With this second volume of Tosti’s songs, Brilliant Classics takes listeners just half-way through a prodigious, career-long output, in which the key-notes are unfailingly memorable melody, lively charm and a gift for story-telling that rivals the very greatest song-writers past and present, from Schubert to Dylan. Many of his songs have never been recorded, so this set makes a unique contribution to the catalogue. There are a few French songs on Vol 2, reflecting Tosti’s great popularity in Paris, but most of the texts here are by Italian poets, mostly contemporaries such as D’Annunzio and Panzacchi. The album works chronologically through the decade 1886-1895, during which time he was singing teacher to the English royal family. Perhaps in deference to his pupils, there are songs by the likes of Longfellow and Weatherly: the release concludes with his delicately wistful setting of In the Hush of the Night. The first volume of this extraordinary project on Brilliant Classics won wide critical praise. ‘All the singers are careful over nuances,’ remarked MusicWeb International. ’Tosti’s songs have, through the years, been bawled out of recognition by leather-lunged tenors, and it is a blessing to hear so many beautiful pianissimos and diminuendos in this repertoire. The accompaniments are discreet and the recording is well-balanced and natural-sounding.’ This release will be an essential acquisition for all lovers of art-song.

Gonzalo de Baena's Arte novamente inventada pera aprender a t�ger (Newly devised method for learning to play) was the first book of keyboard music ever printed on the Iberian Peninsula. Lost for centuries, it was rediscovered in 1992, and early music keyboardist Bruno Forst has since painstakingly decoded it's unique tablature system and edited a modern edition, published in 2012. Baena compiled mostly polyphonic vocal music by various composers, from the old Flemish Masters he himself studied, to contemporaries thriving alongside him in the rich musical environment of Spain under the Catholic Monarchs, along with pieces of his own and several by his son, Antonio. To disseminate this music in arrangements for keyboardists, professional or amateur, Baena transcribed them in an easy to read tablature notation and ordered the pieces in increasing level of difficulty. While his collection, printed in 1540, was pedagogical in intent, Baena nevertheless left a valuable historic document to posterity, creating a faithful depiction of the place and time that gave birth to later masters such as Antonio de Cabezon.

An anthology of recent compositions for organ, written during the last seven decades, is showcased here on the new Dell’Orto & Lanzini organ (2011) at the Madonna di Fatima Parish Church in the town of Pinerolo, near Turin in Italy’s Piedmont region. Yet this exiting new material is not without acknowledgement of the past, as some of the selected pieces pay homage to styles, musical languages and composers of yesteryear. Likewise the organ, though newly constructed, is modelled on those crafted by celebrated 17th-century builder Arp Schnitger, whose instruments abounded in the Hanseatic area of northern Europe during the Baroque era. Apart from the renowned, late composers Ligeti and Eben, the music is by living authors from a variety of European backgrounds. György Ligeti’s popular Musica ricercata, from early in the Hungarian composer’s career, is represented here by three of its movements, transcribed for organ by the artist, Luca Scandali, himself. Themes by the great Baroque musician Buxtehude provide material for Czech composer–organist Petr Eben. The two youngest composers on the programme, Pier Damiano Peretti and Daniele Venturi hail from Italy, while the German-speaking pair, Jürgen Essl and Franz Danksagmüller, both studied with Michael Radulescu in Vienna. Dutch composer Bert Matter contributes a theme and variations on a 16th-century French song, and Belgian Bernard Foccroulle’s O quam pulchra es is written in the style of Baroque vocal music.

This second volume in the 3-part series of Easy Studies for Guitar continues to focus on lesser-known modern compositions that lend themselves to teaching the guitar. The aim of the series is to further awareness and understanding of musical idioms that do not necessarily reflect traditional preconceptions of classical harmony. The selection by Cristiano Porqueddu was determined by a number of features: music without a strong sense of tonality; a wide range of timbre; and a polyphonic conception of the instrument. Volume 2 begins with the second collection of 12 Easy Pieces for Guitar by the Polish composer, Alexandre Tansman – the first collection having been included within Volume 1. These delightful, elegant studies reveal meticulous construction and a certain constancy of form that speak for the composer’s inventive skill. Stephen Dodgson (1924-2013) wrote works for the guitar that attracted the attention of outstanding performers such as Julian Bream and John Williams: these Transitional Studies call for more advanced skill than the other works on the album. Unlike the other works here, the limpid collection of Ten Progressive Studies by the Italian guitarist and composer Franco Cavallone (1957) does not aim at improving technique, but at helping the player master control of sound and colour. The Hungarian composer Iván Patachich (1922-1993) wrote two collections of Gyermekdalok gitárra (Children’s Songs for Guitar) published in 1978, a series of fresh, original vignettes that belie the composer’s remarkable technical skill and elegance. The music of Manuel Ponce is better known than any of the previous composers: he wrote the Six Short Preludes for Juanita, the young daughter of the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, shortly after she had begun to study the guitar. Nonetheless, in simplifying his idiom Ponce managed not to drain his music of its vivacity: the result is music that guitarists of all abilities will take pleasure from.

