Florentine composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco contributed a vast array of music to the guitar literature. This engaging release celebrates his output for two guitars, drawing focus to what is perhaps the repertoire’s most awe-inspiring collection: the cycle of 24 preludes and fugues.

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REVIEW:

This is really great music. It’s inventive, expressive, exciting— truly joyous stuff. Duo Pace Poli Capelli’s performances here are truly excellent. Ensemble is perfect, with a delightful inventiveness and loads of technical finish.

– MusicWeb International

These sonatas date from a high-point in the career of the Czech-born Jan Ladislaus Dussek (1760-1812), at a time when he was established in London as a sought-after performer and fashionable piano teacher. His partnership with the instrument-maker John Broadwood resulted in significant technical developments to the fortepiano which would be imitated abroad and capitalized upon in Vienna by Beethoven, notably the extra power and larger range. The Sonata Op.25 No.2 in D has become famous under the name ‘La Matinée’: a subtitle work that conveys the lively spirit of the sonata and its irresistible sense of good cheer even in the lyric simplicity of the third-movement Larghetto. The three Op.39 sonatas are more elaborate in conception and design without forsaking the earlier work’s transparency and grace. The first movements of Op.39 abound in brilliant figuration, which evidently played to the composer’s strengths as a performer, but they are strongly rooted in a sonata-form structure which contrasts a pressing and vivacious first theme with the more tripping, light-hearted character of the second. The concluding Rondos tend to be the highlight, alternating some surprisingly passionate and even stormy episodes with the kind of unpretentious folk-like theme that Schubert would go on to perfect. This is the second in a projected eight-album series to be published by Brilliant Classics, surveying the complete keyboard sonatas of Dussek. The series was launched in fine style by the Dutch fortepianist Bart van Oort, and it is attracting much critical attention which this addition to the series is sure to share. Born in 1972, Piet Kuijken has been professor of piano and fortepiano at the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels since 2002 and is a guest professor for the fortepiano at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp.

Antonio Caldara's magnificent Missa dolorosa was among his last settings of the mass. First heard on the feast day of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, a week before Easter, the piece is characteristic of Caldara's seemingly effortless capacity for counterpoint writing. Written for the Habsburg emperor Charles VI, whose predilection for contrapuntal textures was well known, Caldara manages to weave emotional power into the music, using dramatic harmonies to underline the anguish in the text. Caldara's motets are also based on religious themes, using quotations from the Bible, plus psalms and well known prayers. The ten motets vary considerably in length, with some compact and others expansive; nevertheless, like the mass, they are all characterised by Caldara's expert contrapuntal writing. The English composer John Ravenscroft, who was based in Italy for most of his life, probably never met Caldara; however, their names were entangled when Ravenscroft's music was mistakenly published under Caldara's name in the 20th century. The addition of his dramatic Sonata – also an exercise in first-class fugal writing – is a tribute to an influence in common, as both men were likely pupils of Corelli. This thoughtful and interesting programme comes from the Dutch Ensemble La Silva and its artistic director Nanneke Schaap. Formed in 1984, the ensemble mainly performs Baroque music, including works by Bach, Handel, Frescobaldi and Telemann. They are interested in exploring new ways of performing, particularly pursuing the connections between music and dance. They have previously performed Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri in collaboration with a modern dance ensemble, with the singers singing from memory and moving alongside the dancers.

