The early-music cellist Renato Criscuolo and his Musica Perduta ensemble have specialized in reviving vocal and chamber music by Italy-based composers from the 17th and 18th centuries, producing well-received albums of Francesco Maria Zuccari (94306), Nicola Porpora (95279), Pergolesi (94763), Handel (94426) and others. Their latest album revives the name and the music of Rocco Greco, a cellist-composer who can be considered the founder of the distinguished Neapolitan cello tradition that later produced more renowned names such as Lanzetti and Caporale. Few personal details are known of Greco’s life. He lived in Naples during the second half of the 17th century, dying there at some point before 1718. As an instrumentalist recorded as working in the Viceroy of Naples’ private chapel, he was known for his virtuosity on the bass violin, a forerunner of the cello and tuned one tone below it. The bow was held underhand, like a viola da gamba. Greco produced a collection of 28 ‘Sinfonias’ – sonatas, we would now call them – for two viols, demanding a virtuoso technique in the quick movements and the opportunity for elaborate ornamentation in the slow movements. Criscuolo intersperses 13 of these sinfonias with brief and untitled movements and with instrumental contrafacta of a pair of motets by Greco. To perform and record this music for the first time in the modern era, he and his colleague Andrea Lattarulo have used modern copies of bass violins, playing at Neapolitan pitch and joined in some of the sinfonias by a light continuo accompaniment or theorbo, harpsichord and/or chamber organ.

Alexei Lubimov has long been renowned for his beautifully weighted and persuasive performances of new music, especially from his native Russia, by post-Soviet composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov. He is a restless seeker after beauty in music wherever it may be found, equally at home in music as diverse as Chopin, Debussy, Pärt and Cage. His interest in historically relevant instruments for historical repertoire stretches back decades to a time, especially in the Soviet Union, when such an interest was unusual and even eccentric to some, but Lubimov has always been a pianist of profound integrity who goes his own way without regard to passing fashions. It is in this capacity, as a fortepianist, that Lubimov has made a distinguished contribution to the ongoing Brilliant Classics series dedicated to the complete sonatas of Jan Ladislav Dussek. As he writes in a booklet essay, the two sonatas Op.44 and Op.77 belong to the mature and most original of Dussek’s works. Composed in 1799, Op.44 is a truly fin-de-siècle work, not coincidentally subtitled ‘Farewell’, with bold modulations that cast their gaze forward into a vision of the Romantic age as much as the rhetorical structures belong to the Classical era of Haydn and Mozart. The emotional candor, the romantic impulse and the depressive melancholy in Dussek’s presentiment of his coming death make the Op.77 Sonata (L’Invocation’) an even more entrancing anticipation of the world of Chopin. For a fusion of Baroque gestures, Classical sonata forms, novelty and expression of the melodic contours, the richness of the piano writing and the boldness in the use of all possible resources of the instrument, there’s no-one quite like Dussek, and Alexei Lubimov is a peerless exponent of his expressive world. The continuation of an exciting new project: the recording of the complete piano sonatas by Dussek! Dussek’s style is rich, harmonically expressive and pianistically challenging, Classicism on the brink of Early Romanticism.

When they began playing together in 2017, Stefano Cardi and Enrico Pieranunzi went in search of repertoire which would harmonize with their disparate musical backgrounds, that of a classical guitarist with a passion for jazz and blues, and a jazz pianist with a thorough grounding in the classics. They turned quickly to America, both north and south, and found there a well-stocked but little-known library of pieces by composers who moved easily and skillfully between popular and classical idioms. This unique recital opens with one of Joplin’s best-known piano rags, The Easy Winners, and follows it with a pair of waltzes, also in arrangements for guitar and piano. Cardi and Pieranunzi then sail down to Buenos Aires for a trio of tangos by Joplin’s Argentinian contemporary, Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934). The juxtaposition of Gershwin and Guastavino is more familiar, none the less beguiling for that, especially played with such easy-going charm. The final pair of North and South American composers is the most ingenious: the Prelude and Waltz from Dave Brubeck’s 1961 album Points on jazz, answered by two of the Cuatro Danzones by Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905), the Cuban composer who studied with Alkan at the Paris conservatoire and played an instrumental part in establishing a classically formed voice for Cuban music. Most of the pieces chosen by Cardi and Pieranunzi were originally conceived for solo piano, but these arrangements draw out the particular, nationally accented character of their melodies when transferred to the guitar. Listened through in an hour-long sequence, the album takes the listener on an often nostalgia journey through the waltz as it was played and danced and heard throughout North and South American during the first half of the last century.