Eminent Italian early music keyboardist Manuel Tomadin adds to a splendid discography on Brilliant Classics with his eighth release for the label. Commemorating the centenary of the apparition of Mary at Fátima, Portugal (1917), Tomadin performs settings for organ of the well-known Marian hymn Magnificat by four composers from the Hanseatic north of Germany, all talented students of Dutch organist–composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, father of the north German organ tradition. And what more fitting organ could be selected for this tribute than the fine Dell’Orto & Lanzini instrument, modelled on 17th-century organs of the Hanseatic school, housed in a Piedmontese parish church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima? This organ reflects the rich tonal resources that would have been at the skilled fingertips of Scheidemann, Schildt, Weckmann and Strungk, who were active in the 17th century around the Hanseatic area on such organs as those at St Catherine’s and St James’s, Hamburg, the Marktkirche, Hannover, and Braunschweig’s St Martini church. Manuel Tomadin is joined in these Magnificat performances by award winning tenor and early music ensemble director Giuseppe Maletto.

Previous albums on Brilliant Classics have illuminated significant figures in the school of North German organ music in the generations before Bach. Here is the work of another, hardly less significant figure, Heinrich Scheidemann. He wrote almost exclusively for organ, and in the expected forms of chorale fantasias, motet arrangements, preludes, toccatas and fantasias which constituted the bread and butter of the 17th-century church musician’s diet. On this newly recorded album, the French organist Joseph Rassam plays a selection of all these genres, juxtaposed for maximum variety. In fact Scheidemann invented the genre of chorale fantasia, later so refined and developed by J.S. Bach, where a well-known chorale melody is played as the soprano line and reworked by means of superimposition, canon and imitation for the effects of grandeur and spiritual elevation. There are several Praeambulum movements in which Scheidemann builds on the legacy of the Dutch master Sweelinck, more freely composed, allowing full rein for the performer/composer’s own virtuosity. Until quite recently, all Scheidemann’s keyboard works were thought to have been written for the organ, but scholarly research has now shown that more than a quarter of the hundred or so pieces known to be by Scheidemann (or attributed to him) were actually written for the harpsichord and intended for performance in a secular context. Joseph Rassam’s recording is therefore one of the first to place such pieces in their original, intended context. In doing so, it reveals new and extrovert facets of the music which was hitherto characterised as more solemn and monumental according to an eccelesiastical context. Joseph Rassam has chosen to use three instruments appropriate to the historical and stylistic context of Scheidemann’s music. The organ is a relatively new one, inaugurated in 2010 by Gustav Leonhardt in the church of St Martin, Amilly, and built by Bertrand Cattiaux in the style of North-German Baroque instruments. He also plays an original 17th-century harpsichord of unknown manufacture, beautifully decorated and recently restored by Alain Anselm, and one of Anselm’s own virginals.

Reclusive and eccentric, the French pianist– composer Charles-Valentin Alkan was also undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, and a composer who, like his friend and fellow virtuoso Liszt, pushed the boundaries of what his instrument, and human pianism, could achieve. Again like Liszt, he composed music that was not merely flashy and difficult to play – it tapped a deep comprehension of music history and theory, a flair for the lyrical and the dramatic and of course a vast imagination. Tackling these formidable pieces are eight pianists and one organist, along with the Trio Alkan piano trio and the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto under Roberto Fores-Veses, on recordings dating from 1989–2017. Alkan’s great cycles for the piano — the Études in all the minor keys, in all the major keys, the Preludes in every key – feature alongside other large-scale works like the Grandes Études for hands separate and together and the Nocturnes, as well as characterful miniatures like the Chants and Les Mois. Organist Kevin Bowyer demonstrates that Alkan was as much an organ prodigy as anything else, with performances of the Prieres and Little Plainchant Preludes, as well as music for Alkan’s beloved pedal-piano transcribed for the organ.

REVIEW:

If you are fan of Alkan or have an interest in outstanding 19th-century piano music, you can’t afford to pass this one up.

