Stories of Mozart's musical precocity, especially centered on pianistic work, are well-known and form an integral part of our mythology around the composer. This release aims to bring wider attention to the charming opera Buffa La Finta Semplice, composed by Mozart at age 12. Full of light and elegant arias, skillful ensembles, and amusing characterizations, this recording casts the spotlight on a the delightful mind of a developing young composer.

Hans Neusidler (1508-1563) was born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, Slovakia) and first enters the historical record in 1530, when he settled in Nuremberg, Germany. He taught lute there in the 1530s, publishing eight books of lute music between 1536 and 1549, and also went into business as a lute maker by 1550. Neusidler was one of the most important early German lutenists. His eight publications feature intabulations of German songs, French chansons, Italian madrigals, dance pieces, and preludes of an improvisatory nature. Most of the works are in three parts, but there are two-part pieces for beginners and a few four-part arrangements in two of his publications.

Lutenist Yavor Genov presents on this album a selection of works by Neusidler, emphasizing his significance as one of the most prominent and bright lutenists of his generation, but also as one of those instrumentalists, who successfully adopted the contrapuntal musical language of the great Franco-Flemish school to the lute playing. Yavor Genov is a lutenist and basso continuo player. His three solo CDs for Brilliant Classics – “Orpheus Anglorum” (2018), “Zamboni – lute music” (2014) and “Kapsberger – Libro primo di lauto” (2013) have received international critical acclaim. He has collaborated with musicians like Dame Emma Kirkby, Núria Rial, Andrew Lawrence-King, Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Teodor Currentzis. Yavor has studied early plucked instruments and basso continuo with Jakob Lindberg.

Can one ever tire of the dancing inspiration that animates these four portmanteau collections which have delighted both serious and casual listeners ever since Bach compiled them for use in social occasions as the 30-something Kapellmeister at the briefly enlightened court of Prince Leopold of Cöthen, exulting in the multifarious influences which he had absorbed and could place at the service of a compositional mind of unequalled intellectual brilliance yet always conscious of his music’s need to entertain, to give delight as well as accompany the sober thoughts of his congregations?

Not, at any rate, in these performances from a virtuoso German ensemble hailing from Bach’s own part of the world and masterminded by a superb trumpeter-turned-conductor who well understands the exuberant, public character of these suites, their occasional purposes, for all that in such moments as the famous Air from the G major Suite, No.3, they appear to take on a more confiding aspect, drawing the listener in before dispelling the tension with another jolly minuet or charming sarabande.

This generously filled CD presents the complete Orchestral Suites (Overtures) by J.S. Bach. Bach’s Suites count among his most popular and most frequently performed works, they are quintessential Bach: majestic, noble, tender and full of energy. They contain some of Bach’s evergreens: the Air from the 3rd Suite and the Badinerie from the 2nd Suite.

Played by the Virtuosi Saxoniae conducted by trumpeter-conductor Ludwig Güttler, modern instruments in Historically Informed Performance Practice, the best of both worlds. - Brilliant Classics

In a personal introduction to his own authoritative booklet essay, the Spanish violist Alejandro Marías relates how he acquired the rare facsimile of an even rarer manuscript, and came to realize that its contents had never seen the light of day in the modern era, let alone received attention on record. Thus he presents here the First Book of pieces – a second does not survive – by Jacques Morel. The volume itself was published in 1709, two years before Marin Marais’s Third Book of pieces. Morel’s date of birth is now obscured by time, but we know that he was this book. And indeed Morel makes no a pupil of Marais, to whom he dedicated attempt to disguise the debt he felt to his master within his music. The book contains four Suites for viola da gamba and continuo – in A minor, D minor, D major and G major, respectively – and a Chaconne en trio for a traverso flute, viol and basso continuo. This gentle and courtly six-minute Chaconne is the only piece of Morel’s that is regularly performed, but the four Suites are full of delightful discoveries. The second of them begins with a Prelude of bold and grave gestures which introduce a colorful suite of character pieces: the Allemande la Jolie (‘The pretty one’), the Courante la Dacier, a gentle, dream-like Sarabande and the Gigue l’Inconstante (‘The faithless one’). To end, there is an enjoyable rondeau, Le Folet (‘The imp’), and La Fanchonnette, reminiscent of a gavotte in feel and structure. The other three suites are no less picturesque, and they are brought to life once more on this album by an early-music group founded in 2009 and named after a popular Renaissance dance. La Spagna has been awarded Spain’s GEMA prize for best young Early Music group.

