A precocious Alexander Kostantinovich Glazunov at 16 took the Russian concert scene by storm. The teenage composer had plentiful musical ideas, a full mastery of form and enviable skill in orchestration, certainly influenced by his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. However, unlike his predecessors, the “Mighty Handful”, Glazunov lived through the political unrest that ultimately led to the Russian revolution and to communism. His directorship of the St Petersburg Conservatoire straddled Czarism and the first years of communist rule, yet ultimately his Russian musical ideal did not correspond to that of Soviet music (nor did his ideal of Russian life correspond to Soviet life). He consequently he fled the USSR, finding refuge in Western Europe, and Glazunov can now be counted among those unjustly neglected artists whose national pre-eminence was unseated by exile.

This double album for Brilliant Classics is therefore particularly welcome, shedding new light on Glazunov’s compositional output for piano duet. All but one of the works recorded here also exist in orchestral versions, but they are not necessarily derivative arrangements or reductions: it is not always easy to determine which version came first. The Fantasy Op.104 is the lone work on this program explicitly conceived for two pianos. Given Glazunov’s ability as an orchestrator, one might doubt the value of these piano versions as mere black-and-white sketches of original, colorful paintings. This is far from the case, as this recording demonstrates. Glazunov’s mastery of colors and voicings extends to the piano as well; the existence of the composer’s own orchestration can inform the pianists’ interpretive choices; and the sobriety of the piano version can highlight musical details that might go unnoticed in the lush orchestral treatment.

REVIEW:

This collection is a substantial addition to my library of music for two pianists, and came as a pleasant surprise. The big 30-minute, 3- movement Fantasy for 2 pianos is the only piece on this program written specifically and only for two pianists. It is also the high point here. The Middle-Ages Suite has four great movements that spread out over 25 minutes: Prelude, Scherzo, Serenade of the Troubadour, and Finale. The playing is both lyrical and exciting as the music demands. Based on this recording, piano duos will find this a worthy addition to their repertoire and I imagine quite effective in concert.

This husband-wife duo have been playing together professionally since 1998, so the excellent ensemble heard here is the result of their nearly 25 year partnership. The recorded sound is quite good, as is the detailed booklet essay by Chiara Bertoglio. There is a lot on this program worth getting to know, and I appreciate their pianism and musicological research.

-- American Record Guide (James Harrington)

Renowned in his day as a virtuoso keyboard player, Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) was the most important Italian composer of keyboard music between Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti. In that capacity his output has output has been surveyed by Brilliant Classics with authoritative collections of his sonatas for harpsichord (94286) and for two organs (94347). However, Pasquini also composed more than 70 cantatas of the concise and dramatic kind written by the young Handel after he arrived in Rome in 1706. By that late stage of his life, Pasquini had held one distinguished post after another in Roman musical life and become known as one of its celebrities, as celebrated for his abilities at the harpsichord as his contemporary Corelli was on the violin. Most of his vocal music remains unpublished, which makes the pioneering efforts of Capella Tiberina in this field especially welcome.

This new recording forms a sequel to their 2013 album of two Passion Cantatas (94225) and makes a powerful case for Pasquini as Rome’s leading dramatic composer of his day. Among Pasquini’s surviving cantatas, the six scored for solo bass stand out, for their keen sense of theatre and expressive rhetoric. They take Biblical history, tales of Roman history and pastoral-erotic tropes for their subjects, and they are imaginatively presented here as a cycle, interleaved with pieces for harpsichord, as though recreating a refined evening of music-making at a Roman palazzo around the turn of the 18th century.

Capella Tiberina is led in these stylish accounts by the harpsichordist Alessandra Nigito, who has made a particular study of Pasquini’s vocal music and edited several of his cantatas for modern publication. There is no more authoritative current exponent of this music, and she is joined here by other experienced performers on Italy’s rich early-music scene.