-- The Art Music Lounge

Domenico Bartolucci was in some ways a 20th-century descendant of the liturgical musicians who composed for the church during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Born in 1917, he was appointed Master of Music at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, but he also taught at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Most of his considerable output was, naturally, sacred in form and purpose: not only motets and mass settings but symphonic oratorios and even a sacred opera based on the life of the painter Brunelleschi. He was appointed a cardinal in 2010 and died in 2013. Very little of his music has been recorded. Here, however, is a new studio recording of his chamber music, made in the Pontifical Institute for Sacred Music in Rome. The genre of Prelude, Intermezzo and Fugue implies a keyboard work of the type written by Bach or Franck; here, however, are two examples scored for violin/cello duet and for string trio, both demonstrating Bartolucci’s considerable mastery of counterpoint. They are joined by a Piano Trio with a lovely second-movement Canzone, and a Violin Sonata of engaging richness: there are moments of great passion in the first movement, of elegiac delicacy in the slow movement, grotesque elements in the third movement, and a luminous fluidity reminiscent of Mozart in the finale.

No modern record company has done more than Brilliant Classics to revive the music and reputation of the Italian-American composer Mario Castelvuovo-Tedesco. Not only in the field of guitar music for which he is most famous, but in piano music and most recently an extensive and powerful song-cycle for soprano and guitar, The Divan of Moses Ibn Ebra. Here’s another new album of the composer’s vocal music, of still greater importance: the first complete recording of his cycle of Shakespeare Sonnets, coupled with the world premiere recording of the three Shakespeare Duets. Castelnuovo-Tedesco set texts by many great poets, among them Dante, Heine and Lorca. It was for Shakespeare, however, that he nurtured his foremost passion. Having composed settings of all the standalone songs in the plays while still resident in Italy, he then turned to the sonnets while ‘isolated and proud’ in the bitter-sweet exile of Beverly Hills where he made his home for the last 30 years of his life. They were set down with astonishing fluency, more than half within less than two months in the autumn of 1945. Ultimately he put music to 32 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, all in the original English, including three settings for vocal ensemble. All of them are now gathered together for the first time, together with the three Duets from 1937.

Between 1860 and 1925, the immigrants who had settled in Argentina to seek their fortune contributed to the development of this music, giving life to forms of varied derivation such as the Cuban habanera, the milonga (a type of folk dance), the African candombe and Italian songs. More of these immigrants came originally from Italy than from any other country, and the first musicians were Italian, which explains the lyrical element in the tango: its aura of melancholy and yearning. Enea Leone and Roberto Bongianino retrace the various stages in the evolution of the tango on this album: the milonga (Milonga de mis amores, Corralera, La trampera), the tango itself (El Chocio, El Pollo Ricardo, Mi refugio, Silbando), and the vals (Pedacito de cielo, Flor de lino). Piazzolla is naturally well-represented by classics such as Histoire du Tango (originally written for guitar and flute), and others in new arrangements. There are also several solo pieces, as well as an Italian homage to the world of the Tango: two compositions that feature in well-loved Italian films, Il postino and the TV serial Il commissario Montalbano.

This is the fourth volume on Brilliant Classics of the vibrantly cosmopolitan music of the Jewish-Italian, US composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. His heritage is reflected in this substantial song-cycle for soprano and guitar, receiving here only its second modern recording. The Divan of Moses Ibn Ezra is a setting of 19 poems, in a modern English translation, by a medieval Spanish Jew who wrote, like Castelnuovo-Tedesco almost a millennium later, in exile. Thus the subject of its first section is ‘Songs of Wandering’, before friendship and love turn sour in the second section. Sorrow and defeat also mark the third, ‘Of Wine, and of the Delights of the Sons of Men’ – though still within the composer’s appealingly melodic vein – before the return of spring and a more positive outlook to close the cycle, in which the poet bravely faces ‘The World and its Vicissitudes’ before contemplating mortality with calm resignation in a moving epilogue. The piece is a substantial addition to the growing discography of the composer on Brilliant Classics, including releases dedicated to his guitar studies (BC95219), duets (BC94833), concertos (BC7615) and piano music (BC94811), as well as samples of his prolific output on several compilations. The fine Italian guitarist Giulio Tampalini has his own impressive discography on the label, in music by Paganini (BC95031), Mozzani and Respighi (BC95230), Tarrega (BC94336) and more. Here he is joined by the Polish soprano Joanna Klisowska, who has sung with many major European early-music ensembles. The album is completed with individual songs in Spanish and Italian as well as two settings of Shakespeare. Ranging in date across the composer’s long career, they exhibit his full stylistic range, from the impressionistic, late-Romantic language of the English songs to the more harmonically adventurous terrain of two Spanish folksongs.