Born as Charles-Antoine Campion in the Lorraine region of France, Carlo Antonio Campioni (1720-1788) made the decisive move to Florence as a 17-year-old violinist, probably studying with Giuseppe Tartini in his famous ‘school of nations’ in Padova. By 1752 he had become an experienced music director as well as composer, appointed as maestro di capella at the cathedral in Livorno. Around a decade later he moved back to France for a temporary stay in Paris but in 1763 he took up the prestigious post of maestro di capella for the Grand Duke of Florence. In this capacity Campioni travelled widely and his own music became known through its publication in Amsterdam, Paris and London. One eager consumer of his music through the London editions was the young amateur violinist (and future US president) Thomas Jefferson, who made a thematic catalogue of the seven collections he then owned, and this catalogue still serves as an aid to sorting out the bewildering confusion of Campioni's printed works. By 1789, when he left Paris, Jefferson owned nearly all of Campioni’s music for strings. Campioni amassed an impressive music library of his own, which attracted the attention of the traveller and writer Charles Burney. Campioni was also an accomplished harpsichordist, as this collection of sonatas amply demonstrates. Full of elegant writing, graceful melodies and graceful ornamentation, the six sonatas fuse Classical-era and Baroque forms: sonata-form movements with dances such as gigues and minuets, and arpeggiated preludes such as one finds in the dance suites of Bach and Couperin. These bold and venturesome works should delight all lovers of Baroque rarities, winningly performed as they are here by Simone Stella.

A newly recorded collection of highlights from Bach’s great corpus of instrumental writing; in transcriptions by Luigi Attademo himself. Bach left us a few isolated pieces and suites for the lute; predecessor of the guitar; but guitarists have always found the rest of his music as amenable to adaptation as every other musician. Luigi Attademo recorded all of Bach’s lute music a decade ago on a 2CD Brilliant Classics album (94294) which attracted glowing reviews in the international press for the combined rigour and imagination of his playing. On this new recording he turns to pieces originally conceived for cello (the Preludio of the First Cello Suite); violin (the Chaconne from the D minor Partita); harpsichord (the Aria from the Goldberg Variations) and flute (the Siciliano from the E flat major Sonata) which have gained iconic status in the three centuries since their composition for their surface simplicity and expressive depth. The recital includes several stimulating pairs: the Aria from the Goldbergs with the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite; Gavottes from the Sixth Cello Suite and E major Violin Partita; the Siciliano from the G minor solo sonata for violin preceding the more famous flute example. These pairs only serve to underline the variety of Bach’s response to a particular genre. Grandest and most superficially complex of the works here; the famous D minor Toccata and Fugue proves highly idiomatic on the guitar; relating the virtuosic and extrovert writing back to what we now think must be a lost violin original for the piece (possibly not even by Bach) rather than the form for organ which is now universally known. Attademo contributes a personal introduction to the album which explains his choice of repertoire and interpretative approach; taking inspiration from great Bach players of the past such as Mstislav Rostropovich and Dinu Lipatti.

Long available only in a larger box, the only available digital-era set of Martinu’s string quartets, recorded in 1990 by a native Czech ensemble.

Martinu composed seven quartets over the course of his career, from the First in 1918 to the Seventh in 1947. This chronological range therefore mirrors the development of his music, from Debussy and Franck-accented Bohemianism in the First to a more up-to-date French influence on the Second from 1925, which arrives in the finale at the kind of chugging accumulations of motoric energy that became his trademark.

The direct emotional appeal of all seven quartets is vividly brought to life by the Stamitz Quartet in a recording first issued in 1990, and which still has very few rivals on disc. Established in 1985, the Stamitz Quartet quickly became known as leading interpreters of Czech repertory. ‘I can heartily recommend this comprehensive traversal of the unpredictable, occasionally highly impressive works that make up the corpus of Martinu’s Quartets.’ (MusicWeb International)