During the past century Russian Orthodox vocal music has experienced two periods of rebirth. The first, which began in the last years of the 19th century, consisted of a return to the popular sources of religious chant in the znamenny chant tradition passed down from its origins in ancient Byzantine chant and maintained by churches and choirs across Russia until the 17th century, when rulers such as Catherine the Great began to look westwards for cultural identity. Composers such as Kastalsky, Chesnokov and Grechaninov repudiated the Italian and French influences which had shaped the work of Classical and Romantic-era composers such as the Sacred Concertos of Bortniansky. repudiated the Italian and French influences which had shaped the work of Classical and Romantic-era composers such as the Sacred Concertos of Bortniansky. This renaissance was foreshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s setting of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1878 – in its time a controversial work, rejected by the Church – and reached its zenith with the two sacred cycles by Rachmaninoff: another setting of the Liturgy and then his religious masterpiece, the Vespers (All Night Vigil) of 1915. Once more suppressed by the 1917 Revolution, an authentic strain of Russian sacred music had to wait until the era of glasnost in the late 1980s and early 90s Rybin Male Choir could once more be formed to sing and record the repertoire that is their country’s musical inheritance, and most of these recordings date from the early 90s, first released on the ‘Saison Russe’ imprint for its renewal. Ensembles such as the of the Chant du Monde label, long unavailable and now reissued here for the first time.

The fundamentally Romantic idiom of Carl Reinecke coexists with the twilight of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century. He was a precocious and prolific composer, who wrote music from an early age after his birth in the North German town of Altona in 1924. The last of his three cello sonatas was composed in the year of 1898 once he had retired from teaching duties at the Leipzig Conservatoire to become its director, while the first of them was composed in 1848, when Reinecke was serving as a young and brilliantly accomplished court pianist in Copenhagen. The trio of sonatas thus spans his maturity and effectively traces certain strands of his development as a composer. All three of them hew to the standard quick-slow-quick three-movement form in which the sonata’s argument is outlined by a discursive first movement, deepened by a reflective intermezzo and rounded off with an extrovert rondo finale. When it was belatedly published in 1855, the A minor Sonata won such popularity that Reinecke was soon asked to make a violin version of the piece. The dedicatee was Andreas Grabau, a cellist in the Gewandhaus Orchestra of which Mendelssohn was director, and indeed, the sonata rejoices in a quickness of thought and lively spirit which Felix would have recognized and appreciated. The D major Sonata Op.89 was composed in 1866 and published by Breitkopf & Hartel with a dedication to Carl Voigt. Is this a ‘midde-aged’ Reinecke? Certainly the first movement stands back from the high drama of the First Sonata, or at any rate gives way periodically to a very cellistic mode of introspection, inviting comparison in this regard with the recently composed E minor Cello Sonata of Brahms.

Igor Ruhadze’s Brilliant Classics recording of sonatas by Locatelli (94736) won warm praise from Gramophone. ‘The playing is elegantly supple, the string tone warm, and the architecture of individual movements thoughtfully worked out. All this makes for a pleasant mood and enjoyable listening. The more exuberant pieces are brilliantly and at times breathtakingly performed.’ With his latest Brilliant Classics album, the Russian Baroque-specialist violinist and director turns to another pivotal figure in Baroque-era violin culture, Francesco Geminiani.

Taught first by his violinist father and then by both Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti in Rome, Geminiani was already a leading figure in north Italian courts in his 20s, before he undertook the move to London that made his name and fortune. Geminiani dedicated the Op.1 Sonatas (1716) to Baron Johann Adolf Kielmansegge, his first London patron. According to Hawkins, Kielmansegge favored the composer by arranging a performance before the king in which Geminiani was accompanied on the harpsichord by Handel. With these sonatas, which clearly stem from Corelli, Geminiani presented himself to the public as Corelli's pupil. Many imitation editions followed the first printing, but the commentator Charles Burney maintained that only the composer himself could do them full justice. Apparently designed as a calling card for Geminiani’s talents as a violinist-composer, the Op.1 Sonatas still make strenuous technical but also expressive demands on any interpreter. Their genteel surface and polished dialogue between parts conceals an array of sophisticated contrasts between moods and demonstration of a violinist’s credentials as an artist as well as a technician.

