Any new album by Vladimir Ashkenazy is cause for celebration and attracts worldwide attention. First as a pianist and latterly as a conductor in a performing career of over six decades, Ashkenazy was recognized early on as having all the virtues of a great performer: musicianship, intellectual perception, technical perfection and musical instincts that never failed to make his fingers say something. He has an individual but expressive conducting technique, but he made the transition to the podium with complete success during the late 70s and early 80s, and his orchestral recordings are now as numerous as his piano albums, and the best of them as masterly. Although the repertoire for which he is best known focuses on Beethoven and the Romantic era, Ashkenazy has often performed music of our own time, especially by young composers. This project brings together Mauro Cardi (b.1955), Francesco Antonioni (b.1971) and Cristiano Serino (b.1971) with concertante works for viola and ensemble, which explore between them the centrality of the viola within a string section, and within the pitch range of an orchestra, and how the viola can both journey from that centre and rediscover it's natural home there. Serini's Per Tutta la Durata di un Arco is based on the duration and extension of a bow-stroke; in Northern Lights, after the Thaw, Antonioni paints a soundscape of light and ice and flowing water in which a clarinet duets with the viola; it is the viola's antique cousin, the viola d'amore, that takes the starring role in Cardi's La Follia, based on the chord progression which inspired countless 17th- and 18th-century composers such as Corelli, Tartini and Vivaldi.

Italian composer Giovanni Albini organizes his beautifully structured music through precise mathematical patterns. + His musical language explores what might be defined as a harmonic continuum: suspended triads, simple voice leading and diatonic scales form the foundation of his unique compositions. + This new release unveils four works from Albini’s sacred oeuvre as realized by seasoned performers of 20th c. repertoire, the Choir of the Faculty of Musicology Cremona under Ingrid Pustijanac, with instrumental support from musicians of the 15.19ensemble and Il Giardino delle Muse.

This collection showcases a variety of works from Albini�s oeuvre, many of which have been praised for their mathematical significance. Strong links to Western Classical music can be heard in each of these pieces, but mathematical theory is also employed in a variety of ways: Una teoria della Prossimit� is completely determined by mathematics, from its structure to its continuity and notation, and Estatica is formed around the single tone of E and expanded outwards. The collection also features three of the string quartets; with String Quartet No.5 � a rapidly changing piece constantly underpinned by the G minor scale � followed by the strict motion of No.6 and the innovative No.7, which is based on Albini�s own specific system of triadic cycles. This disc boasts a wealth of performers, including the acclaimed string ensemble Le Cameriste Ambrosiane conducted by Dario Garegnani, Quartetto Indaco and Duo Bonfanti, as well as soloists Fabio Mureddu, Davide Alogna and Giorgio Mirto.

Born in 1982, the Italian composer, mathematician and guitarist Giovanni Albini began writing for string quartet in 2003. By then he had graduated from the conservatoire in Milan before pursuing further studies at the Accademia della Santa Cecilia in Rome and then in Tallinn. Albini's language is eclectic, reflecting his broad education and wide range of musical interests in writing for new-music ensembles, video games and multimedia artworks. Arpeggiated sequences owe as much to Bach and the Baroque as they do to Minimalism, but they are integrated within an idiom that embraces modernism and the most fundamental musical materials such as a scale, which forms the basis for the Sixth Quartet. This and the most recent of his quartets, No.9, are constructed as strict palindromes - working the same backwards as forwards, like certain late canons of Bach and the Ninth Symphony of Robert Simpson. Subtitled 'Il principe', No.8 is dedicated to the memory of Carlo Gesualdo and based on the opening bars of his madrigal Moro, lasso, al mio duolo. The String Quartets Nos 5-7 feature on a previous Brilliant Classics album, 'Musica ciclica' (BC9294), which collects a diverse range of Albini's instrumental music. 'If some brave director is looking for music for his film, get in touch with Giovanni Albini. Take for example Estatica per chitarra: the technical precision and concentration required for the performance of the song are almost sublimated by the enchanting result. Another example: the balanced dialogue between different instruments such as violin, guitar duo and string orchestra in the Double Concerto, Corali, leads to moments of intense emotion. But so does all the music on this album; music that benefits from the tightly focused skill of the performers and the high quality of the recording.' (Il corriere musicale) Now based in Milan, the Quartetto Indaco was formed at Scuola di Musica di Fiesole in 2007 and specialises in new music. Il Giornale di Vicenza acclaimed the quartet as 'compact, full of Polish and exuberance, a real revelation. The Quartetto Indaco shows lucid precision, concentration and great ability.'

After the success of the First Barrios Guitar Competition CD (Elise Neumann, BC9287), this second issue by the 2012 winner Emanuele Buono establishes the extremely high level of this competition. This CD features Studies and Preludes by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, one of the best-known and appealing guitar composers of the 20th century.

