Towards the end of the renowned Couperin dynasty, Armand-Louis was born in 1727 as the nephew of François Couperin (‘le grand’), and in due course he became titulaire organist at the Église Saint-Gervais in the Marais district of Paris, as generations of Couperins in a continuous sequence stretching back to 1653. In 1752 he married Elisabeth-Antoinette Blanchet, daughter of the harpsichord-maker François-Étienne Blanchet and herself the third generation of a family of musicians and luthiers. They had four children, three of whom lived to maturity and became musicians, including their son Pierre, who succeeded Armand-Louis at Saint- Gervais after a tragic accident with a runaway horse brought about the composer’s premature end in 1789. It has been suggested that personal modesty, as well as the demands of a schedule which saw him in demand at churches across Paris, was the cause of Armand-Louis publishing so little of his music. Certainly it was highly esteemed during his lifetime. These Pièces de Clavecin were published in 1751 as his ‘Opus 1’ and succeeded only by lesser-known collections of violin sonatas and trios. The Pièces de clavecin deserve consideration alongside the viol fantazias of Purcell and the Lachrymae of Dowland for their rich, saturated exploitation of an idiom passed its high noon. The collection is divided into two parts by key, G major/minor and B flat major/minor. The titles allude to friends and well-known figures of the time, and much is lost or rather buried within and between the notes in this kind of portraiture, yet the pieces spring to life in the right hands.

Brilliant Classics has already published all 88 of Domenico Cimarosa’s keyboard sonatas in their commonly encountered appearance as harpsichord pieces (BC95027), as well as an album of 30 sonatas in arrangements for guitar (BC94172). He may still be better known as a composer of comic opera, for masterpiece such as Il matrimonio segreto, but this new album of the sonatas in versions for organ celebrates the variety and adaptability of Cimarosa’s idiom and demonstrates why he was so lionized in his own time. The painter Delacroix preferred Cimarosa’s music to Mozart’s. Stendhal wrote that he would rather be hanged than be forced to state which of the two he preferred. Even the notoriously partial Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick lavished praise on Cimarosa’s wonderful facility, inventive compositional strokes and refined taste, and Goethe, no less, directed several productions of his operas. Perhaps Cimarosa’s sheer fluency has told against his posthumous reputation: where to begin with 88 attractive sonatas? In his own booklet introduction, Andrea Chezzi explains that he has reviewed all of them and chosen 21 which seem particularly suitable for performance on the organ. He has ordered them to alternate slow and fast pieces, made marginal adjustments such as a few pedal doublings, and recorded them here on a historically appropriate instrument by Andrea Boschini (before 1755) and Giovanni Cavalletti (1814), located in the Sanctuary of the Beata Vergine dello Spino, Brugneto di Reggiolo, in the Italian province of Reggio Emilia. Andrea Chezzi’s previous recordings for Brilliant Classics have attracted glowing reviews, such as the Op.1 harpsichord sonatas by Baldassare Galuppi: ‘The performance by Chezzi is bold and decisive… with music that can excite the imagination, performed with grace and style by Chezzi. It also shows that Galuppi is more than just a pretty operatic face.’ (Fanfare)

In this expert recording, singer Roberto Balconi and group Fantasyas approach Giulio Caccini’s (1551-1618) Le Nuove Musiche with a focus on authentic performance practice as specified in great detail by the composer himself in the preface to the work. Dated 1601 and published in 1602, Le Nuove Musiche contains madrigals and arias for solo voice with basso continuo accompaniment and is a seminal collection in the establishment of the new Baroque style of monody which broke with Renaissance practices in many significant ways. In the preface, Caccini exhorts the performers to honour the primacy of speech and speech rhythm. Balconi explains: ‘Monody is more about words and metre than singing, focusing on the declamation of the semantic, rhetorical and prosodic elements of the poetic text rather than constructing a melody.’ This was a departure from the combined voices of Renaissance counterpoint, a move towards solo poetic recitation with the nuance of music in service of the meaning. Caccini lays out guidelines for the retrained and appropriate use of the improvised ornamentation that was the vogue in his day but which he considered too often gratuitous and overly virtuosic at the expense of the music. He stresses these should be used judiciously so that the singer can ‘almost speak in harmony’, in other words recite the text more or less normally using music. In adhering assiduously to Caccini’s compositional concept, Balconi and Fantazyas create an authentic and powerfully moving document of the birth of monody, which not only inspired the invention of opera but changed the entire course of music history.