For this new recording, Igor Ruhadze is joined not by his colleagues in the Violini Capricciosi ensemble but the Russian-born harpsichordist Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya. Having pursued graduate studies with early-music luminaries such as Richard Egarr and Menno van Delft, she too evinces intense sympathy with Geminiani’s idiom.

Essentially self-taught, Schoenberg graduated from playing cello and piano as a teenager to writing his own music through the medium of song. The lyrical tendency in his music is under-appreciated because of the attention drawn to his harmonic innovations such as the twelve-tone system, but Schoenberg began composing, like so many of his predecessors, with the impulse to set poetry to melody and to capture transcendent states – love, longing and death – in music. Accordingly any recorded survey of Schoenberg’s songs still has much to show us about his place at the culmination of a heritage stretching back to Beethoven and Schubert.

The Hong Kong-based duo of Jasmine Law and Nancy Loo open this personal selection from his song output with the yearning impressionism of the Four Songs Op.2 (1899), setting poetry by Richard Dehmel whose ‘Transfigured Night’ was inspiring Schoenberg at the same time to compose an instrumental setting for string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. From the spring of 1907, the ballad of Lady Jane Grey, Op.12 No.1, inhabits the same mystical world as the Second String Quartet in which Schoenberg first composed with a tone row and also set the poetry of the German symbolist Stefan George. A more thoroughgoing engagement with George’s work then inspired Schoenberg’s most substantial contribution to the literature of art-song with his Op.15 collection, The Book of the Hanging Gardens. This collection, in the tradition of An die ferne Geliebte, sets a doomed love story in a sequence of 15 short songs. It shares an atonal language with Pierrot Lunaire and other, more superficially radical breaks with tradition, but The Book of the Hanging Gardens glistens and shimmers with a playful harmonic language which makes clear Schoenberg’s roots in the Romanticism of Brahms and Zemlinsky.

The organ sonatas of Josef Rheinberger still feature large in the repertoire of church organists everywhere, thanks to their attractive melodies and fluent writing for the instrument. Rheinberger’s industry and his skill as a teacher have overshadowed his gifts as a composer in other genres, which this new release helps to redress with suites and tone-pictures for the combination of strings and organ.

While Rheinberger’s Abendlied Op.69 No.2 holds a Brahmsian appeal for choruses, his instrumental Abendlied Op.150 is much less familiar. Yet the combination of string- instrument and organ is intensely evocative of the warm mood of recollection intrinsic to the German genre of ‘Evening Songs’; Rheinberger balances the two instruments with great skill and sympathy so that the organ always supports the cello’s noble cantabile. The Abendlied features here in two recordings; arranged for cello, and in its original version for violin, as part of the complete set of six pieces. Cellist Marco Dalsass also contributes an arrangement of the Pastorale and Elegie from the same set, and it proves fascinating to compare the angelic song of the violin with the warmer baritonal register of the cello in the same music. Both violin and cello join the organ for the Suite Op.149: a substantial four-movement work lasting 40 minutes, opening in a passionate but Baroque-inflected C minor. A meditative set of variations on an original theme is followed by a solemn sarabande, beautifully conceived for all three instruments in the vein of a Romantic slow movement but essentially ecclesiastical in tone. Baroque forms – a free-flowing prelude, a tender Canzone and graceful Allemande – also soften the C minor tonality of the Suite Op.166 for violin and organ, before the Moto perpetuo finale brings the suite to a dazzling close with the most extrovert music in the collection.