There are two themes to this recording: the time-honored genre of the folia, and an instrument made for and played by the greatest guitarist of the 20th century, Andres Segovia. With his determination to expand the repertoire of guitar music and extend the instrument beyond its associations with his native Spain, Segovia commissioned three works played here by Javier Somoza: the Variations à travers les siècles by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Variaciones y Fuga sobre la Folia de España by Ponce and a set of Four Short Pieces by Frank Martin. Segovia eventually decided that Martin’s idiom was too dissonant for his taste and so never played them, but the pieces have since become classics of the mid-20th-century repertoire alongside works by Britten and Henze. As their titles suggest, however, the other two works have a conscious relationship with the history of the guitar and its repertoire, developed from the lute and vihuela of previous centuries. Ponce only partially fulfilled Segovia’s request for ‘a series of brilliant variations on the Folias de España theme […] in the Classical Italian style of the 18th century.’ What resulted was a monumental, thoroughly eclectic work definitely not in 18th-century style. Segovia, again, decided to adapt the piece for his own ends but Somoza has returned to the original. Meanwhile Castelnuovo-Tedesco, in his first work for the guitar, also consciously embraced eclecticism in a series of different idioms: a stylized chaconne reminiscent of early music; a free variation, a waltz, and a foxtrot. There is one more modern work on the album – the dazzling Tiento by Maurice Ohana that also looks back to 18th-century Spanish idiom – which functions as a pivot between the ages. Two examples of the folia theme-and-variation form by Santiago de Murcia date from roughly 1730; and to open, Somoza travels back in time to the tientos of 16th-century Spain with three brief works by Alonso Mudarra. ‘A Guitar for Segovia’ is both an absorbing journey through the history of guitar music and an important record of a Segovia instrument: a significant addition to the expansive library of guitar music on Brilliant Classics.

With this release of Filippo Ruge (1725-1767), Brilliant Classics brings another forgotten name from the Baroque era to the attention of record buyers: there is not another disc of his music in the catalogue, making this an indispensable purchase for all lovers of Italian Baroque. Ruge was a Roman by birth, and a flautist by training: hence the concentration in this survey of his output on works which feature the instrument in a soloistic capacity: not only a G major concerto and sonata but a D major duet, for two flutes, and an arietta in which a pair of sopranos is accompanied by a pair of flutes. The release is completed by a solo soprano aria and a dramatic three-movement sinfonia which concludes with the tone-painting of a violent storm. Ruge was highly regarded in his day, and the lively imagination at work in the pieces on this disc gives ample reason for such admiration. He became a solo flautist at the prestigious series of Concerts Spirituelles in Paris, and his Op.3 collection of concertos was published in London by John Walsh, who handled music by all the significant European composers of the day. After the publication of the set of Duets from which the present D major example is taken, Ruge vanishes from the records; his exact date and location of death are presently unknown. Leader of the Swiss-based Flatus Ensemble, Enrico Casularo also trained in Rome – at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, where he is now a professor of Baroque flute – as a flautist, musicologist and organologist. He has played, recorded, studied and lectured on flute music of the Baroque era for international organisations and produced an authoritative treaty on the history of the transverse flute.

During his lifetime Dmitri Kabalevsky was considered by the authorities to be one of the top 5 composers of Russia, on a par with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He was praised for his formalism, general popular style and patriotism. He was not a revolutionary, and this caused his fame to decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His music however has a strong identity, vigorous, alternating power with lyricism, and rooted in the rich folklore of Russia. This new recording contains his effervescent 3rd Piano Sonata and the complete 24 Preludes, Op. 38, written during World War II, each based on a Russian folk song, presenting a wide variety of moods, from the pensive melancholy to fiery passion. Played by the highly talented young Italian pianist Pietro Bonfilio, who expresses his love for the Russian culture with this beautiful recording.

The start of an exciting ane prestigious series: the complete Beethoven piano sonatas played by Giovanni Bellucci. Bellucci is one of the most interesting and extraordinary pianists of today. Described by Piero Rattalino as ''a force of nature, vast and palpitating'', his playing is highly original, striving to recreate the original impact of the work she is playing: ''het akes us back to the Golden Age of the Piano'' wrote Le Monde. His recordings, notably with works by Liszt, were showered with prizes such as Diapson d'Or, Choc, Editor's Choice, CD Maestro, etc. Giovanni Bellucci embarks on this epic musical journey of recording the complete Beethoven Sonatas, a challenge that every pianist of world stature will face. His Beethoven is free, with a strong sense of rhetoric and improvisation, adhering nevertheless strictly to the score and its intentions. The result is fresh, exhilarating and illuminating, letting us marvel at the originality and genius of the music.