This rich set of music by J.S. Bach (or connected to him by attribution or publication) and transcribed for the guitar provides a stunning example of the versatility of the composer's music, the unquestionable genius of which renders it universally successful on any instrument with polyphonic capabilities (solo string instruments included). Luigi Attademo and Stefano Cardi provide an eclectic selection of Bach pieces in successful transcriptions by themselves and virtuoso classical guitarist and arranger David Russell. This is followed by a large set from Anna Magdalena's Notebook performed and transcribed by Jan Depreter, and complete sets of the Violin Sonatas & Partitas and Lute Suites by Franceso Teopini and Attademo, respectively.

REVIEW:

Some recordings just make you joyous at the vitality of the classical guitar world. This collection shows the variety of possible interpretations of his music from accomplished performers clearly devoted to making it work on the guitar. Liner notes, written by each performer, are well-crafted and offer insight into their creative practices.

— American Record Guide

Mozart wrote the Divertimento K247 in June 1776 for the name-day of Countess Maria Antonia Lodron, a family friend whose two daughters were pupils of the composer. He went on to write the Concerto for Three Pianos with the countess and her daughters as the intended soloists. Meanwhile K247 displays the 19-year-old composer's lyrical gifts but also his structural sophistication and his unerring feel for instrumental sonorities. K287 followed in 1777 as a direct sequel, composed for the same occasion and the same forces, and cast in comparably expansive terms across six movements. The intervening year seems to bring a refinement of both craft and humour, for K287 is one of the miracles of Mozart's lighter music, touched with high contrasts, memorable themes and sturdy developments. The second movement is a genial Andante and Variations which instantly transcends it's 'occasional' context. The heart of the work is the Adagio, placed fourth, where the solo violin outlines a melody cast from the same mould as the slow movement of the G major Violin Concerto K216 from two years earlier. But then Mozart comes up with a genuinely funny musical joke at the start of the finale, where the strings paint a recitative without words, like a virtual soprano on an empty stage. Testifying to their adaptability, these divertimenti have attracted performances and recordings by forces ranging from the one-per-part Vienna Octet to Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic. This new recording presents an attractive middle way, infused with vigour and charm by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Pardubice under the baton of the Armenian conductor Vahan Mardirossian. Mardirossian and his Czech colleagues have made several successful albums together, including the serenades by Dvor�k on Brilliant Classics (97030). Their recording of these perennially appealing early-Mozart works is accompanied by a new essay from Mark Viner.

John W. Duarte was not only one of the most prolific composers for the solo classic guitar in the 20th century; he was also concerned with the instrument in an ensemble context. He made a lasting contribution to the concept and musical chemistry of the guitar quartet, a muchneglected feature until his innovations. This area of his creative work proved something of a goldmine for both professional quartets and educational settings where the guitar was taught as a serious instrument, worthy of deep study, and indeed for Summer Schools worldwide. In this the composer offered arrangements and original works of taste and delicacy, a hitherto unprecedented development in the expanding repertoire of the guitar. This fourth instalment in Brilliant Classics' series dedicated to the vast and precious guitar oeuvre of John W. Duarte provides a complete survey of the composer's music for four guitars. This sub-set of his guitar music is in itself greatly varied in style but of consistently superb quality. Disc one contains music he originally composed for this ensemble, and disc two features his arrangements (many of them of his own compositions) for guitar quartet. Duarte explained that his own stylistic eclecticism derived from improvisation, with composition being a slower form of improvisation benefitting from time to reconsider and to refine the product: 'What one hears becomes translatable into "playback" action and/or, given a knowledge of musical theory, comprehensible. It can provide a direct route to eclecticism - one may adopt what one chooses into one's own bloodstream and bypass what one feels foreign to one's own nature. For this reason I have never had one immediately identifiable style and have happily lived with a wide variety of idioms.'

Blind from the age of two, a prodigiously gifted student, Jean Langlais (1907-91) produced an immense quantity of music. His organ works alone exceed in number those of JS Bach. Many have hardly ever been performed. Perhaps not more than half a dozen works are regularly played or recorded today, which is what makes this new complete survey of his organ music so invaluable, as the authoritative document of a high point in the distinguished lineage of the French organ heritage. The second volume of this complete survey opens with the third and last of his organ symphonies, among the most imposing and yet overlooked of his major works. More familiar are the Gregorian-inspired Suite medievale, the Triptyque, and the Triptyque Gr�gorien, whose flowing melodies share a spirit of Catholic mysticism with briefer meditations such as the Pri�re des Mages, the Incantation pour un Jour Saint and the Palm-Sunday voluntary Dominica in Palmis. As a collection of character pieces, Mosaique shows off Langlais's versatility, by turns solemn and joyful, songful and stormy. This sheer variety of form alone makes him stand out among French 20th-century composers for the organ. Throughout his life, Langlais wrote in many different styles and, true to his ideal, still retained the ability to surprise. This major project has been undertaken jointly by the Italian organists Giorgio Benati, Fausto Caporali and Alessandro Perin. Benati is a former student of Langlais, and Caporali has a string of successful French organ recordings to his credit. They have made these new recordings on Italian instruments, lending Langlais an 'Italian accent' while faithfully observing his expressive and registration markings in his scores. Booklet notes for each piece have been written by Giorgio Benati.