There is still much we do not know about the veritable mandolin-mania of late 18th-century Europe, particularly Vienna, which in that period was home to the three greatest musicians of the Classical period: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The instrument certainly enjoyed dazzling success in Viennese musical circles, embraced by the cultured aristocrats who resided in the Habsburg capital, and its meteoric rise was supported by some extraordinary virtuosos who helped promote its high-quality and fast-growing repertoire.
Giovanni Hoffmann’s refined chamber music featuring the mandolin was warmly received among the Viennese elite, making him one of the foremost figures behind the burgeoning mandolin repertoire of late 18th-century Vienna. Very little is known about his life; the Italianate first name alongside a clearly central-European surname adds to the mystery shrouding his birthplace and sphere of education.
Hoffmann was both a mandolin virtuoso and an esteemed composer. In 1799, the music merchant Johann Traeg advertised a list of the mandolin scores available to purchase from his shop on Vienna’s Singerstraße. It included a Trio for mandolin & bass by Hoffmann, and that same year, the composer released a further number of manuscript works through Traeg including his Quartets for mandolin, violin, viola & cello and
Serenatas for mandolin & viola. Hoffmann’s work is recorded again in Austria in the early decades of the 19th century, but – like his birth – the place and date of his death have not yet come to light. His music, however, lives on, a testament to his talent for composing delightful music in a Classical style evoking the fascinating gatherings of the Viennese literati.

Demofoonte dates from the early ‘Milan years’ of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787), long before the radical ‘reform operas’ for which he is most famous and his break with opera seria and the librettos of Pietro Metastasio. Gluck arrived in the northern Italian city in 1737 and was mentored there by composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Though Sammartini primarily composed symphonies and music for the church, Milan boasted a vibrant opera scene, and Gluck soon formed an association with one of the city's up-and-coming opera houses, the Teatro Regio Ducal. His first opera, Artaserse, on a libretto by Metastasio, premiered there on 26 December 1741 and opened the Milanese Carnival of 1742. Gluck went on to compose an opera for each of the next four Carnivals at Milan, Demofoonte being the second of these and his third opera overall, premiering on 6 January 1743. In celebration of Gluck’s 300th birthday, the early music scholar and harpsichordist Alan Curtis (1934–2015), founder of Il Complesso Barocco and leader of the period music ensemble for nearly four decades, prepared Demofoonte for performance. All of the arias had been preserved, but nearly all of the secco recitatives were lost. Curtis composed new recitatives in Gluck's style, using Gluck’s earliest fully extant opera, Ipermestra, written less than two years after Demofoonte, as a model. This modern revival was given its first performance on 23 November 2014 in Vienna and was recorded with the same excellent cast of singers the week before, in Northern Italy.

These little sonatas by Domenico Cimarosa were originally written for the fortepiano; they are transcribed for guitar here by the present performer, Claudio Giuliani. They're a bit unusual to hear on guitar, an instrument historically associated with an individual performer's virtuosity: these pieces are technically simple, playable by an advanced beginner on either instrument. Yet Giuliani's recording is welcome. This isn't familiar music in any setting, and these are delightful miniatures, among the few examples of music of the late 18th century that shows little influence from either Haydn or Mozart. They stand outside the whole line of development of pieces called sonatas. Each one poses itself a little formal problem and solves it, departing from and returning to its tonic key through a unique coordination of harmonic motion (without recourse to chromatic harmony) and thematic material. The combination of extreme technical simplicity and formal sophistication draws the listener into what might at first seem an undifferentiated series of short pieces. Sample the Sonata in G minor, C. 22 (track 14) for a demonstration of Cimarosa's melodic economy, on a par with Bartók's Mikrokosmos pieces, and for Giuliani's clean playing, which gives these deceptive finds their full measure of worth. Dutch label Brilliant Classics, not known for audiophile engineering, delivers fine guitar sonics here from a studio in Rome.