The 24-year-old Boccherini’s departure from his native Lucca in 1767 proved to be the making of him. By 1770 he had become court composer and cellist to the royal chamber of Prince Luis Antonio de Borbón, youngest son of Philip V of Spain. The ensemble at his disposal must have included an excellent flautist, for he wrote several sets of chamber music in which the flute plays the starring role, including the Quintets, Op.17 in 1773, and the Quintets, Op.19 in 1774, all dedicated to Prince Luis. The writing for the flute is orchestral in nature, as if these were concertos in disguise, with rapier-like dialogue between the two violin parts. All 12 works follow the same two-movement formal pattern, with a moderately quick opener followed by a more graceful dance, except for Op.19 No.6, subtitled ‘Las parejas’ (The Couples) after the ceremonial horse parade of the same name that was held at the Aranjuez palace every spring; its movement titles (Entrada-Marcia, Galope and Entrada-Marcia) reflect the different sections of the event. The Op.55 Flute Quintets on album 3 date from 1797, having been written with an especially talented flautist/oboist in mind. By then Boccherini was set up in Madrid with a generous pension, Prince Luis having died some years earlier, as composer to separate courts in Osuna and Prussia. These later works enjoy a more relaxed temperament, by and large, though the solo writing for the flute is still highly florid and expressive even in the more stately movements such as the grave Lento to conclude Op.55 No.5.

Born in 1971, Marco lo Muscio is an organist, pianist and composer who has performed on the great organs of Europe and the US. His own music been performed by the likes of Christopher Herrick, Thomas Trotter and David Briggs. This album focuses on another, more intimate side of his output. There are pieces dedicated to his mother and to the memory of his late father; tributes to both Debussy and Satie; meditations on literary themes from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in a neo-medieval style; a pair of ricercari originally composed for organ, paying homage to Renaissance-era counterpoint; and to begin with Three American Preludes. Composed in 2001, the first two of the preludes were also Lo Muscio’s first works intended for the piano. Their bluesy harmonies and ostinato bass lines are inspired by the playing of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. The third of them (from 2009) is a homage to Jarrett, but composed in the style of prog rock – an idiom that the organist adopted with such success that he began to work with the guitarist Steve Hackett, founder member of Genesis. Since first meeting Hackett in 2008, Lo Muscio has made many transcriptions of prog rock classics (by Genesis and others) in a parallel career to his own compositions. The two careers intersect here with Horizons, written by Hackett in 1972 for the Genesis album Foxtrot, and itself derived from the Prelude to Bach’s G major Cello Suite. In 2009 Lo Muscio composed his own Meditations on Horizons, which transforms elements of Hackett’s piece with a habanera rhythm Having established a career as a pianist with a speciality in the music of Bach (as winner of the 1995 J.S.Bach International Piano Competition), Andrea Padova has attracted international praise for his performances and recordings. His performance of the Goldberg Variation has won glowing encomia: The Washington Post wrote that he ‘conveys the sense of successfully exceeding the limits of human possibility.’ This is his debut recording on Brilliant Classics.