This album features two compositions by Jean Sibelius from different moments in the Finnish musician's life. The Impromptu Op.5 for string ensemble is an early work from 1894, in which Sibelius uses some thematic materials from his solo piano impromptus Nos. 5 and 6 from the Op.5 set. The Romance in C Op.42 (1903) was composed during a difficult phase in the composer's life caused by excessive alcohol consumption, which prompted him to leave Helsinki and move with his wife near to Lake Tuusula, where he could dedicate himself to composition far from the temptations of the Finnish capital. The piece is divided into short sections in which the melodic ideas arise from fragments of the octatonic, or diminished, scale of alternating whole and half steps supported by dissonant harmonies that add further tonal instability. Samuel Barber's typically inspired melodic vein emerges from the very beginning in his Serenade Op.1 for String Quartet or String Orchestra, dating from 1928. Featuring chromaticism's and dissonant passages, a duality is established between a first, rhythmic and impetuous thematic idea and a lyrical melody. The final movement brings greater serenity and joy through the choice of a major mode and the adoption of a graceful and leaping theme whose fragments pass in counterpoint between one voice and another. When Benjamin Britten composed his Simple Symphony Op.4 he was just 20 years old, and he describes the idea in an introduction to the score: 'This "Simple Symphony" is entirely based on material from works which the composer wrote between the ages of nine and twelve [.]. Although the development of these themes is in many places quite new, there are large stretches of the work which are taken bodily from the early pieces - save for the re-scoring for strings'. In effect, Britten extrapolates eight themes from his juvenile compositional production, associates two of them with each movement and creates a structural mix between the four movements of a Classical symphony, the dances of the Baroque suite and popular folklore. Da pacem Domine is a Gregorian style piece composed by Arvo P�rt in 2004 to commemorate the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks on trains, which killed 192 people. P�rt first composed a version for four voices on the text of a Latin prayer. That atmosphere of contemplation is preserved in his subsequent edition for chamber orchestra. The modal composition, in D Dorian, conveys the feeling of a search for calmness, a request from man to God for peace in the wake of such a tragedy. Scattered appearances of B flat and the leading tone (C sharp) mitigate and add a piquancy to the modal atmosphere.

The surviving work of a mystery composer from the late French Baroque, in a new recording by a highly accomplished young early-music keyboardist. Nothing is known of Le Bret beyond the volume of keyboard pieces reproduced here, which analysis of both musical style and ancillary details has dated to the 1730s or 1740s. Whoever he was, Le Bret was clearly inspired by Fran�ois Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, and his style is comparable to that of the harpsichordists who followed in their footsteps between 1720 and 1740, such as Jean-Fran�ois Dandrieu, Fran�ois d'Agincourt, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Bernard de Bury and Jacques Duphly in his first two books. Like them, Le Bret alternates dances and character pieces. On the other hand, he makes no concessions to the taste for pastoral and country music, does not seem influenced by opera music, and does not overdo descriptive effects and virtuosity. All in all, Le Bret remains faithful to the subtle and poetic language of the harpsichord; as he says in his preface, he has 'always endeavored in composing them to adorn them with the most graceful songs, knowing from our most illustrious masters that this is the beauty of this instrument.' As Simone El Oufir Pierini observes in his booklet essay for this album, one evident example of Le Bret's knowledge of 'our most illustrious masters' arises in the piece titled L'Embarassante, a stylish homage to Les Cyclopes by Rameau. Born in Rome in 1996, Simone El Oufir Pierini studied piano at the conservatoire of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Developing a particular interest in historically informed piano practice, he attended masterclasses led by Alexei Lubimov and Andreas Staier, before undertaking specialised study of harpsichord and basso continuo with such teachers as Andrea Coen and Giovanni Togni. He has made several wellreceived albums for Brilliant Classics, both solo and with colleagues.

