With it's romantic and mystical connotations, night has long been the inspiration behind many works of art. Guitarist Giorgio Mirto takes on the theme in a beguiling set of little-known and contemporary works for guitar. The repertoire is varied, ranging from Mirto's own compositions to those of old Argentinean masters, but each piece brims with color and expression to evoke the moods of night and darkness.

Nocturne is a unique concept album of romantic and meditative guitar music, with works selected and performed by acclaimed Brazilian guitarist Fl�vio Apro. Also an accomplished teacher, producer, researcher and arranger, Apro studied guitar with Monina T�vora - who in turn was a student of the legendary guitarist Andr�s Segovia. T�vora, who died in August 2011, had a profound influence on Fl�vio Apro, who says "her teaching changed the way I thought about music forever". Nocturne is a fitting and poignant tribute to this inspirational teacher. Apro has compiled the works here into what he calls the Nocturne Suite a cleverly thought-out succession that fosters contemplative listening. The keys of each piece follow on from each other according to the notes of the scale, while the alternating tempi of the works, with fluidity interspersed with moments of rest, encourage a truly appreciative sense of time. Apro describes this recording as his "gift" to Monina T�vora: the recording showcases the profound understanding of music that she has passed on to him, and which he in turn is passing on to you, the listener. This selection of guitar miniatures brings us to Mediterranean landscapes under moonlit night skies: works by de Falla, Mompou, Ponce, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Barrios, Llobet, Tarrega, Sor, Rodrigo and others, in which the colours, tastes, folkore and general joie de vivre of Italy and Spain are perfectly captured. Excellently played by composer and guitarist Fl�vio Apro, descendant in the line of the great Andres Segovia.

This collection of 17 lullabies constitutes a particularly charming selection of songs for children, songs about children and indeed songs to send them to sleep. Alongside old favorites such as Wiegenlieder by Schubert, Brahms and Reger, Letizia Calandra has programmed much less frequently encountered examples of the genre. The album opens with two lullabies by Vincenzo Davico (1889-1969), a one-time student of Reger who wrote in a direct and appealing idiom. These form part of a mini-cycle of songs, Ninna nanne popolaresche, completed in the penultimate track. There are one or two older works by Merula and Mozart, but by and large the collection focuses on the 20th century, with memorable melodies and tender expressions by Puccini, Chaminade and Tosti. There are also two lullabies by another lesser-known Italian composer of the last century, Anna Filippone Del Bono. The first was written for the birth of her grandson Lello, while the second, the Ninna nanna di guerra, is a more lyrical piece in which the instrumental part and vocal line are deliberately separate, with a text full of echoes of the First World War and a sense of ineluctable sadness. The delight of this recording owes much to the art of soprano Letizia Calandra, who interprets the individual songs with great intelligence and empathy, delicately differentiating between the moods and intentions of the various composers. A graduate of the Accademia della Santa Cecilia in Rome, Calandra has worked with many of Italy's foremost early-music directors such as Diego Fasolis and Claudio Cavina. 'Scarlatti and the Neapolitan Song' was Letizia Calandra's debut album for Brilliant Classics. According to MusicWeb International, 'The performances are convincing in every respect'.

The works in this collection attest to the high standard of music-making in Naples. The composers here recorded were at the forefront of the achievements of Neapolitan music in the first half of the 18th century, the golden age of music production in the southern Italian centre. And the Neapolitan style at this time was fashionable beyond the borders of Italy, as well. Among all the composers presented, only Mancini lived and worked almost all his life in Naples. The others spent their lives travelling or serving foreign courts. This programme exploits the felicitous pairing of the voice with flute, two instruments similarly tied to the expressivity of human breath. Throughout this programme a baroque transverse flute, or ‘traverso’, is used, either called for specifically or substituted for the recorder. When these pieces were written the two types of flute still existed alongside each other as equals, as they had done for centuries before the transverse variety began to dominate later in the 18th century. Use of the viola da gamba for the bass part also finds justification in Naples. While in Rome the instrument had almost completely disappeared by the first half of the 17th century, it endured in Naples and continued to be used. Several mid-18th-century viole da gamba, preserved to this day, in various sizes by luthiers from the Neapolitan Gaglian family attest to the much later persistence of this instrument in that area.

