca, the most extensive manuscript source of keyboard works known today, containing a good 1,770 pieces by composers from Italy and Northern Europe. Interwoven between Antegnati's pieces are works by other composers of the same period. Notable among these is Anton Holzer's three canzoni, of which this is the first complete recording, and Agostino Soderini's Canzon La Ducalina, a fascinating short piece in which the keyboard writing closely follows the pronunciation of a virtual text and at times sounds like poetry being recited. Federico Del Sordo is a renowned continuo player who has devoted himself for more than 15 years to the study of the alternatim repertoire. For this recording, he performs primarily on a 17th-century organ installed in a Brescia church by Graziadio Antegnati III; variety is added to the set by the inclusion of harpsichord and clavichord performances.

Born in Bergamo in 1822, Carlo Alfredo Piatti was to the cello what Nicolò Paganini was to the violin: a musician who extended the possibilities of his instrument in performance and who inspired countless composers to do the same in writing for it. His remarkable talent was immediately evident, to the extent that by 1843 he was already travelling throughout Europe on concert tours, accompanied by his father. It was Franz Liszt who described him as ‘a Paganini of the Cello’, presenting him with an Amati instrument as a token of his admiration. Piatti’s concert-tours culminated in a visit to London, where he settled in 1846.

In the mid-1800s, musical life in the British capital was full of energy and opportunity. When Verdi learnt that it would be Piatti leading the cellos in the first performances of his new opera, I Masnadieri, he wrote a Prelude consisting of a cello solo with an orchestral accompaniment, which he dedicated to the great cellist. In his own compositions Piatti reconciled virtuoso figurations with a highly lyrical approach to melody which is on show here in two of the songs he wrote for English audiences: O Swallow, Swallow (to a text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson) and La Sera (‘I love the hour of the dying day’), an evening-time, sentimental ballad incorporating a cello solo clearly modelled on the opening of Rossini’s William Tell Overture and astutely calculated to tug at the heartstrings of his well-to-do patrons, who would also want to perform such songs themselves. However, the bulk of Piatti’s music was designed to show his own skill as a cellist to best advantage. This he triumphantly did with the stupendously virtuosic Capriccio Op.22 on a theme from Pacini’s Niobe. The better-known Capricci Op.25 are not included here; instead, the opportunity has been taken by Andrea Noferini to record some of Piatti’s lesser-known, standalone pieces such as the attractive Op.1 L’abbandono, and Notturno Op.20.

These songs for one and two voices come from the first four of D'India's five books of Musiche, a series containing masterpieces of astonishing originality in the style of monody (solo melody with accompaniment), which had eclipsed the polyphonic madrigal in popularity at the dawn of the 17th century. With a career based largely in Turin and Rome, Sigismondo D'India nevertheless demonstrates stylistic links to both Monteverdi and Gesualdo, and it is the latter's influence which supports new scholarship claiming D'India grew up in Naples (not Sicily) in the shadow of the great madrigalist's free thinking on harmony. That very harmonic freedom - to accentuate key emotions in the text with piquant chord changes - is the hallmark of D'India's own, self-styled 'true manner' of composing monody, adopted from Gesualdo's intense, chromatic polyphony to the solo song or duet, and it suggests a Neapolitan, rather than Roman-Florentine, musical background. In D'India's own words, he uses 'intervals out of the ordinary, moving with the greatest invention from one consonance to the next, depending on the variety of the meaning of the words' for 'greater impact and greater power to move the emotions of the soul'. It is this sense for the dramatic power of song that positions D'India as a true proto-operatic composer. In fact, his three-part setting of Clorinda's death scene from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Amico hai vinto) predates by several years that of his contemporary Monteverdi: the revolutionary Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Perhaps the young D'India's wide travels across Italy, absorbing the musical styles at each locale and acquiring a broad grasp of the varied stylistic practices throughout the peninsula in the early Baroque, gave him the conviction to claim his own style as the 'true manner'. In any case, it's originality and vision are truly remarkable.