A divertimento is defined as music intended for light entertainment, 'to please the ear' rather than arouse the emotions, in the phrase of one early-19th-century theorist. The word was used interchangeably at the time with serenade and cassation, and Mozart wrote pieces with all three titles, gathered in this collection, for chamber and orchestral groups, intended for use in the theatre, outdoor, domestic, and courtly settings alike. That Mozart spent a good part of a decade (1769-1779) succeeding in writing divertimenti and serenades which elicit both delight and deep emotion is just one salient indication of his standing above almost all his contemporaries.

This quality is most obviously the case in the Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments, K361, known as the 'Gran Partita', which Salieri in Amadeus cites as an exemplar of Mozart’s genius for smiling through tears. Aside from this and Eine kleine Nachtmusik, very many of his lighter works remain neglected in performance, yet a work such as the D major Serenade K251 is no less characteristic of Mozart in its pliable dialogue between winds and strings, instantly identifiable harmonies, and feeling for form, which knits together apparently disparate genre-types of dances and sonata movements into a coherent whole.

This new collection brings together historically informed recordings made by Brilliant Classics together with digital-era versions of rarer repertoire, initially issued by Berlin Classics and Capriccio, featuring stylish German ensembles with a natural feeling for the Mozart idiom. A new essay by Jos van der Zanden ranges over Mozart’s approach to the divertimento genre, observing how the composer systematically satisfies the demands of the contrasting kinds of listener known in the 18th century as Liebhaber (music-lovers) and Kenner (connoisseurs). There are private jokes, not only in the infamous Musikalischer Spass but the contrast between solemnity and levity in the Haffner Serenade. No less than in the more intellectually prized genres of quartet, sonata, and opera seria, Mozart is always experimenting with form, instrumental color, and harmony, and such a complete set allows listeners at every stage of their musical development to explore this for themselves.

Early recordings by one of today’s pre-eminent interpreters of Rachmaninoff.

The Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova is renowned for her playing of Rachmaninoff, and in particular the four concertos which she has performed across the world. She made these recordings in 2014, at a relatively early stage in her career, but they capture the rhythmic flexibility and feeling for phrase and emotion which give her interpretation of this music its particular signature.

In these familiar works, Fedorova searches for simplicity over sentimentality, because ‘simplicity can be more moving. Or if you have a special harmonic moment in a long phrase, you lead into it without too many distractions on the way. Then the surprise – the resolution or the twist – is all the more special. You have to train yourself to do this.’ On the page, both works bely their strong melodic flow with densely worked, filigree exchanges between piano and orchestra which demand as much analytical and technical grasp of the notes as the concertos of Brahms.

Rachmaninoff himself famously let his emotions speak through his music, which can be all the more moving for its restraint and close observance to the score, and Fedorova has spent decades with these concertos, absorbing them within her musical bloodstream so that their expressions of passion and nostalgia come as second nature to her.

According to Marek Toporowski, the French composer Hyacinthe Jadin (1776–1800) authored ‘the greatest masterpieces of the French literature for the fortepiano from the time of the Revolution.’ Despite dying in poverty from tuberculosis at the age of 25, Jadin accomplished much in his brief life, composing both orchestral and chamber music with a bias towards his own instrument, the piano. This includes concertos and the sonatas featured in this collection, which also offer an optional violin accompaniment. Although several published collections have not survived or been recovered, including a further 12 sonatas for the keyboard.

In a previous album on Brilliant Classics, Toporowski produced a definitive modern recording of Jadin’s Sonatas Opp. 4-6 (96958). In the present collection, he presents Opp. 1 and 3, along with Jadin’s trio of Op.1 string quartets in the composer’s own arrangement for piano and violin. Toporowski finds a pre-Romantic sensibility in this music, with tantalizing anticipations of Schubert, Weber, and even Mendelssohn in Jadin’s heightened language of expression, which ventures far beyond the conventional forms of his contemporaries.

An important point of reference for Jadin was nonetheless the music of Haydn. The Op.1 String Quartets, as played here in the composer’s transcription, are dedicated to Haydn and contain very obvious references to this composer’s style, particularly to his refined modulations. Jadin was also active in Paris while Jan Ladislav Dussek was living in the French capital. As a later co-creator of the London school of piano playing, Dussek seems also to have had a great influence on the young virtuoso. There are salient points of comparison between these sonatas, whether played solo on piano or with their optional violin part, and with the sonatas for the same forces written by Dussek and recently recorded for Brilliant Classics by Petra Somlai, Julia Huber, and Miriam Altmann.

Jadin’s music has never previously been documented in so comprehensive and stylish a manner as in this evolving series from Marek Toporowski, and the quartets receive their first recording in this arrangement, which will appeal to all collectors of Classical-era curios.