This recording acknowledges the increasing scholarly focus on sacred music composed in the Lutheran tradition pre- J.S. Bach. + Johann Christoph Bach (second cousin to J.S.) as well as other names now reasonably well-known to us – Tunder, Bruhns and Rosenmüller principal among them – all active in North German cities as Kapellmeisters and composers, are featured. + Interspersed is a trio sonata by Krieger and, to momentarily lift the mood, an instrumental Paduana by the now little-known Johann Schop. + The disc concludes with one of the few extant works by the Hamburg-based musician Matthias Weckmann.

‘A Minimal Sax’ takes a journey through the last 30 years of minimalist music, one of the most influential artistic movements of the last century. An accomplished young Italian ensemble takes us from the purism of ‘New York Counterpoint’ by Steve Reich through the soulful strains of the Saxophone Quartet by Philip Glass, to the funky rhythms of Michael Torke’s ‘July’ and the catchy offbeats of Michael Nyman’s Second String Quartet, in a version for saxophones which here receives its world premiere recording. Back in 1968 it was Nyman who coined the term Minimalism, in an article for ‘The Spectator’, to describe music by composers such as Cornelius Cardew that could be relied upon for its effect in clearing a listener’s mind. ‘Simple idea, straightforward structure, intellectual control, theatrical presence and intensity in presentation’: these were the other criteria he applied to music or at any rate musical events masterminded by Nam June Paik and the ‘Naked Cellist’, Charlotte Moorman. By that point, Reich and Glass had already been writing influential pieces such as It’s gonna rain which shared the qualities listed by Nyman. Their works for saxophone date from later in their careers, once Minimalism had been established as an unstoppable cultural force that had brought millions of young listeners into concert halls. They were attracted by the hypnotic repetitions that are a trademark of these pieces, particularly suited to the medium of saxophone quartet, but even more to the rhythmic rigor and fresh yet recognisable harmonies shared by all four works here. Founded in 2017, the Freem Saxophone Quartet comprises four recent graduates from distinguished Italian conservatoires who have already played in festivals and concert halls the world over. As an ensemble they perform the established repertoire for saxophone quartet and commission a great deal of new music. This is their debut album.

6 MONOLOGUES FROM JEDERMANN &

In 1650, seven years after Claudio Monteverdi’s death, the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti, with the help of Francesco Cavalli, a student and successor of Monteverdi, decided to put together the compilation Messa a quattro voci et salmi. It was a unique tribute to Monteverdi. In an era when looking back was not fashionable, the preservation of written music was rare, and for the most part the names of dead musicians were quickly forgotten, Monteverdi’s fame seemed to persist for a long time.

In 1641, Monteverdi himself had compiled the collection Selva Morale et Spirituale. Perhaps he considered these to be the great treasures of his oeuvre. But there must have been many more. After all, music was always written for the Liturgy of the Hours (Liturgia Horarum) and for special occasions, and Monteverdi was not excepted from this practice. Cavalli and Vincenti had plenty to choose from when putting together this beautiful compilation, to which Cavalli added his own Magnificat.

Alongside the Messa a quattro –church music in the old contrapuntal style – there is a lot of other beautiful music. We find the Confitebor in two different versions (Monteverdi was constantly modifying existing pieces) which gives us a nice insight into how he worked.

We also know that Monteverdi looked back to the old contrapuntal techniques in his church music. The Laudate pueri, Laetatus sum, Nisi Dominus II and the Lauda Jerusalem for 5 voices are good examples of this. In contrast to this are the works where he looked forwards, where he translated the concertante practice into psalms such as Nisi Dominus I and the intoxicating Beatus vir. In the Laetatus sum, he lets the infinite possibilities over an infinitely repeating bass be heard. The second CD begins with a mass that was written as an opening piece for the Marian Vespers: the Messa in illo tempore. And with this, we complete the circle. In 1610 Monteverdi began a church-music career that to the end of his life was notable for the enormous variety of styles he employed. We should be grateful that Cavalli and Vincenti, perhaps driven by commercial interests, left us this extra treasure.

This album is dedicated to the compositions of Federico Mompou, a composer and pianist of profound sensitivity. He exhibited an early inclination for the piano but, inspired by a Gabriel Fauré concert, he shifted his focus to composition, making his way to Paris to further his study. Mompou’s compositional approach was channelled through the piano, which he considered a fundamental tool for connecting with music’s essence, so he composed primarily on and for the instrument. There are some exceptions, however: notably his guitar compositions Suite Compostelana (1962) and Cançon i Dansa No.13 (1972).