With his characteristically deft economy of means, Henri Dutilleux explored the two characteristics of the bassoon that have defined it in popular imagination ever since Mickey Mouse whirled his broom in vain at the climax of Walt Disney's cartoon realization of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: despite it's somber title, the Sarabande et Cort�ge of 1942 encloses both mournfulness and wit. So too, in no less concise terms, does the Sonatina of Tansman from a decade later. Dutilleux's work opens this recital, but the earliest work here dates from two decades previously, the Sonata which captures in a nutshell the effortlessly easy-going charm of Saint-Sa�ns's late music, composed with all the succinct mastery of expression to be expected of one who had never been short of a good tune for more than seven decades. Hindemith's Sonata of 1938 is briefer still but a much darker work, anchored by a grave march-rhythm second movement which perhaps reflects the troubled times it's composition. The value of Carmen Mainer Mart�n's personal selection of repertoire lies in it's diversity of styles. Listening to the album should banish forever any notion of the bassoon as a one- or two-note instrument alternating eccentrically between rubicund jollity and doleful introspection. There are three waltzes for solo bassoon by Francisco Mignone, one of the most talented Brazilian composers working in the generation after Villa-Lobos; and to finish, a remarkable set of variations (Ocho variaciones sobre la imagen de un sue�o, from 2017) by the Argentinian Alex Dante, born in 1994. This is scored for the unusual combination of bassoon, flute and piano, and dedicated to the two wind-playing sisters on this recording. Born and raised in Spain, Carmen Mainer Mart�n now lives and works as both a teacher and performer in Paris.

This collection of 17 lullabies constitutes a particularly charming selection of songs for children, songs about children and indeed songs to send them to sleep. Alongside old favorites such as Wiegenlieder by Schubert, Brahms and Reger, Letizia Calandra has programmed much less frequently encountered examples of the genre. The album opens with two lullabies by Vincenzo Davico (1889-1969), a one-time student of Reger who wrote in a direct and appealing idiom. These form part of a mini-cycle of songs, Ninna nanne popolaresche, completed in the penultimate track. There are one or two older works by Merula and Mozart, but by and large the collection focuses on the 20th century, with memorable melodies and tender expressions by Puccini, Chaminade and Tosti. There are also two lullabies by another lesser-known Italian composer of the last century, Anna Filippone Del Bono. The first was written for the birth of her grandson Lello, while the second, the Ninna nanna di guerra, is a more lyrical piece in which the instrumental part and vocal line are deliberately separate, with a text full of echoes of the First World War and a sense of ineluctable sadness. The delight of this recording owes much to the art of soprano Letizia Calandra, who interprets the individual songs with great intelligence and empathy, delicately differentiating between the moods and intentions of the various composers. A graduate of the Accademia della Santa Cecilia in Rome, Calandra has worked with many of Italy's foremost early-music directors such as Diego Fasolis and Claudio Cavina. 'Scarlatti and the Neapolitan Song' was Letizia Calandra's debut album for Brilliant Classics. According to MusicWeb International, 'The performances are convincing in every respect'.

Jeroen van Veen has won international success with albums of Satie, Part, Glass and Riley. These are only some of the most significant composers whose work he has recorded for Brilliant Classics in building a library on record of minimalist piano music. Simplicity, repetition and appealing melody are the qualities shared by all the composers who subscribe to this aesthetic, and they underlie van Veen’s own compositions. Although subtitled Volume 2, this is the third album to focus exclusively on the pianist as composer. Books 1 and 2 of his Minimal Piano Preludes were reissued in 2016, and won high praise from MusicWeb International. Further preludes feature in a release of his piano music, and this sequel takes us up to Minimal Prelude No.60, a ‘tango for organ’. “All my music is about time and space,” says van Veen. “The duration of music is an essential part of the concept in my music. The concept of music, specifically my minimal oriented music, only can exist in time. The slow progression, building of the material, the motifs and the search for new sounds is audible in this [album].” All the works featured here were composed between 2010 and 2018. Continuum is a concertante work for piano and flute octet. Incanto is another album-length piece, entirely composed in an unusual 11/8 time signature. Ripalmania is written for six pianos, a scoring which creates an entrancing effect. In Velvet Piano van Veen explores the timbral possibilities of pianos prepared with objects after the style of John Cage, though without the American composer’s aim of disconcerting the listener. The final portion of the release is a celebration of minimalist jazz, in which the border between composition and improvisation almost vanishes.

