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.

The latest volume in a critically acclaimed series presents modern recordings of Dussek’s exhilaratingly diverse cycle of piano sonatas on instruments of his own time.

This enterprising series has reached the trio of ‘Grand Sonatas’ Op. 35, probably first published in 1798, when Dussek dedicated them to Gabrielle Pleyel (wife of the piano manufacturer Ignaz Pleyel) and Muzio Clementi, the composer, publisher, and piano manufacturer who developed new, more powerful-sounding and reliable piano actions. Dussek, like Beethoven, seized on such technological innovation and produced music of new turbulence such as the C minor Sonata Op. 35 No. 3. The sonata’s opening Allegro bursts with vitality and violence, which becomes all the more vivid when played on a piano from Dussek’s time, straining to contain the music’s expressive reach, as it is here.

The instrument used on this album is a 1798 fortepiano from the firm of Longman-Clementi. Accordingly, the touch and sound correspond more closely than any other piano previously used on recordings of this repertoire. Dussek lived in London during the 1790s and worked closely with the manufacturer John Broadwood to extend the range of keyboard instruments. The English fortepiano lent itself naturally to the harmonic fullness of Dussek's preferred textures, and in reverse, the instrument's characteristic sound and touch inspired and shaped the development of Dussek's compositional style.

Op. 69 No. 3 belongs to a collection of sonatas which Dussek composed with an optional violin part. Nos. 1 and 2 in the set have already received historically informed recordings in a separate Brilliant Classics project, with Julia Huber and Miriam Altmann, but this series presents the piano-only version which all the same contains the full argument of the sonata. In partnership with Bart van Oort, Petra Somlai contributed to Volume 9 in this series, which was welcomed in Fanfare magazine with glowing praise: ‘Both musicians have the requisite technique, and their execution of Dussek’s virtuoso writing is impressive… Both artists play with sensitivity and attractive tone. The recorded sound is fine, with admirable warmth and detail.’

Albéric Magnard, born in Paris in 1865, was a pupil of Dubois, Guiraud, Massenet and D’Indy at the Paris Conservatoire, and he frequented the circle of César Franck. In 1896, he became a teacher at Paris’s Schola Cantorum. Then, from 1904, he settled in the countryside on his estate at Manoir des Fontaines in Baron (Oise), where he died in 1914, shot by German troops while attempting to defend the property, which was set on fire along with many of his as yet unpublished compositions. In addition to four symphonies, he is also the author of operas, but chamber music is the genre in which he best expressed himself and into which he poured the influence of Beethoven and the counterpoint of the Schola Cantorum. His last chamber work, the Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 20 is among his most significant compositions. Composed between 1908 and 1910, it is structured in four movements like all his chamber works, betraying his devotion to German contemporaries and in opposition to the French tendency for three movements in symphonies and instrumental compositions.

Completed in 1905, the Piano Trio Op. 18 was first performed at the Salle Aéolian in Paris in January 1906. Also in four movements, it presents more measured writing than the Cello Sonata or Violin Sonata. The dialogue between the three instruments is refined and balanced without any break in interaction.

These are works by a brilliant composer faithful to tradition. On the whole the music can be described as an innovative and surprising, certainly deserving of wider recognition.

A new and strikingly effective
arrangement of a modern
minimalist classic.
Canto Ostinato is a familiar
landmark of modern Dutch art
music. Known affectionately and
simply as the Canto, it receives
many performances each year in a
plethora of arrangements, whether
with the two or four pianos which
Simeon ten Holt had in mind when
he wrote the work in 1976, or
performed by soloists and
ensembles. This flexibility is
inherent in the form of the piece.
Ten Holt supplies a sequence of 106
rhythmic cells which may be
repeated one or many more times,
thus potentially creating a duration
of one or many more hours. The
simple and repetitive patterns blur
the listener’s sense of time, which
becomes space: space for the
performers, space for creation, but
also space for the listeners, space
for imagination.
At the invitation of Orgelpark
Amsterdam, the organist Aart
Bergwerff has been giving annual
performances of Canto Ostinato,
always in a new instrumentation, in
company with different musicians.
This groundbreaking version for
trumpet and organ arose as the
result of a chance meeting
backstage between Bergwerff and
the trumpeter Eric Vloeimans. The
recording captures a concert given
in October 2023 at the Orgelpark,
presenting Canto Ostinato as a kind of
monody for trumpet and organ, like a
long-spun solo with basso continuo.
Bergwerff and Vloeimans had known each
other as students at the conservatoire in
Rotterdam, and so this artistic partnership
was a renewal of friendship as well as a
synthesis of common musical values.
Relying as it does on the stamina of a solo
trumpeter, this version of Canto Ostinato
is necessarily shorter than most of the
canonic versions, but it illuminates the
piece with a fresh perspective, more
melodically focused than keyboard-centric
instrumentations, and evolving more
rapidly through Ten Holt’s cycle of
harmonic change.