Given its color by a pastorally evocative scoring of oboe and small orchestra, the Idillio Concertino lives up to its name with calm and gentle cantabile writing throughout in Wolf-Ferrari’s most neoclassical vein. The composer’s declared idol was Mozart, and all three of these works seek to recover something of a timeless beauty which many locate in Viennese Classicism. “When a piece of music touches our heart,” said Wolf-Ferrari, “we do not need to understand why it does so: indeed it is something that should not be understood, even were it possible to do so. We do not need to be botanists to perceive the beauty of a forest! In art, it is sentiment, not reason, which determines our reaction. Art does not desire an audience of initiates, a congregation of the faithful, but a pure and open heart.” This newly recorded album is for every listener who feels likewise. The solo instrument for the Suite-Concertino is the bassoon, but the dreamy mood prevails in the long-breathed opening Nocturne, which is followed by a quick, strumming scherzo, a lovely heartfelt Canzone and a gentle concluding Andante. This pair of concertos from 1933 is complemented by one of Wolf-Ferrari’s best-known instrumental works, the four-movement Serenade for Strings which dates from a full 40 years earlier, before the composer embarked on an operatic career. In this precociously mature work- written at the age of 17- Mozart is even more clearly a guiding light, as indeed he was for the composer’s contemporary Busoni, who lends his name to this chamber orchestra based in the northeast of Italy.

Lorna Windsor’s selection of eight 20th and 21st-century composers highlights how the voice incarnates different expressive forms more than any instrument. Left naked in its primeval state, the voice leads each composer to rediscover his personal voice, unfettered by convention. Six of the eight composers represented here were born within the same five years, from 1926 (Kurtág and Feldman) to 1931 (Bussotti, Kagel), in 1929 Pousseur, in 1930 De Pablo. Andriessen was born slightly after in 1939 whilst only Macmillan (b.1959) belongs to the following generation. Bold simplicity is the keynote of Feldman’s brief setting of Rilke, Only: purely diatonic across its two minute span, whereas Henri Pousseur’s equally concise tribute to Baudelaire uses a 12-tone technique to create the illusion of diatonicism. In the hands of Luis de Pablo, Góngora’s evocation of a flight of storks creating patterns in the sky, is suggested by melismatic use of the voice, with arpeggios and filigree in quasi-instrumental notation, with arabesque-like writing which hints at distant Arabic hues of flamenco. In Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, György Kurtág set the caustic aphorisms of a18th-century German physicist and writer with lightning flashes of insight and expression. By contrast, A Song of the Sea by Louis Andriessen requires the singer to sit (in performance) with a doll on her lap as she tells a sad little story with a simplicity redolent of folksong. Bussotti and Kagel both made far more thoroughgoing exploration of vocal technique in the Lettura di Braibanti and The Tower of Babel respectively. Lorna Windsor closes her recital with the most extended work on the album: in angustiis II, a lament by James Macmillan which presents a grief-stricken image of humanity crying out to God. She is a specialist in early and contemporary repertoire who can call upon several languages as mother tongues.

Born in Alkmaar, De Fesch was a virtuoso violinist and composer who held several posts in his homeland and had a number of publications to his credit before going to London in 1731. There he became De the leader of Handel's orchestra as well as composing for both the stage and the concert hall. Dating from 1744-5, Joseph was first performed at the forerunner to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, but the score fell from circulation and was presumed lost until its rediscovery in 1980. A few revival performances followed before this beautifully prepared, period-instrument recording was made in 2000. Joseph is not a Hendelian oratorio with a hero or heroine like Samson or Esther: the theme is envy and the forgiveness found through faith in God. The concision and compactness in De Fesch's concertos is also in evidence throughout Joseph. The piece ‘was purposefully crafted in a lighter style,’ according to its conductor, the flautist and founder of Musica ad Rhenum, Jed Wentz. ‘It is pure opera seria and not really a Handelian oratorio. It has an excellent, compact libretto, charming, virtuoso arias, and a minimum of choruses.’ De Fesch’s lively and experienced sense of theatre is conveyed by this recording, made with a distinguished cast of mostly Dutch-based early music singers. ‘The performers excel in this rare literature and certainly are well cast in their respective roles… Jed Wentz elicits an excellent sound from the choir and period-instrument orchestra; both are consistently focused, eager, and highly responsive.’ Fanfare, January 2002

Henry François Joseph Vieuxtemps was aged 4 when he started the violin with his father, a violin-maker and amateur violinist. He gave his first public performance at the age of 6 and his talent attracted the attention of Charles Auguste de Bériot, who brought him to Paris, where in 1829 he made his début. Robert Schumann compared him to Paganini. The famous Italian virtuoso was strongly impressed by the violinist’s performance in London in 1834. In turn, Paganini’s supernatural technique would remain a strong influence and inspiration for Vieuxtemps. Meanwhile he became an idol in Russia where he spent five years from 1846 till 1851. He was Musician at the court of Tzar Nicholas I, Violin teacher and soloist at the Imperial Theatre, and founder of the School of Violin at St. Petersburg Conservatory, contributing to the founding of a “Russian Violin School”. Back in his native Belgium he dedicated his life to teaching at the Brussels Conservatory, where he counted Eugène Ysaÿe among his pupils.