L'Incoronazione di Poppea is renowned not only as Monteverdi's last work but also his most affecting. Almost equally famous, however, is the historical oddity that it's sublime conclusion is almost certainly not his work. Sung as Nero and his new wife drift off in amoral bliss, 'Pur ti miro' has been attributed to various of Monteverdi's Venetian contemporaries. However, among the most plausible candidates is Filiberto Laurenzi. Very little is known of his life except for his encounter with the soprano Anna Renzi, considered the first diva in the history of opera. She not only studied under Laurenzi, but also let him manage her career, following him when he left Rome for Venice. The duet is featured here alongside excerpts from an entertainment conceived when the genre of opera was still in it's infancy. Like Poppea, La finta savia was first performed during the 1643 Venetian carnival season. It may be counted an early example of the pasticcio genre, in which a dramatic piece is the work of several hands, among them in this case Leardini, Pozzi, Ferrari, Giovan Battista Crivelli and Tarquinio Merula alongside Laurenzi. This recording includes five virtuoso arias making use of dance rhythms, some of them intimate in atmosphere and others that are more brilliant, such as 'Tant'armi inventate'. These operatic excerpts are complemented by arias from a 1641 collection dedicated to Laurenzi's work. The highlight is probably 'Cos� mi lasci ingrato', a deeply affecting lament for lost love on words by Ottaviano Castelli.

The light and airy chamber-scaled divertimenti on this recording were composed in London in the early 1720s. They must have been among the first works with which Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747) sought to make an impression on the discerning audiences and business-minded entrepreneurs who, at the time, were instrumental to a music-rich environment that made the city one of the main centers of European culture. It is perhaps to the detriment of his posthumous reputation that Bononcini became known as Handel’s direct rival for the favor of London’s musical public: the rivalry between the two men was even immortalized in a piece of satirical doggerel which popularized the English expression ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’. In fact these divertimenti scored a popular success as soon as they were published; so much so that these harpsichord transcriptions were quickly produced – and then republished two decades later, when they appeared as Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin, placing them in direct competition with the collection of works under the same name by Handel. The divertimenti are three- and four-movement works designed not to place any great strain upon the listener’s attention: the longest movement here lasts barely three minutes. Even the slow movements are simple arias, originally conceived with a high melody instrument in mind – violin or transverse flute – and conforming to a serene and courtly character. By and large, however, they are filled with lively, dance-like quick movements, cheerful in temperament even when the tonality is minor, as it is in half the divertimenti. This is the debut album on Brilliant Classics for the harpsichordist Giovanni Paganelli.

Born in 1959, Stefano Casarini has composed an extensive library of concert and educational music for the guitar for different levels of accomplishment. The 12 Grandes Etudes and 12 Petites Etudes recorded here are designed for professional or at least highly accomplished musicians, full of technical challenges yet satisfyingly musical in their own right. The idiom is tonal but modern, often reflective in mood, using repeated motifs which owe something both to the guitar tradition and to Minimalist music. As Adriano Sebastiani remarks in his booklet notes to this new recording, ‘Casarini’s compositions are highly distinctive, never banal, certainly idiomatic and always to the point. By the same token they can also be intrepid, and inclined to create evocative atmospheres and states of mind that can convey deep feelings.’ This is Adriano Sebastiani’s fifth album for Brilliant Classics, after well-received recordings where he accompanies singers in music by Dowland, Spohr, Weber and Rossini. Thus he brings to Casarini’s music a natural feeling for its Romantic character and easy melodic flow. The album also joins an expanding and valuable collection of studies for guitar on Brilliant Classics, including two collections of Easy Studies and volumes dedicated to Sor, to Gangi and Gilardino, among others. This is the projected first volume of a series designed by Sebastiani to bring Casarini’s compositional voice to an international audience and to give a more complete picture of the stylistic variety, the value and beauty of his music