Johann Wilhelm Hertel is one of the
lesser-known composers of the late
baroque and early classical era. Born in
Eisenach in 1727, as a young man he
travelled to the north of Germany with
his father, who was a viola da gamba
virtuoso engaged as a Kapellmeister at
the court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Already
as a young man Johann Wilhelm showed
a remarkable talent for music. He
excelled on the harpsichord and violin,
but his father wanted him to additionally
study law. However, a trip to Berlin and
contact with Berlin court musicians Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach and Franz Benda
pushed the young Johann Wilhelm to
devote his life primarily to music. In
particular he studied the harpsichord with
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the violin with
Franz Benda and composition with Karl
Heinrich Graun. He spent his life in the
service of the Mecklenburg-Strelitz and
-Schwerin courts, and he was also music
director in Stralsund. It was during this time
that he had many opportunities to meet
authorities from both the musical and
scientific worlds.
His oboes concertos are exemplary
compositions of these times. The autographs,
which are preserved in the Library of the
Royal Conservatoire of Brussels (Sig. No. B-Bc5562 and B-Bc-5563), together contain 10
oboe concertos in various keys. Nine of them
are collected (and numbered by librarians) in
Sig. No. B-Bc-5562 ,and one is separately
placed as B-Bc-5563. As there is no catalogue
of Hertel’s works, the numbers given for the
concertos are taken from the manuscript Sig.
No. B-Bc-5562. Some of the pieces are dated
1749 (Concertos Nos. 3 and 9) and others
1756 (Concerto No.2). All the concertos were
prepared for this recording by Katarzyna
Pilipiuk, copying with a focus on accuracy;
only minor mistakes were corrected so as to
give the most faithful transmission of the
composer’s ideas. The material is very clear,
with all the pieces noted by the composer in
score form. All of them have signs of stylistic
inspiration from the works of Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach, in particular Concerto No.5,
which is an excellent work in the
Empfindsamer Stil.
Other information:
● Recorded March 2023 in Kraków, Poland
● Pilipiuk plays a Baroque oboe by Randall
Cook (2019), after Jonathan Bradbury (c.1720)
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by the
artist, and biographies of her and of the
ensemble

The lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583–
c.1642) lived and worked in a borderland
between musical categories. The first three
decades of his life were spent in France,
then his musical career and published
compositions unfolded in Amsterdam.
Widely acknowledged as a lute and dance
teacher in the Netherlands, he also won
fame as one of the most important and
prolific authors of sacred music for his
instrument, making lute settings of the
Calvinist psalms from the Genevan Psalter.
Vallet lived when the lute was undergoing
significant changes in terms of tuning, right
hand technique and predominant genres,
with the impulse for some of these changes
coming from his French compatriots. Yet he
demonstrates that the older Renaissance
approaches towards both composition and
performance are still relevant. An
impressive part of his repertoire comprises
contrapuntal preludes and fantasias
following the manner of the masters of
previous generations, in which various
thematic motives and complex abstract
forms are woven into the polyphonic
texture. At the same time his lute
collections include vast variety of dances,
some of which were just entering the
performance practice of the time, such as
the Sarabande and Bourée. The volume
Regia Pietas is entirely dedicated to
Protestant (Calvinist) sacred music
intabulated for lute solo. Most of the
psalms are arranged in two parts. Vallet’s
main approaches to these chants is to either
develop them as a set of variations or
provide them a contrapuntal treatment.
This shows that Vallet’s output covers the
three instrumental genres of the
Renaissance: free abstract pieces (preludes
and fantasias), dances and settings of vocal
pieces.
For this recording a ten-course lute is used,
strung in gut at 415 Hz. This type of gut
stringing considerably affects the overall
sound of the lute, its resonance and
sonority, hopefully bringing the lute a bit
closer to what one might imagine as an
‘original’ sound of the time.
Other information:
● Recorded January 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria
● Genov plays a 10-course lute by Jiří
Čepelák (2019, Prague), after a mid-16thcentury Bolognese model by Hans Frei
(Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, no.
C.34); strung in gut
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by
the artist and his biography

The lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583–
c.1642) lived and worked in a borderland
between musical categories. The first three
decades of his life were spent in France,
then his musical career and published
compositions unfolded in Amsterdam.
Widely acknowledged as a lute and dance
teacher in the Netherlands, he also won
fame as one of the most important and
prolific authors of sacred music for his
instrument, making lute settings of the
Calvinist psalms from the Genevan Psalter.
Vallet lived when the lute was undergoing
significant changes in terms of tuning, right
hand technique and predominant genres,
with the impulse for some of these changes
coming from his French compatriots. Yet he
demonstrates that the older Renaissance
approaches towards both composition and
performance are still relevant. An
impressive part of his repertoire comprises
contrapuntal preludes and fantasias
following the manner of the masters of
previous generations, in which various
thematic motives and complex abstract
forms are woven into the polyphonic
texture. At the same time his lute
collections include vast variety of dances,
some of which were just entering the
performance practice of the time, such as
the Sarabande and Bourée. The volume
Regia Pietas is entirely dedicated to
Protestant (Calvinist) sacred music
intabulated for lute solo. Most of the
psalms are arranged in two parts. Vallet’s
main approaches to these chants is to either
develop them as a set of variations or
provide them a contrapuntal treatment.
This shows that Vallet’s output covers the
three instrumental genres of the
Renaissance: free abstract pieces (preludes
and fantasias), dances and settings of vocal
pieces.
For this recording a ten-course lute is used,
strung in gut at 415 Hz. This type of gut
stringing considerably affects the overall
sound of the lute, its resonance and
sonority, hopefully bringing the lute a bit
closer to what one might imagine as an
‘original’ sound of the time.
Other information:
● Recorded January 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria
● Genov plays a 10-course lute by Jiří
Čepelák (2019, Prague), after a mid-16thcentury Bolognese model by Hans Frei
(Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, no.
C.34); strung in gut
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by
the artist and his biography

This is the most comprehensive collection ever released of Giuseppe Martucci’s music, in stylish modern recordings by native Italian musicians.

An Italian Brahms is an unlikely idea, but it encapsulates a superficial acquaintance with the music of Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909). Any listener curious to take a deeper dive into the richly Romantic melodies and impassioned large-scale structures of Martucci will find no better place to start than this survey of his major works in every instrumental genre.

Martucci was an accomplished pianist, received with great enthusiasm on tours of France, Germany, and England, and the tremendous sweep of his Piano Concerto loses nothing by comparison with far more familiar examples. Brought to life here by Alberto Miodini, the piano music, too, is intensely wrought, but it never loses a preeminence of melody which was Martucci’s heritage.

In 1888 he conducted the Italian premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; his song-cycle La canzone dei Ricordi, written a year earlier, is the closest he came to translating the opera’s chromatic eroticism into his own music, and this box affords the opportunity to hear the piece in both its orchestral and piano versions; no less enlightening than (for example) the distinct versions of the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

Disc 10 collects Martucci’s other songs for soprano, such as the remarkable Pagine sparse of 1888. Other highlights of the set include Martucci’s deep investment in chamber music, resulting in piano trios, violin and cello sonatas, and a magnificently brooding Piano Quintet, again in the Brahmsian mold.

Attractive Classical-era duets for violin
and cello in world-premiere recordings
by a young Italian pair of brothers.
Despite his French name, Louis
Massonneau was a German composer,
born in Kassel in 1766 and dying at the
venerable age of 82 in MecklenburgVorpommern in 1848. His father was
chef to the Landgrave Friedrich II of
Hessen-Kassel, and Louis received his
musical training at the hands of the
court musicians in Kassel, soon
becoming a violinist in the court
orchestra. The Landgrave died when
Massonneau was 19, and the orchestra
disbanded, requiring him to seek his
fortune elsewhere. This he did in a
series of posts, as a concertmaster of
court and theatre orchestras in
Göttingen, Frankfurt, Altona, Dessau,
Hamburg and finally Mecklenburg, where he
settled for good and retired in 1837.
Composing all the while, Massonneau left
behind a fairly substantial catalogue. Almost
completely unknown apart from a trio of
oboe quartets, it includes three symphonies,
twelve symphonies and six violin concertos,
doubtless written with his own talents in
mind. These three Duos Concertante probably
date from Massonneau’s time in Altona, when
he came to know the cellist Martin Calmus.
Required to perform duets for the
entertainment of those attending ‘Musical
Academies’, Massonneau doubtless found a
dearth of such repertoire, and wrote it afresh.
Calmus himself must have been an
accomplished cellist, because both parts
demonstrate a virtuosity and experimental
spirit shared with the better-known music of
their contemporary Boccherini. Each duo is cast
in three movements, skilfully varied in form
from the others, in which lyrical expression is
tempered by a touch of irony. Haydnesque
touches of major-minor ambiguity lend
dramatic tension to the first duo, while a more
balletic spirit and Mozartian melodic charm
brings a quasi-operatic character to the second.
No.3 is the most innovative in its rapid
conversational interplay between violin and
cello and unconventional range of timbre.
Demian and Dylan Baraldi have made this
recording with the cooperation of the Edition
Massonneau, and authoritative booklet notes
from the Edition illuminate the composer’s life
and work.