The definitive collection of Bonporti’s chamber music, including many first-ever recordings.

Labirinti Armonici is an Italian-based early-music ensemble with a string of Brilliant Classics albums to its credit, focusing on the neglected music of the north-Italian composer Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672–1749). A priest like his contemporary Vivaldi, he focused his creative energies on music for the church and for chamber ensemble, and it is this impressive catalogue of work that Labirinti Armonici has documented.

Bonporti has by and large been heard only in excerpted, fragmentary form on collections of Italian-Baroque composers, but Labirinti Armonici reveal the true breadth of his creative personality. There are four surviving collections of stylish sonatas for two violins and continuo, published as Opp. 1, 2, 4, and 6. Labirinti Armonici take an imaginative approach to the continuo part, enriching the skeletal figured-bass line with cello, harpsichord, and organ in various combinations according to the mood and character of each specific sonata.

When separately issued, these collections won glowing praise from international reviewers, and this reissue makes an invaluable contribution to the field of Baroque chamber music available at a more accessible price than ever. ‘The overall effect is of a highly professional group at home with the repertoire. So little of Bonporti’s works have been recorded to the highest standards; let us hope this is a start of a revival!’ (Early Music Review)

Theobald Böhm, who was born in Munich on 9 April 1794, was among the most accomplished German flautists of his age and was a composer and an ingenious inventor who perfected the construction of the flute.

Over and above his commitment to scientific and organological research, Böhm pursued activities as a composer for his instrument and continued to make transcriptions of celebrated works by the Classical and Romantic masters right up until his death on 25 November 1881. In both his pieces based on original themes and the series of variations on melodies drawn either from popular operas or from well-known popular tunes, the stylistic techniques distinguishing his compositions were fully in line with the fashions of his day.

Of a very different nature, on the other hand, is the sophistication displayed in his search for an elevated and musically complex idiomatic language for the flute in his transcriptions of works by the great composers, including Christoph Willibald Gluck, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the two near-contemporaries Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. The decision to make transcribed versions of celebrated vocal or instrumental pieces was an eloquent way of stressing that the 'new flute' Böhm had invented could perform works that posed audacious challenges, without any expressive awkwardness. Indeed, the formulas chosen by Böhm to arrange, vary and adapt these celebrated melodies to the flute can be counted among the most original, and in many respects unique, achievements of the age.

What emerges, therefore, is a sort of catalogue of the expressive possibilities of the 'new flute' and an invitation to explore the quality of sound, an aspect which he considered to be his 'primary interest as an artist.'

The apogee of the French harpsichord came in the 18th century with the publication of the musical works of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, the two leading representatives of the French harpsichord school. These were followed by numerous livres de clavecin written by a new generation of composers such as Claude Balbastre, Pancrace Royer, Jacques Duphly, and Michel Corrette.

It is within this rococo-galant context, which marked the final glory days of the harpsichord, that we encounter the music of Jean-Baptiste Parant, a composer for whom only scant biographical details are known. Parant’s Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, published in 1762, contains 16 pieces written in the light and carefree rococo style, which makes them a true reflection of the music that would have been heard at this time in the salons of aristocrats and patrons such as the Prince de Conti and Monsieur de La Pouplinière or at the literary salons of Madame du Deffand, Julie Lespinasse, and Madame Geoffrin.

The titles of the pieces allude to persons from Parant’s circle, such as La Angôt and De la Bauve, or to places such as Passy (most probably a reference to the Château de Passy, the residence of the aforementioned important and very wealthy musical patron Alexandre de La Pouplinière) and Lyons (‘La Lionoise’). His sources of inspiration are also to be seen in such evocative titles as ‘Les Cascades’, ‘La Majestueuse’ or ‘La Pétulante’. Running throughout his music are the dances most commonly found in French suites, such as the menuet, rondeau, allemande, gavotte, and lourée.

The first disc in this two-CD set contains Sardinian composer Cristiano Porqueddu’s first three sonatas for solo guitar, written between 2013 and 2019 and performed here by his compatriot Riccardo D’Alò. ‘Des couleurs sur la toile’, in three movements, pays homage to the painter Gesuino Curreli, the composer’s maternal uncle, who paints landscapes of contemporary Oliena, a town in northern Sardinia. ‘Sonata di Picerno’ – completed in 2015 and dedicated to Italian guitarist Christian Saggese – is a musical portrait of the distinctive town of Picerno in the beautiful Basilicata region of Italy. All three of its movements narrate an entirely fictional leyenda (legend). Sonata No.3, ‘Il rito del fuoco’, is based on an ancient Sardinian legend that tells of Saint Anthony and his pig stealing fire from hell to give to humanity. It is a cyclical composition, which remains anchored in the harmonic and thematic elements introduced in the first section throughout.