-- James Manheim, AllMusic.com

In February 1896, Clara Schumann described Julius Röntgen in a letter to Johannes Brahms: 'He has remained a child, so innocent, pure, open, enthusiastic… But we certainly can and must take him seriously.’ Brahms certainly agreed and stole from the younger composer a theme from the Serenade which opens this compilation, for use in his own Second Symphony; when Röntgen pointed this out, he was the recipient of a rare apology from Brahms. Born in 1855, Röntgen grew up in Leipzig, the son of the leader of the Gewandhaus orchestra. As a boy he met Liszt, having already composed music for the likes of Joseph Joachim. His move to Amsterdam in 1877 launched a multifaceted career as a pianist, conductor and teacher who continued to compose prolifically in all the classical genres. He became friends with Grieg, who dedicated a volume of Lyric Pieces to him, and much of his own output convincingly welds Austro-German forms with a fresh, Scandinavian-accented simplicity of expression. This portrait of Röntgen ranges across his diverse output, from the Serenade of 1876 to one of the symphonies he wrote late in life, a single-movement form composed in 1930 with a soprano vocalise. A youthful and joyous Violin Sonata of 1879 was composed for the violinist Amanda Maier, who would soon become his first wife; its high spirits are shared by the Theme and Variations for two pianos from the previous year. The Cello Sonata Op.56 is dedicated to the memory of a friend and adapts the final chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. His Sixth Piano Trio Op.50 opens in high Brahmsian style with a passionate main melody and a tender slow movement. A trio of motets dates from the 1920s and features some of his most daring harmonies, before the Symphony strikes a vein of pastoral contemplation akin to the Sinfonia Espansiva of Nielsen, who had also become a friend.

This fascinating set provides a refreshing window onto a much studied, much idolized, and oft performed master of composition, allowing many of his familiar works to appear in a new light, recognizable and yet transformed. Bach’s music is often described as indestructible, in the sense that no matter how it is performed, or in whichever arrangement, its essential spirit survives. Many of the transcriptions included here represent the work of contemporary, world-class performers bringing Bach’s masterpieces into the repertoire of their own instruments or ensembles, thereby giving new timbres to the genius of Bach’s contrapuntal lines. The much-loved Goldberg Variations, for example, are given not one, but two new arrangements, as the interwoven voices for keyboard are divided between the members of a string trio and a recorder quintet. Others are scholarly reconstructions of concertos for what might well have been Bach’s originally intended instruments – versions that were subsequently lost to future generations.

From 1729 Bach directed the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, an association consisting of students and musical citizens, and for his performances with them Bach needed to provide secular works. But his time was largely absorbed with writing sacred music for St Thomas’s Church in his role as Kantor. So Bach devised harpsichord concertos by adapting concertos he had originally written for other instruments. Musicologists believe that the seven works known today as Bach’s concertos for solo harpsichord were initially composed as violin or oboe concertos. A third category included here might be called Bach transcriptions by 20th-century “giants”. The great Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt arranged for the harpsichord various major works by Bach – five from solo violin works, three from solo cello suites and two movements from a partita for solo flute and a suite for solo lute respectively. These are classics of the arranger’s art, refined and thoroughly idiomatic.

The wirily coiffured man in his middle years who glares from the cover of this new Brilliant Classics release is Luigi Mozzani. Perhaps he has misgivings about his picture being taken; if so, it deos not apparently unsettle his playing. His left-hand position suggests a stretch of unusual breadth: a Rachmaninov of the guitar, perhaps. The expression, without being too fanciful, suggests a man of pride and personal independence, and gives life to a remarkable story. Mozzani was born into grinding poverty in 1869 but as a child gained a basic musical education that enabled him to earn a living in his home-town of Faenza as a clarinettist in the town band. He taught himself the guitar, and more profitably learnt the oboe, which eventually took him across the Atlantic where he became a member of the New York Philharmonic. There too he published a method-book for the guitar which, one he had returned to Europe, made his name in the guitar fraternity. By the turn of the century, as a player, teacher and maker of guitars, Mozzani had found his metier. His output was not large, and focused on education, but full of original lyric inspiration. The studies are as much tone-pictures as they are technical exercises, no less satisfying as a listening than a playing experience. As wider audiences will now appreciate, his works certainly belong to the fienst guitar repertoire of the late 1800s: they have never been gathered together on a single album, and many of the pieces here receive their first recordings.