This set of divertimento-like sonatas belongs to Devienne’s period in service to Cardinal de Rohan during the first half of the 1780s, though the manuscript is dedicated to another French nobleman. It is the work of a highly accomplished musician in his early 20s: already the master of his art as a performer on the flute, providing for himself and his patrons music to delight the imagination without straining for depth and profundity. Unlike Devienne’s concertos, which naturally featured virtuoso solo parts, his chamber music tended to avoid excessive technical difficulties because it was largely intended for an audience of aristocratic amateur musicians. The sonatas are all cast in two movements, none of them especially slow except for a melancholy Siciliano to open the Third, which is the only one of the set written in a minor key. Gracefulness is the quality enshrined both by Devienne’s expressive markings and by the fluid charm of his melodies. The scoring for an ensemble resembling that of the Baroque trio sonata makes this music more accessible to a wider audience than the trios for three flutes with which the composer is more fully represented on record: there are no comparable versions of these works presently available, making this release a highly appealing acquisition for anyone curious about the byways of Classical-era chamber music.

On their new album the Queenz of Piano combine Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata with Thunderstruck from AC/DC to a brilliant piece of music. Beethoven’s Ode an die Freude merges with the infectious joie de vivre of Happy (Pharrell Williams). Chopin’s revolutionary etude meets Eye of the Tiger with energetic dance beats. Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You turns the grand piano into a percussion instrument for intoxicating grooves that create a crackling tension between soft sounds and fast passages. The programme of the two award-winning pianists is rounded off by their own compositions, in which they once again prove their musical understanding beyond genre boundaries. Their original way of playing the piano is transformed by electronic sounds and live visuals into a new Gesamtkunstwerk: a contemporary piano concerto! Virtuosic, enthralling and gripping at the same time!

Music for 'The Cardinal King': the only complete available recording of an engaging chamber-collection from 18thcentury Rome, written for the head of a renegade English Catholic family in exile. Several previous Brilliant Classics albums have given notice of the under-appreciated gifts of Carlo Tessarini (1690-1766). Collections of his violin and flute sonatas have revealed a consistently inspired and stylish voice, reliably well-turned melodies and shapely instrumental parts rewarding players and listeners alike. The same qualities illuminate this collection of five Allettamenti da Camera, composed in Rome in 1740 and dedicated to His Royal Highness Henry Duke of York. By that stage in his career, the Rimini-born Tessarini had worked for courts and aristocratic patrons in Venice and Urbino. He had lately moved south to Rome, perhaps in hope of currying favour with the Stuarts, who had lived in the city as celebrated exiles for some years. Surely no dedicatee, whatever their musical expertise, could fail to be delighted by music of such accomplishment and sunny elegance. Each of the five Allettamenti is cast in a tripartite quick-slow-quick form of sonata movements, and they are crowned by a virtuosic, two-part Capriccio which allots a starring role to the solo violin in a set of increasingly elaborate variations. All the same, Tessarini departed for Naples shortly after their composition, and continued on his travels across Europe, finding receptive audiences in France, England and the Netherland, where he died early in 1767. This new recording has been made by an ensemble of Italian early-music specialists who have gathered for the purpose under the banner of the Cappella Musicale Enrico Stuart. They are led by the violinist Gabriele Pro, who is joined by Andrea Lattarulo (cello), Michele Carreca (theorbo and guitar) and Simone El Oufir Pierini (harpsichord). Pierini has won glowing opinions for previous Brilliant Classics albums dedicated to the music of Cherubini (96246), de Montg�roult (96247) and Tinazzoli (96865).

An LP reissue for a critically acclaimed best-seller of the Brilliant Classics catalogue, and an ideal introduction to the unique, meditative world of Arvo Pärt.