This new recording contains the substantial (over 40 minutes!) Violin Sonata Op.12, as well as Morceaux de Salon and Romances Sans Paroles.

Italian violinists Carmelo Andriani already successfully recorded for Brilliant Classics works by Michele Esposito. Pianist Pierluigi Camicia is a highly respected soloist and chamber music player, who collaborated with Ruggiero Ricci, Félix Ayo and the Quartetto di Cremona.

Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) was a German composer and arguably the master lutenist of the 18th century. In addition to being one of the greatest players of all time, he was one of the most important and most prolific composers of lute music in history. He wrote around 600 pieces for lute, most of them grouped into ‘sonatas’ (not to be confused with the later classical sonata, based on sonata form) or suites, consisting mostly of Baroque dance movements. This recital features some of Weiss’s sonatas (he called them ‘Suonate’) for solo lute. They have come down to us in a variety of tablature manuscripts, and many are missing their preludes, which were usually improvised. Weiss’s music is characterised by a unique understanding of the capabilities of his instrument, its strengths and its weaknesses. Like J.S. Bach’s, his music represents the culmination of a high Baroque style a little at odds with the more progressive aspirations of his younger contemporaries. The cantabile style of playing heard in these marvellous performances is directly inspired by the instrument, a lute-harpsichord built for Mr. Rübsam in 2015 by the acclaimed American instrument-maker Keith Hill. It consists of one manual with one set of gut strings at eight-foot pitch, and two sets of jacks which pluck the strings in two different places. One, positioned farther from the nut, produces a flutey sound, and the other, closer to the nut, produces a more nasal timbre. A second set of strings, made of brass at four-foot pitch, produces a halo-effect by resonating with the eight-foot register played by the performer. It gives the rather dry sound of the gut strings a much more singing quality of tone.

Until his sudden and tragic death in 1983 at the age of 35, the French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was an utterly original voice in new music. Even what is left to us has continued to be hugely influential on successive generations of composers who seek to explore the sounds at the edge of the notes and between them, who search for new sounds on old instruments and new forms in familiar places. His ensemble pieces such as Zipangu and Bouchara have become repertoire works for important new-music groups, but his chamber music is still little known, if no less individual. The present release will therefore attract all new-music enthusiasts, with its carefully prepared performances of five works dating from his artistic maturity. Vivier enrolled at the Conservatoire de musique in Montreal in 1967. Gilles Tremblay, student of Olivier Messiaen, became his most important teacher. Studies at the legendary summer schools in Darmstadt, artistic nursery to a generation of avant-garde artists, and in particular with Karlheinz Stockhausen, enabled Vivier to find and refine his own voice. After writing the Piece for cello and piano, and the Pianoforte for solo piano in 1975, he undertook a pivotal journey to Asia, exploring the cultures of Bali and Indonesia, which would inform the rest of his output. Thus Pulau Dewarta, from 1977, heard here in an arrangement for piano and percussion, is unmistakably colored by gamelan sounds. From the following year dates Paramirabo, the last and most recent work on the album, is scored for flute, Violin, cello and piano, exploring similarly exotic harmonies and timbres to Zipangu and Pulau Dewarta, but with the instruments mostly operating in rhythmic unison. Based in the Netherlands, the instrumentalists on this album are all experienced new-music soloists who have worked with many of today’s most distinguished composers as members of the ASKO/Schönberg Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen as well as the Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam.