The recordings on disc two – performed by Lorenzo Micheli Pucci, a guitarist from Piedmont in northern Italy – were written by Porqueddu between 2011 and 2020. Díptico de la oscuridad is a homage to Pablo Neruda’s poetic atmospheres and is dedicated to Italo-Australian guitarist Ermanno Brignolo. Metamórfosis de la soledad, dedicated to Italian guitarist Alberto Mesirca, stems directly from observing the artistic solitude glimpsed by the composer in artwork by Gastone Cecconello on a personal visit to his studio. It takes the form of a series of short movements based on Angelo Gilardino’s study ‘Soledad’ from his collection Studi di Virtuosità e di Trascendenza. These movements offer a prismatic vision of the material from the introduction to the study, heavily abridged to allow it to be used as a theme for a cycle of variations. In 2019 and 2020, Porqueddu’s figurative art studies led him to discover the wonderful ancient Chinese artwork Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a set of eight parchments dating from the Song Dynasty, approximately 1150 AD. Porqueddu wrote the solo Studies from Eight Views from Xiaoxiang while studying Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 21 Greeting Cards for guitar. They are built on clearly identifiable melodic sketches, and alternate between demanding technical skill and a capacity for introspection from the performer.

Within the extensive repertoire of the German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), music for cello and piano occupies a considerable position in terms of both quantity and quality. Hindemith was primarily a violist and conductor, but his wide-ranging interests led him to experiment with a great variety of instruments both as a composer and a player, making him a de facto multi-instrumentalist. Among his favorite instruments, the cello always occupied a special place in his activities, partly due to his collaboration with his brother Rudolf, an excellent cellist.

His original compositions for the specific duo of cello and piano are varied and numerous, offering a synthetic vision of the different stylistic instances of an author who never tired of rethinking and redefining his language. This recording brings together and offers the listener this entire wonderful portion of Hindemith’s catalogue.

The Drei Stücke Op. 8 (1917) are undoubtedly among the most important pieces of the composer’s youthful phase. The later Sonata Op. 11 No. 3, a composition of considerable constructive commitment and complex genesis, is recorded here for the first time in both versions: one from 1919 (lost piano parts reconstructed by Fazil Say), the other from 1921. The delicate and expressive Drei leichte Stücke ‘Cello in first position’, composed in April 1938, are intended for the didactic sphere, without renouncing the peculiarities of the harmonic language of the composer. The same can be said of the brief and melancholic Meditation, a transcription of a movement from Hindemith’s orchestral ballet Nobilissima Visione. More complex is A Frog he went a-courting. Despite its brevity, it is one of the finest pieces on this program. A dozen concise variations, framed by the initial exposition and the concluding return of the traditional English theme, present a wealth of instrumental, timbral, expressive, and dynamic solutions in a small, dense, brilliant display of Hindemith’s compositional mastery. Do not be deceived by the title Kleine Sonate (1942), which is small in size but not in terms of compositional complexity. The imposing Cello Sonata (1948) was written for Gregor Piatigorsky and premiered by him in New York in the year it was composed. Comparing this Sonata to the Sonata Op. 11 No. 3 conveys a sense of the stylistic evolution across some 30 years.

New, fun-filled arrangements—with historical authenticity on their side—bring bright and breezy curtain-raisers by a once-celebrated contemporary of Mozart to life.

In a career not much longer than Mozart’s, Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) wrote an astonishing total of 64 works for the stage—as well as substantial collections of symphonies, concertos, and sonatas—that were performed across the length and breadth of Europe.

Cimarosa specialized in lighthearted comedies, for which he supplied stylishly upbeat scores, shot through with Italianate lyricism, and a kind of impetuous vigor which was all his own. This quality makes his overtures particularly suitable for transcription to the kind of plucked-ensemble chamber versions heard on this enterprising new album. During the period after unification, the mandolin became a popular instrument much as the ukulele and the balalaika did elsewhere: relatively easy to learn, highly portable, and well suited to being played in ensemble as a kind of instrumental choir.

The Anedda Quintet have devised a unique synthesis of the two approaches, adding a strong bass component to the classic quartet line-up. This collection of Cimarosa is mainly comprised of modern arrangements by the composer Michele Di Filippo, who had already collaborated with the Anedda Quintet for a previous Brilliant Classics album of Rossini arrangements (95904). In adapting these orchestral scores, Di Filippo aimed to make the melodies sing out while preserving a sense of dialogue, tension, and drama between instruments.