The repertoire for harp and piano is modest indeed; only Carlos Salzedo’s Sonata (1922) enjoys any currency on disc. However, the combination of plucked and keyed chromatic instruments is one that affords any number of imaginative possibilities and a broad palette of timbres, especially in the contrasting sustain and decay patterns of each instrument. For her second album on Brilliant Classics, after the critical success of ‘Dionysus and Apollo’ (95925, featuring equally rare Romantic flute and harp repertoire), Anna Pasetti explores the work of four mostly Milanese-based composers. First among them is Francesco Pollini, dedicatee of Bellini’s I Sonnambula and composer of a ‘Grande Sonate’ in a concertante style, exploiting the idiomatic contrast between the instruments to the full. The Capriccio by Benedetto Negri is written in the form of a nocturnal divertimento typical for the time: a cantabile introduction prefacing an elaborate variation set with a brilliantly figured coda. Best known of our quartet is Saverio Mercadante for his operas and florid variation sets on popular operatic themes which cling to the fringes of the instrumental repertoire, especially for flute. His rhapsodic Melodia is a chamber arrangement of a concertante work for harp and small orchestra, with an opportunity for improvised virtuosity in the form of a cadenza which Pasetti has devised for herself. Neapolitan by birth and training as an operatic composer, Lauro Rossi took charge of Milan’s conservatoire before succeeding Mercadante at the head of the Naples conservatoire. His Divertimento is an early work, dedicated to a talented pair of musician sisters, in which the piano takes the lead role, unlike the other works here.

Under its founder-director Krijn Koetsveld, Le Nuove Musiche has won international acclaim for its complete recording of Monteverdi’s madrigals, a project over a decade in the making and which has recently been released complete for the first time by Brilliant Classics. Now the ensemble turns its attention to a modern master of concerted vocal writing, Arvo Pärt. The idioms of the two composers could hardly be more different: Monteverdi’s madrigals so rich and elaborate, speaking of earthly love and pain, while Pärt evokes a world of stillness and calm. As Koetsveld remarks in his booklet introduction, his music seems so simple. Only a few notes, repeated harmonies, often extremely quiet tempo, declamation on a note or chord. No complex patterns, with many surprisingly dissonant harmonies or highly complex vocalizations. Where does that intriguing, intoxicating atmosphere come from which many cherish and enrapture? In the Magnificat of 1989 Pärt draped the text in a free declamatory style, on a note, or a dissonance or a simple harmonic world He expresses the Marian hymn softly, almost timidly, as if the defining vision of the text is of Mary, quietly rejoicing at the news that she carries within her the son of God. The Nunc dimittis was composed separately, 12 years later, but its unhurried unfolding of the Song of Simeon complements the Magnificat perfectly. The Seven Magnificat Antiphons (1988, 1991) and the Stabat mater (1985) both employ fewer notes in the service of a more austere soundworld, one which may cast the listener back to the vast spaces of a medieval cathedral and the daily offices held therein. For 25 minutes the Stabat mater dwells hauntingly within the Aeolian mode as if in musical imitation of Mary, quietly lamenting her son at the foot of the Cross. Both of them exercise an immense power upon any receptive listener, and this new recording is sure to capture the imagination of Pärt’s many followers worldwide.

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REVIEW:

There are plenty of first-rate recordings of these works available, particularly the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, but who’s going to complain about a new one that delivers a slightly different perspective–that is, one created by a minimal vocal ensemble (eight voices), well-tailored to Pärt’s famously minimal scoring? The voices are (happily) very well-matched, and their favorable blend and balance often leads you to forget how many (or few) of them there are. You just enjoy the sound—both for its fullness and textural clarity, as well as for the special quality that comes from a handful rather than a roomful of compatible voices resonating.

While the Magnificat, Nunc dimittis, and Maria antiphons are all finely sung, the Stabat Mater—heard less frequently, probably due to its uncommon scoring for three voices and three strings—is the highlight, showing in luminous detail the beauty of particular voices—soprano Wendy Roobol, alto Hugo Naessens, and tenor Falco van Loon (great names, all!)—as well as the three singers’ exceptional technical and interpretive mastery. I was not familiar with this ensemble, Le Nuove Musiche, before, and its earlier claim to fame is a 12-disc set of Monteverdi madrigals. All available clues suggest that this is a Netherlands-based group, but good luck trying to find out much at the ensemble’s website: strewn with an odd and unhelpful mix of (mostly) Dutch and (occasional) English, its contents are certain to leave most sincerely inquisitive browsers frustrated and still uninformed. There is virtually no information about the group—other than a composite of individual head-shot photos—in the disc’s liner notes.

