PIANO CONCERTOS 3 & 5

This release focuses on the Third and Fifth piano concertos - the former composed in 1800 and dedicated to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia. The score was still in progress when the composer debuted the piece from memory.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi owes much of his fame to La Serva Padrona, a comic intermezzo designed to be performed between the acts of an opera seria. In it, a maid and a servant conspire to convince their master to marry the maid. When Aldo Tarabella was asked to direct a performance of Pergolesi's intermezzo, he wanted to do more than simply pair it with one of the operas it traditionally sits alongside - so he composed Il Servo Padrone, a companion piece, and a kind of sequel, to Pergolesi's original. At the level of the plot, things come full circle, and by the end, master and servants have returned to where things began, highlighting the difficulty of fundamentally changing social conditions. A kind of emancipation seemed within reach, but is ultimately not achieved - in some senses, the reverse of what one might expect given the transformation of social roles in Europe among (at least middle-class) women in the 17th century and since. Musically, however, this homage to an 18th-century musical form is very much brought into the present day. It's arias are developed in an atonal context and it's recitatives leave traditional Classical form behind to travel symbolically towards the light-hearted episodes found in 20th-century musical comedy. This unique album is the first ever recording of Tarabella's tributary composition.

Almost forgotten today, the Piedmontese musician Giovanni Maria Pelazza was born in 1847 and at the age of 24 became organist at the parish church of Romano Canavese. Afforded the opportunity to exercise his performing skills and creative imagination upon a particularly impressive example of contemporary Italian organ building, installed nine years previously by the firm of Camillo Guglielmo Bianchi, Pelazza composed most of the works on this album for use during and after services in the church. He later moved to Marseilles, and then in 1898 emigrated to Buenos Aires, becoming chapel master to a church which served the local Italian community. He died there in 1936, having thoroughly reformed and improved the standard of sacred music performance in the city. As a church and instrumental composer Pelazza was more original than most of his local contemporaries. The collection of 12 Suonate su varii tuoni demonstrates a reduction in the hitherto dominant influence of Rossini and the bel canto tradition upon non-vocal Italian music, and at the same time an awareness of the organ’s potential as a symphonic instrument. The collection opens in the grand manner with a majestic Allegro sinfonico and thereafter supplies voluntaries for use during and after the Mass, including a solemn Adagio per l'Elevazione and a fun Polka-finale. Making his debut on Brilliant Classics, Fabio Macera has also chosen extracts from Organ Masses in C and D major by Pelazza, and three further sonatas written for the feast of the Holy Sacrament. On this new recording he plays a stylistically appropriate organ built in 1821 by the Serassi firm for the Parish Church of St Bartholomew in Borzonasca, near Genoa.

No one knows who first used the term ‘Folia’ to describe a kind of Portuguese dance, or even when it became associated with a particular theme immortalised by Arcangelo Corelli in the last of his Op.5 violin sonatas. However, as La Folia or La Follia, the theme has been improvised on and updated ever since then, all drawing on the noble dignity of the original and its simple, effective power. Born in 1956, Carlo Pedini produced a half-hour set of variations on ‘La Follia’ in 2007, and scored them for string orchestra: this is the first internationally available recording, made by an ensemble drawn from the string section of the KLK Symphony Orchestra in Ukraine. They are conducted here by a contemporary and countryman of Pedini’s Ferdinando Nazzaro, who founded the new-music ensemble attached to the KLK orchestra. Complementing La Follia here is another neo-Baroque work of Pedini’s, a set of three substantial pieces for string orchestra with a central adagio and a finale dedicated to the art of the neoclassical painter Antonio Canova. The album concludes with a second set of ‘La Follia’ variations by Paolo Ugoletti, also born in 1956 and a fellow student of Franco Donatoni. These take the theme into the territory of pop, with variations marked ‘Boogie-Woogie’ and ‘Funky’ using innovative string techniques. Dedicated to the conductor of this recording, Ugoletti’s rhapsody ‘Il sentiero dei castagni’ (The Chestnut-Tree Path) completes this album which is a must-hear for fans of attractive tonal music by contemporary composers off the beaten track.

PAPILLONS PIANO SONATA NO. 3

Niccolò Paganini has been a figure of inspiration and speculation for countless musicians after him. Marieke Schneemann is by no means the first to play Paganini’s finger‐breaking Caprices on the flute, with all the necessary transpositions that requires, not to mention a virtuosity at least matching that required to play them on the violin, but she is the first to do so on a ‘period’ flute: a wooden conical ring‐keyed flute by Louis Lot, Paris, 1860. Ms. Schneemann has been first and foremost a musician in the Netherlands flourishing historically informed, period instrument movement.

Leo Ornstein was born in 1895 in the Ukraine, and emigrated with his family in 1906 to the USA, where he became a famous pianist and leading figure in the American Avant-Garde, writing highly experimental music in which tonal clusters played an important role. Halfway through the twenties he withdrew from public life and founded his own music school- the Ornstein School of Music. He continued composing but was largely forgotten until the revival by his son in the seventies. Ornstein’s works show a wide variety, from Post-Romantic works in the tradition of Grieg and Franck to pieces of shocking modernity and savagery. This release contains the complete music for violin and piano and for flute and piano, music of a highly original spirit, who died at the advanced age of 108 in the year 2002. These works are played with great conviction and dedication by violinist Francesco Parrino, flutist Stefano Parrino, and pianist Maud Renier.