Brilliant Classics proudly presents 5 more titles in the exciting 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: Dvorák Complete Piano Music, Tchaikovsky Complete Ballets, J.S. Bach Famous Concertos, Handel Complete Organ Concertos and Locatelli Complete Violin Concertos. World class performers include Inna Poroshina, Igor Ruhadze, Christian Schmitt, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Pieter-Jan Belder, Musica Amphion, Erik Bosgraaf, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and others. The fresh and colorful artwork is eye-catching while the booklet contains liner notes in English. A great series at an unbeatable price! The present release features Christian Schmitt and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra performing Handel’s complete organ concertos.

A pupil of Cesar Franck and Widor, Louis Vierne (1870-1937) was an influential organist, holding posts in such venues as the Notre Dame in Paris, where he was widely celebrated. Vierne’s works are characterized by complicated counterpoint, dense harmonies, and an exalted atmosphere. His Piano Quintet, featured on this disc, was inspired by the death of Vierne’s child, and displays an overwhelming emotional intensity. “Spleens et detresses” is a work based on poems by Verlaine. The song cycle exudes a feeling of mystical emotion.

This new release is the first ever recording of Giogio Gentili’s 12 Trio Sonatas. A famous violinist and teacher, Giorgio Gentili taught the likes of Antonio Vivaldi. He performed in the San Marco, and his compositions were popular all across Europe during the early 18th century. The Italian Soavi Affetti Baroque Ensemble performs these works on original instruments and beautifully explores this lesser-known corner of the Baroque repertoire.

The term toccata stems from the early Baroque. In the hands of Girolamo Frescobaldi and Johann Jacob Froberger, it signified an extended piece that consisted of several contrapuntal sections that were headed by a brilliantly figured introduction, full of virtuoso flourishes. The primary aim of the toccata in the hands of Bach's forebears such as Schmelzer and Biber was to dazzle and astonish listeners. This was the tradition that the youthful Bach inherited and embellished in his unique way. All the toccatas on this album probably date from the composer's period in service to the ducal court at Weimar, in the first decade of the 18th century. Composed while still in his twenties, they are young man's music, designed both to impress and delight his listeners, both by the facility of his invention and no less by the virtuosity of his performance. BWV910 is built to an especially grand design of two contrasting fugues, the second modelled on a refined French chaconne which recalls some of the composer's earliest masterpieces such as the C minor Passacaglia for organ and the Cantata BWV12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, the ground bass of which is almost identical to the fugue subject.

“I could not have written it better myself!”, remarked an astonished Brahms on hearing the 18-year-old Erno Dohnányi’s Opus 1 (the First Piano Quintet) in the summer of 1895. Often hypercritical and disparaging of other composers, Brahms was so impressed by Dohnányi that he promoted his music in Vienna. Just two years later the elder composer passed away, but he might have remarked similarly about Dohnaìny’s Cello Sonata in B flat of 1899. This magnificent composition sounds undeniably like an affectionate homage to him. In 1902, Dohnányi performed the Cello Sonata in Frankfurt with Hugo Becker, one of the most famous cellists and pedagogues of his time, and a few years later Becker would be the dedicatee of Dohnányi’s Konzertstück in D Op. 12 for cello and orchestra, which the composer also arranged for cello and piano. Dohnányi and his friend Béla Bartók, three years his junior, always admired each other, though they could not have differed more in terms of style and character, their diametrically opposed approaches particularly apparent in their use of Hungarian folksongs. By contrast to Bartók’s innovative ethnomusicological perspective, Dohnányi continued presenting gypsy melodies in the Romantic fashion of Liszt and Brahms, as evidenced in his Ruralia Hungarica Op. 32, a cycle of seven pieces scored for various forces, one of them (Op.32d) being for cello and piano.

REVIEW:

Ernst von Dohnanyi (1877-1960) was a fine Hungarian composer, beloved by Brahms and Bartok and cellist Hugo Becker, to whom he dedicated the 25-minute Konzertstück, Op. 12. That was originally for cello and orchestra, which explains why the piano takes off on its own so much. It is effective. Ruralia Hungarica consists of pieces for everything except the kitchen sink, but only this 6-minute piece is actually for cello and piano. Both artists work together well and are recorded with warmth. This is the only place to find the Konzertstück played with piano.