The gentle piano arpeggios introducing Spiegel im Spiegel calm the pulse and invite the listener into a world of stillness, consolation and contemplation. Composed in 1978, it has become one of the best-known works written by Pärt in his ‘tintinnabular’ style which he first developed with the short piano piece Für Alina earlier in the 1970s.

This album presents three different versions of Spiegel im Spiegel: the original violin-and-piano score, then subsequent arrangements for cello and piano and for piano trio. Each of them reveals different facets of the piece as it gently unfolds, making the album as a whole an hour-long meditation.

Shorter intermezzi set the main work in relief: as well as Für Alina, written as a birthday gift to the composer’s daughter, there is a satellite work also for solo piano, the Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka. Finally there is the Mozart-Adagio which Part wrote for piano trio in 2005 as a tribute in memory of the Russian violinist Oleg Kagan. Neither an arrangement nor a collage, the piece takes its theme from the slow movement of Mozart’s Violin Sonata K280, a youthful work, and proceeds to weave a restrained commentary around the original, as well as adding an introduction and epilogue which set the piece in the context of our own time. Like much of Pärt’s music, it makes an impression out of proportion to its apparently modest ambition and dimension.

Antonín Vivaldi (1678-1741) was 27 years old when his Opus 1 collection of 12 sonatas first appeared in print in 1705. Whether or not they represent his earliest acknowledged compositions, they certainly mark the start of a glittering career, bearing already identifiable Vivaldian fingerprints while also drawing on a heritage of Italianate chamber music exemplified by the trio sonatas of Corelli. The form of these early works resembles a suite rather than the three- and four-movement pieces determined by tempo marking which soon became standard practice for the sonatas and concertos composed by Vivaldi in such profusion. In all but three of the Opus 1 Sonatas, a freely developed prelude introduces a sequence of three dance movements such as sarabandes, gigues and gavottes. Solemnity and lively intimacy sit side by side, in an ingenious synthesis of church and chamber modes of expression. Vivaldi’s Opus 1 reaches a grand climax with a free-standing set of variations on the most popular melody in 18th century Italy, ‘La Folia’. This grave and antique chord-sequence of Spanish origin inspired the 20-something composer to handle the familiar instrumental line-up in a bold new way, liberating the bass line from a supporting role and giving some especially brilliant canonical dialogues to the two violins. The sonata demonstrates the degree to which vocal writing inspired Vivaldi’s slow movements and paved the way for his future ventures in opera. The album is completed by two sonatas from the Opus 5 collection published in 1716, and six more sonatas without an opus number (RV 60, 68, 71, 71, 74 and 77 in the Vivaldi catalogue), all scored for the same combination of instruments.

Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) was a composer-virtuoso esteemed by Haydn, from the same generation as Beethoven but far more travelled, feted in salons and palaces from London to St Petersburg. The four sonatas on this release all come from different periods: The earliest (Op.5 No.3 in A flat) dates back to 1788, the threshold of the French Revolution, while the last (Op.61 in F sharp minor) was composed in 1807, in the midst of the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. The B flat major Sonata Op.24 reflects Dussek's time in London, and Op.43 in A major the period of his hasty departure from London, abandoning his young wife in London and fleeing to Hamburg to avoid his creditors, notably including Lorenzo da Ponte. In the sonatas from Op.24 onwards Dussek richly exploits the colorful sonorities of then-new-five-and-a-half-octave Broadwood grand, mingling flamboyant virtuosity and explosive rhetoric with a rhapsodic expansiveness and harmonic side-slips that foreshadow Schubert. The music is tautly structured and passionately argued, with richly imaginative textures and a subtle use of chromaticism for poignant effect. On this latest installment in a projected complete set of the sonatas, each album performed by a different pianist specializing in music of the Classical era, the Finnish pianist Tuija Hakkila plays two instruments: a Viennese five-octave instrument of anonymous manufacture dating from around 1800, and a modern copy of a Longman Clementi fortepiano (London, 1799) made by Chris Maene. Both pianos are ideally suited to the drama, virtuoso brilliance and often deep, rich sonorities of these sonatas.