Harpists Eva Tebbe and Ekaterina Levental remark that Debussy makes the invisible visible and turns the unspeakable into a musical world full of mysticism, layers of ambiguity and evocative meanings. A century after his death, he is being celebrated across the world in 2018, and this album promises to make a special contribution on record with arrangements of works, most of them relatively unfamiliar, which particularly lend themselves to the ethereal and exquisite combination of voice and harps. Much of the music here was written while Debussy was composing his only opera Pelléas et Mélisande, a Symbolist drama based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, who recognized that in many ways Debussy had not only set his play to music but even outstripped and further enriched his original. There is the early and peaceful Ballade from 1890, then the Proses lyriques from 1892-3 and the seductive Trois Chansons de Bilitis (1897), from which this musical partnership takes its name. Bilitis is the fictional poet of Classical antiquity invented by Pierre Louÿs, writing in an erotic, symbolist vein after the fashion of Sappho: and when in 1900 Debussy came to use the texts of Louÿs again for the Musique de Scène pour les chansons de Bilitis, the music accompanied a tableau vivant in pre-Raphaelite style of winsome and scantily clothed young women. The recital is completed by the Danse sacrée et danse profane – originally composed for harp and orchestra in 1904, here with the orchestral parts arranged for a second harp – and the six Epigraphes Antiques from 1914, which return to the musical material of the Bilitis works but in the composer’s more allusive late style which would lead to his final masterpiece written for Serge Diaghilev, Jeux.

The keyboard works of Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari (1763-1842) represent a synthesis of the styles circulating around Europe at the turn of the 19th century. The sonatas on this album, from his Opp. 9, 10 and 12 collections, reveal both his admiration for Mozart and his own tendencies towards Classicism, in dialogue with the French galant style, with the melodic traits of the Italian operatic style, and with the virtuosic formulae of the innovative piano music associated with Muzio Clementi. The six Balletti are more modest in scale and probably intended for domestic use by amateurs. On the other hand, the Caprice Op.8 undoubtedly addresses the power and dynamic range of the new piano, with an innovative, unresolved conclusion on the dominant. Born in the Trento region of Italy, Ferrari studied music in Verona and could play the flute, oboe, violin, viola and double bass by the age of twenty. He became friends with both Paisiello and Thomas Attwood, the friend and contemporary of Mozart, whose quartets dedicated to Haydn made a deep impact on the young Ferrari. Having written operas in Naples, in 1792 he moved to London, where he met Haydn and Clementi and quickly became a leading singing teacher, with the Princess of Wales among his pupils. It was there that he achieved his most lasting professional success. He wrote a pair of piano concertos, and about 50 sonatas. The instrument used in this recording is a replica of a five-and-a-half octave 1804 Walter und Soehne fortepiano, built by Paul McNulty in 2008. Like Ferrari, Stefania Neonato hails from the Trento region; she is now professor of fortepiano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, and her activities in teaching, performance and recording are concentrated on Classical-era music for fortepiano.

With this recording the acclaimed ensemble Le Nuove Musiche, led by director Krijn Koetsveld, have come full circle and at last completed their monumental undertaking of a complete cycle of Claudio Monteverdi's books of madrigals. In bringing this endeavour to a close the group have returned to their starting point, recording a fresh take of perhaps the most famous set, Monteverdi's groundbreaking Books V & VI, previously released by Le Nuove Musiche one decade ago at the start of this musical journey. With these two books of madrigals Monteverdi unequivocally made his forward-thinking position clear in the heated debate over musical aesthetics that had been raging fiercely in Florentine artistic circles. Defying his critics, he distanced himself from conservative practices by declaring his own methods a 'second practice', the seconda prattica. He abandoned the confines of a single mode, freely adding piquant dissonance to underpin emotionally charged words in the text, thus heightening the drama. He also began exploiting the basso continuo as an independent harmonic foundation for melody - the dawn of monody, a solo-and-accompaniment style that would surpass polyphony as the basis for the music of so many later generations of composers. Le Nuove Musiche's approach to Monteverdi is both dedicated and informed. They bring the past into the present, considering questions that were asked in the Renaissance and are still relevant in our present musical landscape, thereby making Early Music as new today as any other, while maintaining the highest standards of performance authenticity.