Roberto Valentini (1671-1747) was born in England in Leicester in 1671, the fourth child of a fairly wealthy family. He remained in his homeland until his twenty-first birthday, when, to complete his musical studies, he emigrated to Italy, settling in Rome. He made his name as a multi-instrumentalist (he played flute, violin, cello and oboe) and started in the music publishing business, successfully publishing his own works. Valentini’s style was first influenced by the instrumental tradition of Corelli, but in his later works he embraced the then upcoming Galant Style, with a strong emphasis on melody, charm and brilliance. This new recording contains the 12 sonatas for flute (that is the recorder) and basso continuo Op.5, as well as “La Villeggiatura’, a set of 6 sonatas for two flutes. Performed by the Cappella Musicale Enrico Stuart, with Carolina Pace and Romeo Ciuffa on recorder, accompanied by viola da gamba, theorbo, guitar, harpsichord or organ. The group already successfully recorded chamber music by Boismortier for Brilliant Classics.

Antonio Vivaldi composed twenty-seven concertos featuring solo cello.Although none of these concertos were published during his lifetime, Vivaldi clearly saw the potential in an instrument then in its infancy.The concertos are packed with Baroque innovations; virtuosic passages feature lively arpeggios, rapid semiquavers and much rhythmic diversity.First released as part of Brilliant Classics’ Vivaldi Edition, this 4CD set features renowned concertmaster Federico Guglielmo and his specialist early music ensemble L’Arte dell’Arco playing on period instruments.

Based on 33 years of scholarship and promotion by the Istituto Nazionale Tostiano and a lifetime of studies on the part of this volume lives up to its predecessors in bringing to wider attention the work of a born melodist, at home in the English and French tongues as well as his native Italian, and one who brought the genre of salon song to a peak of perfection. The greatest singers of each era from Caruso to Pavarotti and Bartoli have always reserved a corner of their repertoire for Tosti, but he has hardly ever been given the spotlight, perhaps nervous of the sheer popular appeal of songs such as ‘A vucchella' which opens album 2 of the present set. The chronological approach to his work taken by this project proves that he was certainly not confined within the limited universe of love requited, rejected, desired, misunderstood, suffered or unspoken. The songs in this fourth volume cover the years 1905 to his death in 1916 having become a British subject in 1906, knighted in 1908, and retired to Italy in 1912. Despite their relative youth, the singers chosen to record this project are all Tosti experts, having won various editions of Ortona’s international voice competition devoted to the interpretation of drawing-room songs and ballads. Other actors of lesser skill almost always seem to be portraying the same person. Much the same thing can happen with music, but not here, thanks to the idiomatic command and fresh, unselfconscious artistry of the singers in responding to the wide range of poets set by Tosti, including Gabriele d’Annunzio, Thomas Carlyle and Frederic Weatherly.

The name of Claudio Veggio (1510-1543) would hardly be known were it not for the survival of the Manoscritto di Castell’Arquato, one of the earliest and most important collections of Italian keyboard music from the first half of the 16th century. The manuscript’s many ricercari, mass movements, Magnificats, motets, chansons, dances and madrigal intabulations are the work of composers almost forgotten today, but Scandali’s performances on a historically fitting organ give Veggio’s music a new lease of life. The six ricercari show strong affinities with the works in the same genre by the better-known Cavazzoni; his only other surviving work is a four-part harmonisation of a song, La fugitiva. Dating from the following generation, the Bari-born Rocco Rodio (c.1535-after 1615) enjoys marginally fuller representation on album, but this is still the first complete collection of his surviving work for organ, which is preserved by a Libro di Ricercate published in Naples in 1575. This volume is a historical landmark in its own right, as the first known printed edition of instrumental music in open score. His vocal music was also published in Rome and Venice, but Rodio appears to have made his career in Naples, and these organ works share the extrovert quality and awareness of contemporary developments demonstrated by Neapolitan composers which would in due course come to make the city known as the ‘conservatoire of Europe’. Our third composer is the Modenese composer Sperindio Bertoldo, born like Rodio around 1530 but dying considerably earlier, in 1570. The Brilliant Classics catalogue of Italian organ music is unrivalled in its reach and depth; this is the label’s second recording of Bertoldo’s organ music after Manuel Tomadin’s recent album (95874).