In the guitar’s melancholic and evocative timbre, Mompou discovered an ideal medium to express his contemplative and gentle poetic world. The guitar becomes the canvas where sound and silence intertwine, evoking emotionscapable of transporting the listener to archaic places suspended in time.

In 2018, Brilliant Classics released Ramelli’s recording of Mompou’s original guitar compositions. This new album furthers his exploration of the composer’s works, taking his piano compositions and reimagining them for the guitar. The collaboration between the guitarist and James Beneteau, who presented Ramelli with these exquisite transcriptions of Mompou’s pieces, has been profound.

Throughout the transcription journey, Ramelli and Beneteau followed Mompou’s scores as a map, transmuting each piece through the lens of contact with the geography of the guitar’s unique resonance. Decisions about transcription, instrumentaltechnique, tempo, and dynamics are all intertwined with this listening to the instrument itself. Playing Mompou’s music transcribed for guitar is a journey aimed at heightened listening and sensitivity, exploring the spaces between notes through tactile contact with the instrument. This recording captures this creative process and marks the beginning of this ongoing artistic journey.

Both Beach and MacDowell were formidably accomplished pianists who wrote concertos in barnstorming virtuoso style, for themselves and their contemporaries to play, but they could also turn their hand to the lucrative domestic market for piano-duet music. In doing so they also tapped into the 19th-century, Romantic preoccupation with childhood which Schumann had encapsulated in his Kinderszenen of 1838.

MacDowell wrote his Moon-Pictures Op. 21 in the winter of 1884–5 and subtitled them ‘after H.C. Andersen’s Picture-Book without Pictures’, referring to an 1848 collection of short bedtime stories.

Published in 1901 and dedicated to the composer’s niece, the six duets of the album’s title collection, Summer Dreams by Beach, are shorter and technically simpler than the Moon-Pictures, but they are prefaced by literary quotations which once more indicate that this is not music for children so much as music for adults to play to children, and for adults to play at being children. In any case, simpler means and fewer notes need hardly imply naivety of expression, and Beach’s self-taught technique was too rigorous to allow anything less than the most deftly fashioned work to escape her desk.

Composed in 1883, Beach’s brief 3 Movements for piano duet are the work of a prodigiously talented teenager who knows her early-Romantic piano literature – including Kinderszenen – inside out, but who also understands at this stage how to emulate rather than merely copy her models.

In the following year of 1884, the 23-year-old MacDowell wrote his 3 Poems Op. 20. Strictly speaking, Hamlet and Ophelia is the outlier in this collection, since MacDowell composed it in 1894 as a tone-poem for orchestra in the Lisztian manner, and then made this two-piano transcription rather than leaving the work to the kind of professional arranger habitually commissioned by publishers for such work. Nevertheless, he took the kind of care over it that Brahms did in arranging his symphonies, and the piano-duet version retains the brooding tension of the opening and effectively transfers the violinistic surges of Hamlet’s main section to the keyboard.

The album’s final collection takes a chronological leap forward to 1952, but its nostalgia-drenched mood belongs to an intermediate age. ‘One might imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel’, Barber explained in a letter to his publisher, ‘the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos. Souvenirs – remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.’ Barber, it should be noted, would have been four years old at the time, and so these are ‘souvenirs’ in the manner of sepia-tinted postcards.

‘I play Bach every day,’ said Shostakovich in 1950, at an event to mark the bicentenary of Bach’s death. ‘For us, Bach's legacy is an embodiment of flaming emotion, soulful humanity and true humanism, which stands in contrast to the dark world of raw evil and contempt for humanity.’

Taking their inspiration from these words, and from the palpable influence of Bach on the solid forms and fluent counterpoint of Shostakovich’s own music, this quartet of musicians presents an entirely original pairing of the two composers, in which cantata arias and a major song-cycle are linked and interspersed by instrumental interludes.

The German soprano Dorothee Mields is renowned for her piercing musicianship and luminous tone in the music of Bach, working with such illustrious conductors as Rene Jacobs and Philippe Herreweghe. Her contributions to recent recordings in this field have been called ‘sensational’ and ‘ravishing’ by Gramophone.

Here she sings recitatives and arias from seven cantatas, including the meditative opening movement of ‘Ich bin in mir vergnügt BWV204’. The trio-sonata accompaniment brings her expressive handling of the text to the fore, and prefaces the arias with the G major Sonata BWV1021 for violin and continuo, while Luca Quintavalle contributes the sixth Prelude and Fugue from Book 2 of ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’. Switching to piano for Shostakovich, Quintavalle plays the D major Prelude and Fugue from the Russian composer’s counterpart to the WTC. The early Piano Trio No.1 makes a Romantically yearning preface to the late settings of Alexander Blok which Shostakovich composed alongside the song-cycle Fourteenth Symphony. These songs find the composer at his most introspective, unsparing and yet rewarding of the subtlety which Mields brings to them. The idioms of Bach and Shostakovich complement as much as they contrast, and they are drawn together here by performances of powerful eloquence.

