With well-received albums of his piano trios, piano music and music for chamber orchestra, Brilliant Classics has expanded the horizons of many listeners to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948). Previously known principally for his operatic and dramatic works such as I Gioelli della Madonna, Wolf-Ferrari built up a body of instrumental music that was played across Europe during his lifetime. Association with Mussolini’s Fascist regime cast a shadow over his postwar reputation and only in recent years have listeners been able to rediscover the music of an inveterate Romantic. The First Violin Sonata was written while the 19-year-old Wolf-Ferrari was still studying with Joseph Rheinberger in Munich. However, its long-breathed melodies and grasp of large-scale form bely its composer’s relative inexperience. All the same, the Brahmsian contours of the First Sonata are succeeded in the Second by a more personal idiom, one that more successfully integrates Wolf-Ferrari’s lifelong allegiances to both German and Italian schools of composition. Dating from 1901, it sings with a stern, almost austere passion rather in the manner of the composer’s Belgian contemporary Cesar Franck; the second of the sonata’s two movements has an especially sacred character and ends in a mood of serenity. The Third Sonata is a very late work, dating from 1943, while Wolf-Ferrari was giving concert tours through Axis countries. In parallel with the evolution of the trio of sonatas by Brahms, this E major work has a neoclassical character maintained throughout the suppressed passion of its four compact movements: there is even an excursion into strict counterpoint in the first movement’s development section, and the finale returns to the work’s opening theme, now touched by both irony and tenderness.

The second volume of Giovanni Bellucci’s Beethoven cycle for Brilliant Classics takes the listener on a journey of six eventful years, from Op.22 of 1800 to the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata of 1806. During that time Beethoven established himself as Vienna’s pre-eminent pianist-composer. He came to regard Op.22 as the best of his ‘early’ sonatas but a sea-change in the deepening of his expression is already evident in the piano-writing of Op.26, with its funeral march ‘in memory of a hero’. There follow the remarkable formal innovations of the Op.27 pair – No.2 immortally inscribed on the popular imagination as the ‘Moonlight’ – and then the smooth, undulating rhythms of the ‘Pastorale’ Op.28. The trio of Op.31 sonatas present a study in contrasts, from the graceful profile of No.1 in G major to the sound and fury of the ‘Tempest’ No.2 and then the hectic momentum of No.3, presaging the concision of works at the end of his ‘middle’ period such as the ‘Serioso’ Quartet and the Eighth Symphony. The proportions of the two-movement Op.54 are even more tautly circumscribed, before the reach of Beethoven’s expressive range for his instrument expands to hitherto undreamt heights in the ‘Waldstein’ Op.53 and the ‘Appassionata’ Op.57. Giovanni Bellucci is among the most strikingly individual of modern pianists. Described by Italian critic Piero Rattalino as ‘a force of nature, vast and palpitating’, he cultivates an old-fashioned richness of piano timbre while still attending to the letter as well as the spirit of Beethoven’s scores. According to Le Monde, ‘he takes us back to the Golden Age of the Piano’. His recordings have been showered with prizes such as Diapason d’Or, Choc, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, CD Maestro etc.

The first complete recording of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book on 15 CDs! This remarkable collection of works for the virginal, or small harpsichord, is found in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

It is the largest collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean keyboard music, all handwritten and totalling nearly 300 compositions, all of which predate the first keyboard music published in England by about 50 years.

The identity of the copyist of these works is uncertain, although a fascinating riddle. The manuscript is a role call of the leading composers of the era – John Bull, Giles Farnaby, William Byrd, Peter Philips, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tomkins and a number of unknown composers all feature. Research seems to point to one Francis Tregian from Cornwall, who may have copied the music whilst in Fleet prison from 1608 until his death in 1619. Tregian’s remarkable work – which extends to four volumes and 2000 pieces – ensured the survival of music by many of the most important composers of this era.