As with many composers from the early modern period, very little is known about Gregoire Brayssing. This recording features his only surviving work, printed in Paris in 1553 as the fourth volume in a series dedicated to the guitar published by Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard. Brayssing’s collection provides us with a few clues about his life: the frontispiece describes him as ‘de Augusta’, meaning he was born in the German city of Augsburg. The Quart livre, despite containing only 20 pieces, is a pre-eminent example of writing for renaissance guitar, on a par with the works of Alonso Mudarra and Miguel de Fuenllana. It includes six short (some very short) contrapuntal fantasias, true gems of the repertoire, which showcase the composer’s ability to take full advantage of the instrument’s technical and expressive resources, including the fourth course with two strings in octaves, which the upper voice uses on more than one occasion. This device is employed throughout the book, but without ‘strangling’ the instrument, as happens in Fuenllana’s works. The psalms are next, expertly crafted and ornate, with Brayssing’s arrangement in a lower key of the first part of the motet In exitu Israel by Josquin des Prez a particular highlight. The composers of the other psalms are not known. The book continues with six chansons from leading composers of the time and a frottola, the famous O passi sparsi by Sebastiano Festa, all intabulated in the same manner as the psalms that precede them. Concluding the book are two long and intriguing compositions, completely unlike anything else in the repertoire: L’Alouette and La guerre, faitte a plaisir. The title of the former turns out not to be a transcription of Cle´ment Janequin’s famous work, but an original composition by Brayssing.

The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.

This pocket history of the piano duo opens – as it must – with the F minor Fantasy of Schubert. All elements of Schubert's art can be found in the Fantasy: his gift for a sublime, gently unfolding melody; melancholy harmonic turns from major to minor; high drama within a spacious symphonic design; intricate counterpoint in the finale. Less well known but no less accomplished in its way is the set of Beethoven variations by Camille Saint-Saëns, a polished transformation of a minuet theme. This 1992 studio recording concludes with a pair of 20th-century pieces which capitalize on the energy and momentum of the piano duo genre as a whole: La valse of Ravel and the Paganini Variations of Lutoslawski, which never fail to raise the pulse and receive here barnstorming performances. The adrenaline level increases further with a sequence of live performances on album 2, opening with Rachmaninov’s gorgeous Russian Rhapsody and continuing with The Rite of Spring in the version which Stravinsky first performed with his friends in Paris prior to the ballet’s notorious public premiere in 1911. In his Monologue of 1964, Zimmermann developed the thread of his Dialogue for two pianos and orchestra with a collage technique which quotes from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in which the two pianists muse almost to themselves at times. Rounding off this collection in epic style is the apotheosis of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen.

REVIEW:

This is a spectacular piano duo release. Of the 2 discs one was recorded in the studio (one piano) and the other in concert (two pianos). The repertoire here is mostly “famous works”, but the Zimmermann falls outside of the title’s range. There are a lot of brilliant, virtuosic pieces here, and the Ravel and Stravinsky are best known in their orchestral guises. Among people who listen to a lot of 4-hand repertoire, everything here, except perhaps the Zimmermann, will be in our libraries. This is a release I’ll keep on my active listening stack for quite some time.

-- American Record Guide (James Harrington)

Unchanged since its formation more than a decade ago, the Quartetto Noûs has made albums for the Amadeus label and the Italian division of Warner Classics, but this is the ensemble’s first recording to receive international distribution and attention. Having studied with the Quartetto di Cremona but also quartet luminaries such as Gunter Pichler and Rainer Schmidt, they combine an Italian warmth of collective sonority with the incisive musical instincts of modern-European schools of quartet playing.

Pesenting five of Shostakovich’s best-known quartets, this volume presents the first in a projected series of the complete quartets for release on Brilliant Classics. Contemporaneous with the postwar Ninth Symphony which attracted censure for its unsettling humor, the Third Quartet of 1946 remained one of the composer’s own favorite works, and its five-movement form dives deep into dark waters before finding uneasy rest in one of Shostakovich’s most characteristically edgy finales. It was following the death of Stalin in 1953 that several of Shostakovich’s works began to feature his musical monogram, DSCH transliterated into notation, and the Fifth Quartet is one of the first such pieces. The contrapuntal working of the quartet makes it one of the most satisfying in the cycle, while the Seventh presents the composer once more as oddball clown, the Fool to the King Lear of the Eighth Quartet, where the DSCH motif finds a tragic apotheosis. The five-movement form once more serves Shostakovich well in the Ninth but signs of his refined and austere ‘late style’ begin to appear in the solemn simplicity of the slow music and the pithy exhilaration of the finale, which is almost a quartet in itself and the most Bartókian movement of the entire cycle.