First recordings of the complete surviving keyboard works by a forgotten figure of the French Baroque.

Brilliant Classics has revived the names of many composers from obscure corners of history. Few of them have been as buried by the past as Pierre-Claude Foucquet, who was active in Paris in the first half of the 18th century. Yet anyone listening to this first complete recording of his music for harpsichord will surely wonder why. Three volumes survive: two books of Pièces de Clavecin, and a third entitled Caractères de la Paix. This was the first to be published in 1749. By then Foucquet had been organist at the magnificent Church of Saint-Eustache for some years, and he would go on to take up the post of titulaire at Notre Dame. He was following in a distinguished family line, his father and grandfather both having been organists at Saint-Eustache.

Foucquet must have been a richly talented organist and improviser in the French tradition, and this latter quality is abundantly and delightfully preserved by the character pieces which make up these harpsichord suites. They belong to the same tradition as the Pièces de Clavecin of Couperin, d’Anglebert and Rameau, but they have a palette of colour and a dramatic imagination of their own. The third movement of Caractères de la Paix is titled ‘Le Feu’, and it fairly sets the instrument alight with pounding explosions and ribbons of flame, demanding all the resources of both an instrument and interpreter at full stretch.

From 1751 and 1758 respectively, the second and third books are hardly less full of vividly pictorial representations – of chickens and champagne, of figures lamenting and working and praying in a gallery of probably real people whose names are now lost to us but whose personality lives on in the keyboard music of French composers from the time.

This album of Foucquet is a notable addition to the Brilliant Classics discography of Fernando De Luca, which already includes complete surveys of other unfamiliar names from the time such as Jollage, Moyreau and most recently Pierre-Thomas Dufour (96771).

Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1760–1812) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the foremost keyboard performers and composers of his age. Over a span of three decades, Dussek completed nearly 300 compositions, most of which involve a keyboard instrument. The sonata as a genre holds a special position in his overall oeuvre: keyboard sonatas were among his first published pieces in the early 1780s, and the sonata Op. 77 in F minor was to be his last work before his death in 1812.

This set is the result of an extensive recording project using the combined resources of eight excellent fortepianists to produce the first comprehensive recording of Dussek’s keyboard sonatas on period instruments. Listeners are invited to take a journey through the brilliant, harmonically beautiful and expressive music of one of the most fascinating composers at the threshold of early Romanticism. While in modern times piano building has been largely standardised, 18th-century instruments were very personal works of art, and their construction differed from town to town and from builder to builder, and even within one builder’s output. The distance between cities as far apart as London and Vienna resulted in two distinct schools of piano building: the “English” and the “Viennese.”

The formidable array of both English and Viennese fortepianos played on this recording (see info below) provides listeners with a parallel journey, alongside through Dussek’s music, exploring the great tonal variety that existed amongst fortepianos in the composer’s day, with each instrument’s unique qualities matched to the differing characters of Dussek’s works.

This pair of piano trios has become recognized in recent years as among the finest works by their composers, and they make a complementary pairing despite their contrasting idioms. This new recording also makes a fine showcase for a trio of Italian siblings who have won many prizes in chamber-music competitions and give recitals across Italy as Trio Rigamonti.

Completed in 1846, the G minor Piano Trio of Clara Schumann thus postdates her early piano pieces by decades, and is accordingly a much more mature and accomplished work. She handles the piano-trio dynamic with great skill, balancing her piano part against the strings with sensitivity, and the whole piece is shot through with a pathos that bears comparison with contemporary works by both her husband and her friend Brahms.

While there is no shortage of light and shade to the second theme of the first movement and the playful central Scherzo, the expressive pull of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio draws the listener towards the piano’s deeply felt introduction to the slow movement, which achieves remarkable pathos within its relatively brief duration. The turbulent finale skilfully balances the scale of the first movement, and the whole piece ranks among the most satisfying of 19th-century piano trios.

Its counterpart in the early years of the 20th century, hardly less rewarding a contribution to the piano-trio literature than contemporary works by Ravel and Rachmaninoff, is the Piano Trio composed in 1921 by Rebecca Clarke. The angst of Clara’s finale is answered and intensified by a gripping confrontation at the start of Clarke’s Trio, which does not so much subside as simmer throughout the first movement. The central Andante flows like a free-running brook and yet is achingly lyrical, before the Allegro vigoroso finale spins the listener through a whirling kaleidoscope of music past and future. These trios make a natural pairing in concert and on record and yet they are still too rarely heard, but Trio Rigamonti are passionate advocates.