-- American Record Guide (David W. Moore)

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) was the organist at St. Peter's in Rome for a good part of his life. His music is important for historical reasons but, more than that, it has a special quality of gentle gravity beneath the lively rhythms and sudden shifts of harmony. The greater part of Frescobaldi’s output was written for keyboard instruments – unusually for the time – and Roberto Loreggian has already established himself as the leading current exponent of this music by recording a complete set of the published works for Brilliant Classics.

A decade on from the release of this much praised, definitive edition, Loreggian has returned to Frescobaldi and gathered up many much less well-known pieces to be found in manuscript collections across Europe. In some cases these are alternative or earlier versions of published works. One hallmark of the Frescobaldi style is its restlessness, or appetite for change which speaks to our age even more than his own. Even within the established form of a given genre such as a toccata, Frescobaldi bends and stretches the rhetoric, leaps forward in harmony and holds back the phrase with a sophistication worthy of ancient rhetoricians such as Cicero. It follows naturally that these pieces were created in a method of continual transformation. While following the course of his compositional style invites the listener on a journey of more than academic interest, the appeal of this set resides no less in the sheer fertility of invention on offer.

Born in 1660 into a family of peasant farmers, Johann Joseph Fux died in 1741 as Kapellmeister at the Habsburg court in Vienna, a prestigious post that he held for almost 30 years: an extraordinary rise in fortune and testament to both considerable gifts as a musician and, self-evidently, an inclination towards hard work and self-improvement. These new recordings by Filippo Emanuele Ravizzi have few rivals in the current catalogue. Ravizzi is a pupil of Bob van Asperen and Gustav Leonhardt: a distinguished pedigree, which brings a fine feeling both to the tripping, French-style dance rhythms of the partitas and to the potential for darker expressive coloration in the Capriccio and the long D major Chaconne. Anyone curious to hear the work of a formative figure in the Baroque period will take great pleasure from this set.

Franz Liszt was not necessarily known for the composition of sacred music. Piano pieces are what etched his name into history. The piano pieces included on this release, however, are works that were inspired by the Divine. A deeply religious man, particularly in his older age, Liszt composed a great deal of “religious” piano music, including his Ave Maria, Angelus, Miserere, Legendes, Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude, and many more. Performing these works is Italian pianist Irene Russo, who is making her Brilliant Classics debut with this two-disc release. The album also includes extensive liner notes and an artist biography.

An audiophile LP transfer for an
immersive tribute to a remote island
off the coast of Brittany.
Having become celebrated for his score
to Amélie (2001), the French composer
moved to the island of Ushant
(Ouessant/Eusa), and this album is a
musical tribute to his home, comprising
ten pieces about ten specific places on
the island. In 2016, Tiersen published a
collection of pieces called Eusa, which
Jeroen van Veen has combined with his
2021 collection, Kerber, named after a
chapel on the island, to produce Island.
The album has been a best-seller on CD
for its contemplative mood and beauty.
Among the 10 tracks, some offer the
perfect soundtrack for contemplation on
a long walk or staring out of a window on
a train journey. Others seem predestined
to be background music for study or
relaxation. The pieces sound at times
dreamy and wistful, at times bittersweet,
at other times happily playful. With each
song, your imagination can easily conjure
a scene from a movie: a breakup after a
fight in a cosy café or a nature
documentary showing two baby birds
opening their eyes for the very first
time.
This isn’t a collection about isolation;
it’s more an expression of awareness of
your own environment and your place
within it: a sonic encapsulation of the
hyper-local. Tiersen relates this
approach to a night spent studying the
stars – which he himself does. ‘You can
look at things that are thousands of
light years away and relate your own
existence to this really cosmic element,’
he says. ‘But you get that same feeling
with the things all around you.’