REVIEW:

"Shostakovich has weathered the storms of time and modernity well and his popularity in the last few years has reached unprecedented peaks. A lot of this is on the back of his symphonic output and on his concertos which seem to speak to the current generation in a way that Mahler spoke to the Sixties generation. All of this attention has meant that Shostakovich’s later music, more often damned with faint praise in his lifetime, is now being critically reassessed. Nowhere is this more true than with the chamber music of which the jewel in the crown is, of course, the cycle of quartets...alongside those by Bartók, the most impressive composed during the twentieth century...younger quartets are embracing these superb works as part of their core repertoire...

Which brings me to the Quartetto Noûs. I will start with the latest quartet included in what is the first volume in a projected series, No. 9. I do so partly because it is a good example of the effect of the long shadow of No. 8 on the others in the series. This great masterpiece belies any notion that Shostakovich’s powers in any way diminished in the sixties and is the full equal of the more celebrated sibling which preceded it. I also start with it because this recording by the Quartetto Noûs is an exceptionally good one. I started by comparing the scherzo third movement with the reference set by the Fitzwilliams and the Italians just seem sharper, more caustic and yet also more playful. It is unfair to contrast a much older recording technically with a brand new one but the superb sound given to the Noûs really does make a difference. It is simultaneously richer and in closer focus. Listen to the way the pizzicati in the first movement skitter like raindrops. There is a lot of lyricism to this quartet, another dimension of Shostakovich’s musical personality not often heard in the symphonies, that the Noûs mine to great effect. We are reminded that this quartet was dedicated to his new wife. The first of the piece’s two slow movements really sings on this recording.

...I suspect most listeners will go to the eighth for a visceral evocation of the historical period yet the more introspective, less febrile approach taken by the Noûs has a lot to recommend it[.]

A significant feature of this new recording is a welcome insistence on finding color in this music. When I listen to these quartets I am constantly thinking that this is where the firecracker modernist of the fourth symphony went with all his bag of tricks and relentless invention. He made a brief, enigmatic reappearance in the ninth and in his last symphony but generally the Shostakovich of the symphony and concerto is a rather sober soul. The performance here of the seventh string quartet, itself a somewhat enigmatic work written after the death of the composer’s first wife, exemplifies what I liked so much about the Noûs’ manner. Even at full stretch, as in the finale, which must surely be an expression of personal not societal grief, they find a strange luminous beauty of sound in the double stopping that dominates the wild first half of the movement. They seem to be making the point that Shostakovich doesn’t have to be ugly in sound to register...This score, brief but haunting, might stand for the buried treasure awaiting discovery in the Shostakovich cycle as a whole.

...the third quartet is concerned with the human cost of war – the heartfelt return of the Schubertian theme of the slow movement that seems to quote Der Greise Kopf from Winterreise is gut wrenching in this performance before fading out into the stratosphere. The line from the Schubert song – ‘how far it is still to the grave’ – seems appropriate to the mood of the post war movements and Shostakovich’s expectations of that period.

The Noûs approach to this intriguing work might be described as consistently cantabile. Even in the spiky second movement, they play beautifully. Anyone raised on Soviet era Shostakovich might baulk at this but it is worth recalling that, in this fraught post war period, to embrace traditional abstract musical traditions like quartet writing was in itself a radical act courting accusations of formalism. Music was meant to evoke socialist realism, not concern itself with beauty of form...The Noûs play with plenty of grit as demonstrated by the third movement but there is always that sense of lamenting, singing voices behind and responding to the violence.

The fifth quartet clearly presents commentators with a challenge. The translated notes by Oreste Bossini included with this release in effect raise their hands in the face of music which is, apparently, ‘complex and inscrutable in its density and depth’. Hardly words to send the prospective listener rushing to the CD player...Yet there does seem to be an autobiographical element to even a quartet like this that seems to be resolutely absolute music. During the development section of the first movement all four instruments declaim a new melody fff. Not just any melody but a quotation from a clarinet trio by the astonishing Russian composer, Galina Ustvolskaya, to whom the composer had earlier proposed marriage only to be rejected. Knowing this fact, seems to me, to transform this movement into one concerned with ardent, turbulent feelings of desire. It is a fact that also gives me an opportunity to get on my soapbox about what a scandal it is that Ustvolskaya is still only known as a footnote to a less well known Shostakovich quartet rather than on the merits of her music. This is little short of a disgrace.