Despite our increasingly secular society, many modern composers, inspired by ancient religious texts, have written music that is spiritual, pure and remarkably peaceful. + This release, a celebration of modern sacred music composed 1983-2011, and much of it of Russian or East-European origin, includes young Ukrainian composer Dimitri Tchesnokov’s Three Sacred Songs, Alfred Schnittke’s Three Sacred Hymns and more established works such as Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat. + The young conductor Léo Warynski directs Les Métaboles, who sing Russian and Latin with excellent diction and clear focus.

These medieval cantigas and lais - troubadour compositions from Galicia and France, respectively - display an innovation of the 12th and 13th centuries: themes of courtly love and Marian devotion combined, at once carnal and mystical, encompassing both the profane and the divine. The two lais on this recording are found in a manuscript songbook known as the Noailles Chansonnier from c.1300. In the anonymous Plainte de la Vierge au pied de la croix the Virgin Mary speaks in first person in a figurative lament at the foot of the cross. The Lai de Notre Dame, attributed to 13th-century troubadour Ernoul 'Le Vieux' or 'Le Vielle', begins with the author's promise to keep faith with the Virgin Mary and serve no other woman, a pledge quite reminiscent of those of Alfonso X of Castile in his Cantigas de Santa Maria, one of the largest collections of monophonic songs from the Middle Ages. The Cantigas, attributed to King Alfonso X (1221-1284), were written in early-Medieval Galician-Portuguese, fashionable as a lyrical language in Castile at the time. In Santa Maria loei, e loo e loarei, the king thanks the Virgin Mary for her kindness and protection. Nenbressete, Madre de Deus deals with Mary's role as mediator - in medieval eyes, her primary function. It was composed as a contrafactum on Recordare, translating the antiphon into Galician-Portuguese and expanding it with new musical and poetic concepts. Virgen Madre groriosa, a contrafactum on the estampie 'Reis Glorios' by French troubadour Giraut de Bornelh, binds this album together, demonstrating the relationship between the Galician-Portuguese and French lyrics. To the members of Malandan�a, medieval music is a field in which both performance and scholarship are unavoidable and interdependent subjects. Research conducted by Francisco Luengo and others into sculptures depicting medieval instruments has opened up a world of sounds, ideas, images and voices from the distant Middle Ages.

MUSICA SACRA: PERGOLESI'S STAB

MUSICA SACRA: MOZART'S REQUIEM

Mahler based the second movement of his Seventh Symphony on The Night Watch by Rembrandt, but the painter himself depicted few musicians and no acquaintances with musicians are known. His most famous musical contemporary was the keyboardist and composer Sweelinck, whose setting of Psalm 1 is presented here in a consort-style recording alongside three keyboard works played on harpsichord and organ. This collection also highlights much more unfamiliar names to illustrate the rich musical culture of the Low Countries at the time of the painter’s flourishing. There are vivid sacred madrigals by Herman Hollanders; stylish pavans by Cornelis Schuyt; a transcribed, extensive Salve Regina for organ by Pieter Cornet; a song for solo recorder by the lutenist Jacob van Eyck, Doen Daphne d’Over schoone Maegt; solo-vocal motets by the poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, who did in fact know Rembrandt; and much, much more. All the works and composers, however unfamiliar, are elucidated in an invaluable booklet essay. The organ recordings were made in the Oude Kerk of Amsterdam which played a significant role in Rembrandt’s life (and became the resting place of his wife, Saskia), on the church’s transept organ, which has been newly restored to the meantone temperament which the composers on this album would have known and written for. Full sung texts are also included in this invaluable and unrivalled collection.

Between 1860 and 1925, the immigrants who had settled in Argentina to seek their fortune contributed to the development of this music, giving life to forms of varied derivation such as the Cuban habanera, the milonga (a type of folk dance), the African candombe and Italian songs. More of these immigrants came originally from Italy than from any other country, and the first musicians were Italian, which explains the lyrical element in the tango: its aura of melancholy and yearning. Enea Leone and Roberto Bongianino retrace the various stages in the evolution of the tango on this album: the milonga (Milonga de mis amores, Corralera, La trampera), the tango itself (El Chocio, El Pollo Ricardo, Mi refugio, Silbando), and the vals (Pedacito de cielo, Flor de lino). Piazzolla is naturally well-represented by classics such as Histoire du Tango (originally written for guitar and flute), and others in new arrangements. There are also several solo pieces, as well as an Italian homage to the world of the Tango: two compositions that feature in well-loved Italian films, Il postino and the TV serial Il commissario Montalbano.