ORCHESTRAL WORKS

ORCHESTRAL WORKS

From Mozart to Leoncavallo: three hours of opera's greatest hits in rhythmically buoyant, highly enjoyable East-German recordings. Taped between 1959 (Wagner's Der fliegende Holl�nder) and 1993 (Die Fledermaus), a collection of overtures gets this operatic compilation off to a (literally) flying start. Suitner in particular directs deliciously sprung performances of Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel), Smetana (The Bartered Bride) and Supp� (Dichter und Bauer / Poet and Peasant and Leichte Kavallerie / Light Cavalry). The Austro-Germanic angle of the first half of the release is widened on the second half by a selection of opera choruses that represents some of the most powerful moments of 19th-century Italian opera. There is the triumphant hymn in praise of Egypt from the second act of Aida as well as the sublime song of pride and defiance, 'Va pensiero', that crowns Nabucco and became before long the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento and the struggle for Italian unification. Verismo choruses are here too, taken from that evergreen pairing of Pagliacci and Cavelleria rusticana. Favourite German operatic choruses include the Chorus of Guests in Wagner's Tannh�user as well as the hymn of the priests in Mozart's Die Zauberfl�te. Suitner directs all these: a compilation album made in Berlin in 1978. He also exercises a subtle guiding hand over the Staatskapelle Dresden for a compilation of tenor/baritone opera duets recorded in 1972 with the two foremost East-German male singers of their generation, Peter Schreier and Theo Adam. 'Expectably' commented Fanfare, 'the results are echt Deutsch' - even if the repertoire itself again covers Smetana, Gounod and Verdi as well as Mozart and Lortzing, with all the numbers sung in German and 'performed with zest'.

Classical Music

'O Rosa Bella' is the title of two popular 15th-century chansons, the earlier composed by Johannes Ciconia and the latter originally attributed to John Dunstable, but now to John Bedyngham. The text is based on a poem written by Leonardo Giustiniani (1300-1446): 'O lovely rose, My sweet soul; Let me not die In courtly love.' More than 20 works were based on this popular theme by composers including Johannes Ockeghem, and a Mass attributed to Gilles Joye. Born around 1420, in the Belgian town of Courtai, Joye worked as a singer and lived beyond his means. Having taken up a prestigious ecclesiastical post in Bruges, he was sent by the church fathers on a pilgrimage in order to atone for misdemeanors, but he continued to accumulate debts which compelled him to sell all his possessions; he died in penury. The song which Joye took as the basis for his Mass circulated widely during the 15th century; by a curious coincidence, Rosabella was also the name of Joye's lover with whom he lived openly (and imprudently). The recording follows performance practice of the time by using only male voices doubled by instruments for the two Masses and mixed voices for the Chansons. The chosen instrumentation includes shawm, slide trumpet, sackbut, cornetto, recorder, lute, gothic harp and psaltery: an authentic but richly colored ensemble. Although there are previous recordings of the Mass and the chansons, all the music recorded here has been newly transcribed from original sources by two of it's performers, Min J. Kim and David Brutti. The recording took place in the Umbrian church of San Francesco in Trevi, where the original organ survives, dating from 1508, and thus retaining a sound-world that resembles one known to the likes of Dunstable and Joye.

This collection brings together guitar preludes by Asafiev and Ponce, and includes world premiere recordings of Badings's 12 Preludes, Sauget's 3 Preludes and Farkas's Exercitium Tonale. Despite their very different styles, these composers are all linked together by a single trait: none of them were guitarists. A fascinating survey of 20th century Preludes for guitar solo, recorded between 11-2010 and 3-2012, Chisea della Solitudine, Nuoro, Italy, including world premiere recordings. Guitars: Livio Lorenzatti (2009), Giuseppe Guagliardo (2005). The prelude, originally an introduction to a more complex form (for instance a fugue), started living it's own independent life with J.S. Bach, and developed in the 19th century into a relatively short (roughly between half and five minutes) character piece in free form. Famous examples are the preludes of Chopin. Cristiano Porqueddu is one of the world's best and most adventurous guitarists, his previous recordings for Brilliant Classics of Barrios, Gilardino and Sor having won high praise from the international press.

For their 'commitment, technical versatility, unanimity of ensemble and near-immaculate tuning' (Gramophone) the five musicians of Seldom Sene have won golden opinions in repertoire ranging from songs and dances from Renaissance Spain and England to their own transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations: 'With passionate command, skilful precision, nuanced dynamics and their outstanding potential for colouring, the ensemble succeeds in creating a surprising spectrum of enchanting, unheard-of sounds from Bach's Variations without compromising the "idea" of the work. ' (MDR. De) Now they undertake a new adventure, having commissioned pieces from four composers of diverse backgrounds and idioms. Aspasia Nasopoulou has written a collection of 10 miniatures - 'Dipoles' - which are inspired by opposites such as Male/Female, Bent/Straight, One/Many and so forth, giving rise to a cycle of high contrasts. Her fellow Greek composer Thanasis Deligiannis plays on the talents of Seldom Sene as singers as well as instrumentalists in setting a triptych of texts in English by the poet Iacovos Camhis, with the whimsical title of a bit unfair. S�ren Sieg's work brings together the joyful and relaxed temperament of much African music with the dramatic tension of European music. As a multi-talented composer and performer on wind, string and keyboard instruments he has composed 24 recorder suites: this is the latest, titled Mathongo Amnandi, meaning 'sweet Dreams' in Xhosa. Finally Seldom Sene play Quo quondam victa furore ('Where once madness excelled') by the Dutch composer Paul Leenhouts: a character piece telling a pastoral story from Roman literature which extols the virtues of a simple country life. Leenhouts, too, has a background in early music, as a distinguished performer and director in his own right: like the others, he has composed a vividly communicative piece which is beautifully tailored to the talents of Seldom Sene.