What we get is a passionate rather than a gaunt work and the Noûs Quartet’s singing style is glorious here. Have a listen to the soaring, high lying violin melody that ends this opening movement before ushering in the second. It is like an austere, ecstatic lark ascending. That second movement, one of Shostakovich’s finest, has never sounded more like an intimate, clandestine assignation...what the Quartetto Noûs give us is a Shostakovich in the round in all his multifaceted genius.

--MusicWeb International (David McDade)

Known in his day as ‘il Tedeschino’ (‘the little German fellow’) Giovanni Filippo Maria Dreyer was born in Florence in 1703, and made a name for himself as a castrato soprano in opera houses across Italy and farther north: he enjoyed senior posts at theatres in Wroclaw and Prague before joining the imperial theatre in Moscow. By 1737 he had returned to his home city, where he joined a religious order at the Church of SS Annunziata and became its maestro di capella. The library of SS Annunziata preserves the collection of Salmi Brevi à 4 voci con Strumenti (Short Psalms for four voices with Instruments) composed in 1740 and in part presented here for the first time. The style emulates the popular Neapolitan school of the time, pre-eminently represented by Pergolesi and Alessandro Scarlatti. The harmonic writing is broad, clear and expressive, such as to be appreciated by the general public and not only by a small circle of specialists. Also featured here the motet Verbum caro for two sopranos and continuo, and the more elaborate settings of Domine ad adjuvandum and Inno a 4 per San Filippo, both featuring arias interspersed with choral movements like a cantata. Like the Salmi Brevi, these pieces have never seen the light of day beyond the shelves of the library at SS Annunziata. Invited to research and perform them, the violinist and conductor Giacomo Benedetti has produced these stylish recordings with fellow Italian singers and instrumentalists schooled in historically informed performance practice, and the result is an attractive window onto music-making in the churches of Baroque Florence.

‘Ottavio Bariola represented absolute musical perfection. The organs of the [church of] Madonna di San Celso are honoured to have passed through the hands of such an excellent performer. His listeners rejoiced while he pressed the keys, and the original way he moved up and down the keyboard provided an earthly imitation of the harmony of heaven.’ This rapturous description, provided by the abbot Filippo Piccinelli in his work L’Ateneo dei Letterati Milanesi (Milan, 1670), provides a good summary of all the biographical information available for the organist and composer Ottavio Bariolla. The organist and organ builder Costanzo Antegnati, son of the renowned Graziadio Antegnati who built the organ for the church of Santa Barbara in Mantua played on this recording, bears witness to the fact that Bariolla was still alive in 1608, naming him in his Arte Organica (Brescia, 1608) as one of the many ‘illustrious and most excellent composers’ that inspired him to write his treatise. The only copy currently known of Ottavio Bariolla’s Ricercate per sonar d’Organo (the original has been lost) is contained within the German organ tablature held in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino (Fondo Giordano 8). This tablature, which has been dated to between 1637 and 1640, was drawn up by scribes working in southern Germany and is the largest manuscript source of keyboard music, featuring an incredible 1770 compositions. Bariolla was one of the first composers in the prime of the ricercar to break away from monothematic composition, preferring to use multiple themes in his Ricercate and therefore pre-empting the direction taken by his successors, including Giovanni Maria Trabaci, the best-known composer of the Neapolitan school, and Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Christophe Moyreau (1700-1774) was born and spent most of his life in Orléans. He became organist at Orléans Collégiale Saint-Aignan in February 1719 and at Orléans Cathedral in January 1738 and occupied this position until around 1772. In French music of his era (secular and also religious), an important place was reserved for the rhythms and structures of the dance. In 1753 Moyreau published his “Pièces de clavecin”, 124 pieces grouped in 6 books. The dances Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gigue, Rigaudon, Menuet are part of Suites, while these books also include concertos and sonatas. Some of the pieces bear titles (in the style of Couperin and Rameau) like La Flotante, Le Baccante, Le Jaloux, La Coquette, Le Preludant, L'Euridice, La Comique, L'Orphée and Le Caprice. Book 6, uniquely for French harpsichord music, consists of several three-movement keyboard simphonies written in Italian style.