Oh well. The music and the singing are very good, and give no reason to disappoint either the newcomer or the experienced Pärt listener, even if there’s nothing here in the performances of the Magnificat, Nunc dimittis, and antiphons that elevates them beyond the existing reference versions. If you happen to be new to Pärt’s music you will find a substantial commentary on various works in our reviews archive, from which an excerpt, describing some of the music’s unique characteristics, concludes this review:

“The bias toward minor thirds in both melodic and harmonic contexts, the pervasive use of antiphonal choral effects, the chord inversions that give a sense of suspended time, the slow-moving harmonic changes unbound by traditional metrical or temporal constraints–all of these in some way define Pärt’s post-1976 music. But ultimately, the proof is in receptive, un-analytical listening, and no matter how many times you hear Pärt’s works, each time you’re somehow carried beyond an expected esthetic experience to a more spiritual place–whether you want to be or not.”

– ClassicsToday (David Vernier)

Following up on the great success of the first volume of “500 Years of Organ Music” (Brilliant Classics 95310) Brilliant Classics is happy and proud to launch this second volume of 50 CDs, presenting an unprecedented number of organ composers, not one work of them present in the previous box, a survey of immense scope, variety, quality and historical importance. Like its predecessor the box is in chronological order, starting off with the Renaissance (Antegnati, Pellegrini, Bonelli, Gabrieli a.o), continuing through the Baroque (Zipoli, Pachelbel, Krebs, Lübeck, Marcello a.o.), the Classical Period (Spergher, Cimarosa, Valeri, Galuppi) the Romantic Period (Rheinberger, Merkel, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Poncielli, Fumagalli a.o.) to the 20th century (Messiaen, Ligeti a.o.). The best organists of our time play on a wealth of historic or newly built organs, all perfectly suited to the music played on them. A fitting and unbeatable tribute the the “King of instruments”!

Much of the oldest organ music has been lost or destroyed. However, to this day in institutions and libraries around the world ancient manuscripts are still discovered languishing on cobwebbed shelves, and the music’s fragments are painstakingly pieced together, allowing new works to come to light. For instance, we are introduced to Gonzalo de Baena, whose collection, "Newly devised method for learning to play," dating from 1540, was only rediscovered in 1992.

Other Renaissance-era highlights include Italian virtuosi Cristofano Malvezzi, Giovanni Maria Trabaci, and Antonio Valente, whose works offer an insight into the era’s musical traditions, with parallel triads and typically highly ornamented melodies.

Encompassing a range of European contributions, the anthology also features Spanish early music and particularly the tiento. Deriving its name from tentar ‘to touch’, the tiento is Spain’s answer to the Italian ricercar. The style is exemplified by Francisco Correa de Arauxo’s Libro de tientos y discursos de música practica, published in 1626, and its pieces set the stage for the Spanish Baroque era.

Among the German composers, the set includes Johann Caspar Kerll, a highly-respected composer in his day whose works were studied by Handel and J.S. Bach. He is virtually forgotten today, but receives due credit here with a full album dedicated to his canzone and toccatas. Naturally, a survey of the German organ music repertoire is not complete without the contribution made by the Bach family, and seven members of the family, including J.S. Bach, grace this set.

Organists: Fabio Antonio Falcone, Stefano Innocenti, Matteo Messori, Riccardo Castagnetti, Enrico Viccardi, Claudio Astronio, Roberto Loreggian, Francesco Cera, Luca Scandali, Hadrien Jourdan, Matthias Havinga, and more.