Despite being the leading composer of his native Ecuador, the name and reputation of Luis Humberto Salgado (1903-1977) has hardly travelled beyond South America. His Symphonies were composed from 1949 to 1975: works of maturity, not outlandishly but colorfully orchestrated, originally structured (the Second and Ninth each in a single movement), nationalistically inflected, especially in several of the rackety finales, yet crafted with a fastidious ear, as one would expect from a pupil, then professor, then director of the leading conservatoire in his country, based in the capital of Quito. The most overtly folkloristic of the symphonies is the First, in which each movement is based on a different indigenous style of music. The tendency to compression in Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony impressed Salgado deeply, and influenced the compact form of the Second. However, Salgado never followed the likes of Messiaen and Boulez down the path of total serialism: the Third Symphony bears a distinct key signature – D major – and intriguing subtitle: ‘written on a pentatonic scale in Rococo style’. The Fourth is another vigorous assertion of Ecuadorean and Andean character within traditional symphonic form. The language of the Sixth (1968) is structured like a Concerto grosso and scored for strings and timpani, in the neoclassical vein of earlier European scores by Martinu and Martin. Salgado styled the Seventh as a tribute to Beethoven on the bicentennial of his birth, but the symphony itself is strident and questing. The Eighth Symphony was composed to mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Pichincha, which wrested Quito and the independence of Ecuador away from their Spanish occupiers. Finally, the 12-minute Ninth makes an appropriately refined adieu, shaped around several 12-tone melodies, its exposition outlined in a mere 53 bars, and brought to a conclusion by a dense and chromatic fugato.

Almost all good Romantic-era composers knew how to have fun at the piano, all the more so with a friend. Schumann and Brahms wrote some of their most unbuttoned music in this genre, and their example was followed by Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843–1900). From a generation after Brahms, he venerated the older man, and having maintained a relationship – somewhat strained on Brahms’s part – since their first meeting, he came in 1868 to marry Elisabeth von Stockhausen, who herself had been a pupil and close friend of Brahms, who would often write them letters together (and then more private ones to Elisabeth). Von Herzogenberg left grand themes and forms to his many works in other genres such as quartet and oratorio. There are five variation sets here – one on a theme by Brahms, the others of his own invention – and several collections of dances, equally cheerful and often whimsical in disposition: music to be enjoyed in the playing as much as the listening. There are two collections of Allotria – from the Greek, meaning strange or foreign things – each containing three pieces, and the second set here receives its first recording. Von Herzogenberg’s handling of harmony is at its most ingenious here, and his northern-accented melodies are especially original. The sisters Nadia and Angela Tirino have played together since childhood, and they share that intimate understanding, musical instinct and equality of partnership common to first-class sibling piano-duets. Having both studied at the conservatoire in Florence, they live and work there, teaching and performing, but also joining the jury of distinguished piano competitions around the world. This von Herzogenberg release is their first internationally available album.

In this release, the prominent conductor Adriano with help from the world renowned Bratislava and Moscow Symphony Orchestras, among others, draws together the first complete series of orchestral works by Swiss composer Fritz Brun. This set sheds light on the little-known composer’s repertoire, from the rhapsodies, the concertos, to ten sweeping symphonies. Brun grew up in Lucerne and his time active as a composer coincided with a period of high creative output of Swiss music. Brun’s repertoire sits alongside other native composers such as Honegger, Schoeck, and Bloch. The crowded market, combined with the struggle to find a publisher, offers one indication as to why Brun’s works failed to reach the mainstream public. While not a household name, Brun is often touted as the Swiss answer to Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar. Brun’s works have a nostalgic touch; they draw on the Romantic and Classical eras in their emotional sincerity and defined forms, but always with a modern flavor. After graduating from the Cologne conservatoire, Brun worked in Berlin, London and Dortmund where he took up various music posts. His music reflects his European travels and unites diverse inspirations from different countries and eras as equals on his musical plane. Modernist influences are skillfully interwoven into his compositions, the scherzo movements for example, draw on Stravinsky in their timbre and rhythms and Symphony No. 5 liberally experiments with tonality. However, similar to his English counterparts, his music remains rooted in his homeland. Symphony No. 3 is inspired by the Alps and it is his best known work, made particularly famous for its use of Italian-Swiss folk melodies. In his later life, Brun returned to Switzerland, where he served as director of the Berne Music Society until his retirement in 1941. The final portion of this release features historical recordings, in particular, the celebrated Paul Sacher brings his interpretation of Variations for string orchestra and piano, and Brun conducts his own Symphony No. 8.