Played by Fernando De Luca, one of Italy’s foremost harpsichord players, who recorded to great critical acclaim the complete keyboard works by Graupner, published by Brilliant Classics. The first-ever survey on record of the complete surviving output by a significant contemporary of Rameau: a missing piece in the jigsaw of the French Baroque.

Born in Rome in 1678 into a family of German origins, Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729) was employed as a violone and cello player by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the orchestra led by Arcangelo Corelli. Later he moved to London where he took a leading role in establishing Italian opera which was beginning to flourish, while serving as a continuo cellist in the Drury Lane theatre and the Queen’s Theatre. In 1713, Haym started to work as librettist for Handel and the collaboration continued until 1728. During this period Haym acquired the role of secretary at the Royal Academy of Music. Haym’s sonatas with flute are the first flute sonatas by an Italian composer to be published. The Sonate a Tre (Op.2) and the Sonate da camera a flauto traversa, haubois o violino solo, are strongly influenced by Corelli in the profound knowledge of counterpoint and the wide spectrum of expression of feelings and affects. From his familiarity with Corelli’s music, Haym was able to assimilate the gravity of style and nobility of expression while retaining his own musical personality.

Played by the Cappella Musicale Enrico Stuart, consisting of Chiara Strabioli (transverse flute and recorder), Romeo Ciuffa (recorder and transverse flute), Rebeca Ferri and Marco Vitale (harpsichord). Founded in 1998 the Capella Musicale Enrico Stuart specializes in 17th- and 18th- century repertoire in which wind instruments play a central role. They previously made for Brilliant Classics highly praised recordings of Boismortier and Valentini.

The German tradition of Lieder accompanied by guitar is overlooked but surprisingly rich. Several of the great Lieder singers have recorded Schubert songs with guitar (Christoph Pregardien and Peter Schreier principal among them), and to highly expressive effect. In many ways the change of instrument draws back these songs to their medieval heritage, to the Minnesänger (minstrels, or troubadours) who fulfilled courtly functions, or at a more humble level travelled from town to town, lute slung over the back, entertaining nobles and commoners alike with tales of love and war.

It is this tradition that Patrizia Cigna and Adriano Sebastiani have tapped into with the first complete recording of the Lieder composed by Carl Maria von Weber for which he had a guitar in mind. In fact Weber, more than most of his native contemporaries, nurtured a great affection for the instrument while it was more celebrated abroad – notably in the Classical tradition by Mauro Giuliani, and we should not forget that the guitar was the first instrument of Hector Berlioz. Weber would accompany himself like a early-Romantic troubadour in his own songs, and he scored for the guitar in several of his stage-works such as Abu Hassan.

The Op.25 Lieder bring together these two strands, written as incidental music for August von Kotzebue’s one-act play Der arme Minnesänger (The Poor Minstrel). Some of the songs here such as the Op.13 set and the Op.29 Canzonettas were written with either keyboard or guitar accompaniment in mind, for obvious, commercially attractive reasons, but the standalone Mayenblümelein was only ever intended for the guitar, as was the lovely, polyphonic Sagt, woher stammt Liebeslust which calls for two sopranos, a three-voice female choir, and a guitar accompaniment. These, like several other songs on this recording, have no rivals in the current catalogue, making this a new recording an essential acquisition for all lovers of Romantic Lieder.

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REVIEW:

The songs are utterly charming, lyrical and dramatic, on a par with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and early Schubert songs. The guitar freely and independently interacts with the melodic lines, never being a mere accompaniment.

– Records International