Born in Torino in 1967, Alfredo Franco was
involved in non-classical music in his youth
before taking up the classical guitar. He then
undertook advanced studies in the historical
and critical fields in the Department for Art,
Music and Theatre of the University of Turin.
He would later abandon concert activity as a
performer and focus instead on composition.
His now prolific classical guitar output has been
well received by important interpreters such as
Cristiano Porqueddu and increasingly
programmed on the stage and in the studio.
This triple-disc set constitutes a broad crosssection of Franco’s solo guitar music.
Porqueddu has offered brief comments on
some of the many, varied compositions that
will be new to many listeners. A Bleached
September Sky: multiple short episodes
evoking sudden premonitions. A Night’s Tale
features a rapid, edgy central section set
between a dreamlike beginning and end.
Alphabetical Portraits conceptually
depicts seven composers by associating
the letters in their surnames with notes
of the chromatic scale. Inezie deliziose is
a collection of miniature album leaves
heralding the frivolity of an imaginary
past. Fantasia No.7 contrapuntally pays
homage to Renaissance vihuelists. Il
flauto nel bosco – Omaggio a Grazia
Deledda: a sonatina based on the Nobel
Prize-winning Sardinian author’s
renowned collection of short stories. La
regina delle tenebre – Su un racconto di
Grazia Deledda is inspired by an
eponymous short story, again by the
Sardinian author. La guitarra callada –
Homage to Frederic Mompou seeks to
convey the Catalan composer’s
atmospheres. Quaderno di aprile is a
minimalist diary, composed almost
compulsively along a few days in April.
Mirando un cuadro de Goya is one
possible interpretation of the painter’s
Pavo muerto. Microsuite is designed to
provide an introduction to contemporary
musical languages. Petite Suite mécanique
honours three guitarists from different eras:
Robert de Visée, Miguel Llobet and Leo
Brouwer. Sette aforismi: short, sparse studies
on timbre and colour. Sonatina autunnale sits
somewhere between Manuel Ponce and
Alfredo Casella. Sonatina estiva pays tribute
to Carlo Carrà and his paintings of seaside
shacks. Tarreghiana: a theme and variations
based on Tárrega’s famous Prelude in A
minor. Wintergarten is a farewell stroll in a
Schumannesque winter garden, evoking
chorales and with variations.
Other Information
● Recorded January to June 2023 in Nuoro,
Italy
● Bilingual booklet in English and Italian
contains a short description written by the
artist for each piece

The new focus on Bohemian classicism in
the second half of the 18th century,
manifested in recent recordings and articles
in professional journals, has amply
demonstrated the calibre of these
composers and the quality of their music.
Among them, Josef Mysliveček enjoyed
considerable fame during his lifetime. He
was known to such important figures as the
soprano Caterina Gabrielli and was a friend
of Mozart’s, who esteemed him.
Mysliveček’s like many of his
contemporaries strove for musical success
and economic independence through opera
composition, a career that was high-profile
but also challenging in the late 18th
century. And he did not consider the
fortepiano to be as important a vehicle of
expression, unlike Mozart, as can be seen in
his meagre solo keyboard output.
The Six Divertimenti are single-movement
compositions, and while probably
intended as didactic, they are not sterile
exercises for amateurs but exquisite
pieces that satisfy the most discerning
palates. The Six Sonatas are short but
brilliant pieces, based on the galant style
transmuted into a pre-classicism very akin
to the Mannheim school, with energetic
first movements with a symphonic flavour
alternating with elegant and delicate
minuets.
Given the small number of Mysliveček’s
compositions for solo fortepiano, it was
decided to include two additional, rare
pieces worthy of this monograph: two of
his Wind Octets Op.1 in a contemporary
solo keyboard transcription by Václav
Vincenc Mašek. Mysliveček’s writing
features remarkable counterpoint,
compressed by Mašek into an exemplary
arrangement.
This recording is intended as the first on
historical instruments (there is already a box by
Clare Hammond on modern piano with the
Divertimenti for fortepiano, the six Sonatas and
the Concertos for fortepiano and orchestra).
The arranged Octets (most likely never
previously performed, let alone recorded) are
offered as world premieres.
Other information:
● Recorded April 2022 in Colloredo di Prato,
Udine, Italy
● Bartoccini plays a late-18th-century Venetian
fortepiano (Divertimentos) and a Paul McNulty
fortepiano after Anton Walter (Sonatas and
Octets)
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by the
artist and his biography