The name Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) does not immediately bring to mind such modest works as violin duos, but alongside his large output of trios, quartets and quintets for stringed instruments, Boccherini's oeuvre also features two sets of six pieces for two violins. One set was composed at the beginning of his compositional career, in 1761 - that is, before his 20th birthday - and published some years later, in 1768, in Paris by Louis-Balthazar de La Chevardiere, under the title Six duos pour deux violons, with the opus number 5. Later, the same collection is described by the composer as his Opus 3. And then there is a second, much later collection with arrangements for two violins of other compositions of his originally written for three or five stringed instruments. The latter set was published by Ignace Pleyel in Paris in 1799 - just a few years before his death - under the similar title Six duos pour deux violons, with opus number 46. Unsurprisingly, the two sets are very different in character. Boccherini's Duets Op. 3 all consist of three movements. Five of them begin with a fast movement, in a major key. Then follows a slow movement in a different key, sometimes major, sometimes minor. And, finally, there is most often a minuet, in a characteristic 3/4 time, with a tempo between slow and fast. The first duet in the set, however, follows a different model: it starts with a slow movement, a fast movement follows and finally there is a light-hearted 'Presto'. We know the year of composition of the Duets Op. 3, and we know for sure that they are works by Boccherini. Regarding the Violin Duets Op. 46, however, there are still some question marks. We know that they were published in 1799 by the Parisian publisher Ignace Pleyel, but they are missing from the catalogue compiled by Boccherini himself of his own works. That does not necessarily mean that they are not from his hand. Boccherini regularly arranged his own compositions for other instrumental combinations, and these are systematically missing from his catalogue. And these arrangements are not simply reductions of the original compositions for two violins: in many cases they are thorough re-compositions based on the original material. This last aspect in particular contributes to the assumption that the arranger was Boccherini himself: arrangers who are not the original composer usually leave the structure of the composition intact in their arrangements. In the case of Boccherini's Duets Op. 46, as it were, new compositions were created. Boccherini's violin duets are perhaps not among his best-known compositions. For the Duets Op. 3 one has to go back quite far into the past to find a recording on LP or CD. The Duets Op. 46 have never been recorded on LP or CD. It's high time, then, for a CD featuring these charming and melodious works. Other information: - Recorded October, November & December 2021, Velp, Netherlands - Booklet in English contains liner notes by Rudolf Rasch and profiles of the violinists - The recording of the Opus 3 Duets is based on the critical edition of these works in Volume 29 of the series Luigi Boccherini: Opera Omnia, published in 2007 by Ut Orpheus Edizioni (Bologna) - The Dutch liner notes are available for download at www. Brilliantclassics. com - A much-underrated composer, Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) was one of the leading composers of the late 18th century, a friend and colleague of both Haydn and Mozart, and a formidable cello virtuoso. Although less dramatic than either Haydn or Mozart, his music does have moments of explosive drama that appear all the more effective when bursting fortissimo from an otherwise calm movement. The harmonic shifts are also surprising and used to great effect. His music is sensuous, charming and highly melodious, yet may be passionate and dramatic as well. - This new recording presents the complete Duets for two violins by Boccherini. Originally conceived as study material, these works far transcend this aim, as they are challenging, skillfully written compositions, brimming with good tunes and blazing vitality. - Played by Igor Ruhadze and Daria Gorban, specialized in Baroque repertoire, having recorded the complete works by Locatelli and works by Nardini. Rugadze's recording of the Boccherini violin sonatas on Brilliant Classics received 5 stars in the French Diapason.

In 2023 Brilliant Classics released a 9CD box of the complete keyboard music by William Byrd, marking the tercentenary of the composer's death. The set was welcomed as a monumental achievement, and a worthy sequel to Davitt Moroney's pioneering achievement on Hyperion: 'Those who enjoyed Belder's forthright and imaginatively ornamented Byrd performances in his complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book survey will know what to expect,' wrote Jed Distler in Classics Today. 'He favors less agogic manipulation and more conservative rhythmic continuity compared to Hyperion's Davitt Moroney. However, a palpable sense of controlled freedom informs Belder's subtle placement of cadences and phrase endings and his flexibly articulated ornaments.' Extracted from that critically acclaimed set, the present album presents all the pieces recorded bv Pieter-Jan Belder on the at the Albert Kiespenning organ of the Grote Kerk in Wijk bij Duurstede. The degree to which any of these pieces was written 'for organ' may remain open to question, when they could be performed, with allowance for some imaginative liberties, on any keyboard instrument, and indeed many contemporary pianists have revived Byrd's music for a new generation of listeners. Whether experienced on a Steinway or a spinet, Byrd is the first great composer for the keyboard, even when producing instrumental versions of choral anthems. Belder includes several such pieces here, which find a natural home 'in church' rather than the domestic setting of the harpsichord. Two versions of Salvator Mundi are effectively forerunners of chorale preludes; likewise three versions of Clarifica me. Several voluntaries lie no less idiomatically on the organ despite their highly florid writing, while the assorted preludes or fantasias and their companion fugues also deserve to be regarded alongside notable pre-Bachian models by Frescobaldi and Buxtehude. According to Early Music Review: 'As for performance, Belder's strength is in allowing Byrd to speak through the music rather than inflicting an interpretative regime upon the music... It remains wholeheartedly to welcome and recommend this fine discographical achievement.'