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REVIEW:

This wonderful set is self-recommending and a real labour of love, reflecting Adriano’s commitment to perform, record and bring to a wider listening public the music of his compatriot and Switzerland’s leading symphonist Fritz Brun, providing on disc the majority of his music, including all the orchestral works.

– MusicWeb International

Heinrich and his son Carl Baermann count among the most accomplished clarinettists of the Romantic age. Many composers wrote for Heinrich, most notably Carl Maria von Weber, who composed his two concertos and chamber works with Heinrich in mind, impressed as he was by his ‘homogeneity of tone from top to bottom’. Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were among others who wrote for this ‘Rubini of the clarinet’, as he was known at the time. His son Carl was less talented as a soloist, though he accompanied his father on concert-tours playing the basset horn, and he turned both to teaching and to instrument-making: in 1860 he produced an 18-keyed Müller-type clarinet, which found favour with many players, including Richard Mühlfeld, for whom Brahms wrote several celebrated late works such as two sonatas and the Clarinet Quintet. Carl’s own compositions run to 88 opus numbers in all, of which three are played here by the young Italian clarinettist Dario Zingales: two evocative tone-poems and the early but more extensive and demanding Fantasie brillante Op.7. These world premiere recordings are complemented by Carl’s arrangements of six Schubert Lieder, including the evergreen Ave Maria, Gretchen am Spinnrade and Ständchen, in which the vocal line transfers beautifully to the solo instrument. Heinrich’s own music is even less known but no less rewarding for collectors of little- known Romantic chamber music. Still unpublished, the Nocturne in F minor is as melodically memorable as it is superbly written for Baermann’s own instrument. Dario Zingales presents its first recording here, as he does the Introduktion und Polonaise Op.25 and the sparkling Air Varié Op.12 No.2. With invaluable booklet notes contributed by Zingales himself, this album will also be a valuable acquisition for all clarinettists looking for new repertoire.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was one of the most successful and remarkable composers of the first half of the 20th century in Italy. His style is influenced by Neo-Classicism, vivid, brilliant, with the occasional odd dissonance, strongly rhythmical and full of catchy melodies. He fled Anti-semitism before WWO2, and settled in Hollywood where he successfully composed film music for more than 200 films.

This new recording presents a selection of chamber music for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, in various combinations: the most substantial is the Piano Trio Op. 70, also featured are the Clarinet Sonata, the Cello Sonata Op. 50 and Pastorale and Rondo, Op. 185 for all 4 instruments. Evocative, dream-like and melancholy music alternates with exciting, rhythmically driven dances.

Played with feeling and conviction by the Ensemble Italiano, with Mauro Tortorelli (violin) Pierluigi Bernard (clarinet), Massimo Macrì (cello) and Angela Meluso (piano).

This ensemble previously issued a recording of Castelnuovo- Tedesco with the complete works for violin and piano (BC 95642).

Pietro Paolo Raimondo was a nobleman of Como and a musician of accomplishment who began in 1601 to compile a manuscript of pieces that came his way. He probably copied them out – or had them copied – for the purpose of playing them himself, but the manuscript now provides a significant record of pieces that would otherwise be lost, many of them by authors now unknown to us. Among the 69 pieces there are anonymously authored dances but also fantasias by Francesco da Milano and Lorenzino del Liuto, and intabulations of vocal works such as the famous Vestiva i colli and Susanne ung jour. Through the Raimondo Manuscript we may enter the rarified world of high-Renaissance culture as seen through the eyes and ears of a cultivated amateur. The collection has received relatively little attention on record before now, making this new recording all the more valuable: probably the first album to be devoted to it. The booklet-note gives valuable context both to the history and performance practice, written by the artist on this recording, Domenico Cerasini. He has chosen 24 items from the Manuscript, and provided authorship details where they can be deduced, but scholarly issues of who wrote what may be considered beside the point when listening through to pieces that alternate between lively celebration and melancholy reflection.