Classical Music

The combination of oboe, clarinet and bassoon attracted several French composers in the first half of the last century and inspired witty and elegant divertissements from the likes of Ibert, Francaix and Poulenc. But the character of the trio held an appeal to composers farther afield, as this album shows, and that appeal was by no means confined to 'light music', even if all the music on this album - from Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - shares a lightness and airiness of texture. The composers from eastern Europe - Lutoslawski, Schulhoff and Veress - all suffered under totalitarian regimes, and Schulhoff died at the hands of the Nazis, but their painful histories do not cast a long shadow over the pieces on this album. In fact, the origins of Lutoslawski's Trio are found precisely in the exercises of counterpoint he realized in the winter of 1944-5, when he had been forced to flee Warsaw, together with his mother, following the consequences of the Warsaw Rising. The Trio is a quirky, restlessly experimental work. The wind trio as laboratory also held appeal to Sandor Veress, who found a very personal synthesis of his own research into Hungarian folksong with the 12-tone theories of the Second Viennese School. The outer movements of his Sonatina abound in the madcap humor of his compatriot Ligeti, while the central Andante introduces a gravely memorable theme on the bassoon. Schulhoff's Divertissement is naturally the most French-sounding work on the album, a set of seven compact character sketches including a Charleston (No.4) and 'Florida' (No.6). Known in some quarters as the 'Russian Brahms' from the country of his birth, Paul Juon is the least-known figure here, but not the least accomplished, and his Arabesque is a substantial, four-movement structure launched in fine style by Commodo movement with echoes of Nielsen at his breeziest.

With his characteristically deft economy of means, Henri Dutilleux explored the two characteristics of the bassoon that have defined it in popular imagination ever since Mickey Mouse whirled his broom in vain at the climax of Walt Disney's cartoon realization of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: despite it's somber title, the Sarabande et Cort�ge of 1942 encloses both mournfulness and wit. So too, in no less concise terms, does the Sonatina of Tansman from a decade later. Dutilleux's work opens this recital, but the earliest work here dates from two decades previously, the Sonata which captures in a nutshell the effortlessly easy-going charm of Saint-Sa�ns's late music, composed with all the succinct mastery of expression to be expected of one who had never been short of a good tune for more than seven decades. Hindemith's Sonata of 1938 is briefer still but a much darker work, anchored by a grave march-rhythm second movement which perhaps reflects the troubled times it's composition. The value of Carmen Mainer Mart�n's personal selection of repertoire lies in it's diversity of styles. Listening to the album should banish forever any notion of the bassoon as a one- or two-note instrument alternating eccentrically between rubicund jollity and doleful introspection. There are three waltzes for solo bassoon by Francisco Mignone, one of the most talented Brazilian composers working in the generation after Villa-Lobos; and to finish, a remarkable set of variations (Ocho variaciones sobre la imagen de un sue�o, from 2017) by the Argentinian Alex Dante, born in 1994. This is scored for the unusual combination of bassoon, flute and piano, and dedicated to the two wind-playing sisters on this recording. Born and raised in Spain, Carmen Mainer Mart�n now lives and works as both a teacher and performer in Paris.

Often cited as the most distinguished neoclassical composer of post-war America, Robert Muczynski (1929-2010) was born in Chicago to Polish parents. This album of chamber music surveys an output which is always restless and unpredictable thanks to the embrace of both Bartokian harmonies and structures as well as the more lyrical yet open-ended language of Samuel Barber. The Cello Sonata of 1968 is often considered to be Muczynski’s chamber music masterpiece, in which the problems of balance and register inherent to the genre are not only solved but transcended with a mastery especially evident in the central Scherzo. From a year later, the Fantasy Trio Op.26 is a welcome addition to the clarinet-cello-piano trio genre established by Beethoven. Energy and punchy rhythmic interplay are hallmarks of Muczynski’s music, as the earlier Flute Sonata engagingly demonstrates: in its whimsical, abrupt, headstrong progress through a compact four-movement form, it may even be considered the most important such work by an American composer. Muczynski took technical agility and devil-may-care confidence for granted in his interpreters; in this case, an international quartet of musicians based in the US. There is an extended booklet essay by the pianist Dmitry Samogray which places both composer and works in invaluable context. Any listeners curious to fill out their appreciation of American music beyond Copland and Bernstein will want to hear this release.

Musica ad Rhenum has earned a special place in the early music world, with critics describing the ensemble's performances as "cutting edge" and "exhilarating." the group are joined by a fantastic set of vocal soloists, with Johanette Zomer assuming the role of Aminta and Alexe Gregoriev playing Alexander the Great.