Pieter-Jan Belder, one of the world’s most respected and prolific harpsichordists, received rave reviews for his previous issues in this series: “..a captivating portrait..full of rhythmic drive..he displays a keen sense of rhythm...broad and brilliant gestures...one of the most important recording projects of this decade..”(Musicweb-International).

Belder’s discography includes works by Scarlatti (complete sonatas!), Soler, Rameau, Corelli, Bach, Purcell and many others. Currently he is completing the complete harpsichord works by J.S. Bach.

Gaspare Torelli (1572–c.1613) was born to a family of officials and intellectuals, and as a young man he embarked on a religious career in his home town of Sansepolcro, becoming a monsignor in 1602. He was a music teacher, composer and poet and, with a thorough knowledge of Latin, he also penned a treatise on Italian grammar. The Amorose faville are the last in the series of extant musical works published by Torelli. The collection of 22 canzonettas dates from 1608, when it was published by Amadino of Venice. A single complete copy survives in the Kassel University Library, upon which Carolina Calabresi has based her modern edition published in Città di Castello in 2018. The canzonetta genre emerged between the second half of the 16th and the first decades of the 17th centuries. These are short polyphonic compositions, the earliest of which were not very elaborate but which over the course of time began to take on some features typical of the madrigal, including a more refined compositional technique and the use of imitation and syllabic declamation. The subject matter also grew broader, with bucolic and pastoral themes in the style of Petrarch added to the original stock of amorous tales. Also among the canzonetta composers was Claudio Monteverdi, who published his Canzonette a tre voci in 1584, at the age of 17. Torelli’s Amorose faville have a number of features in common with Monteverdi’s canzonettas including madrigal-like text painting. Here is the beginning of a style aimed at stirring the listener’s emotions and conveying musically the poetic imagery, an expressive urgency that would later lead Monteverdi to break the strict rules of traditional harmony and champion the theories of the revolutionary seconda prattica.

This album features the complete works for flute (to date) by Franco-Ukranian composer Dimitri Tchesnokov (b.1982), with the exception of his flute trio Tableaux feìeìriques. This programme is supplemented by some of Tchesnokov’s piano solos in a comparable style. The pieces presented here offer a contrast to the composer’s religious/mystical music (3 Chants sacreìs, Requiem, Ave Verum) and his historic/realistic works (Symphonie archai¨que, Cha^teau de Grandval, Symphonie Ukrainienne). The 11 Haïkus are interspersed throughout the recital, maintaining a feeling of spontaneity and lightness, while the pieces alternating with the haikus create contrasting images and moods. The influence of the Far East is present in several of the compositions, among them Rhapsodie Japonaise, based on traditional modes like Hirajo¯shi and Insen; Quelque part aÌ Tsushima (Somewhere in Tsushima), evoking the sound of the koto; and La Fete du Dragon, conjuring the fireworks and cheerful colors of China with the pentatonic mode. From the composer’s Slavic roots comes Une Histoire vraiment bizarre (A truly bizarre story), a trip to a magical forest from old Russian fairy tales, where Little Red Riding Hood meets strange characters like the forest ghost, Leshy.

Musical anniversary celebrations have inevitably been curtailed in 2020, and overshadowed by Beethoven, but Giuseppe Tartini was renowned throughout Europe as the pre-eminent genius of the violin – not only as a performer but as a composer of works which demonstrated his extraordinary gifts, and as a teacher who welcomed students from across Europe to his home in the north-Italian city of Padova, where they learnt every sophistication in the art of violin playing; not only virtuoso trickery but the sustaining of a true legato like a great singer. Tartini’s concertos have laid down the gauntlet to great violinists down the ages, even if many of them have been forgotten and only recently revived. Now Giulio Plotino joins their number, selecting three of the best-known concertos to complement what is still Tartini’s best-known work, the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata whose title and fearsomely intricate figuration was apparently inspired – almost diabolically dictated – by a dream of the composer’s. The concertos chosen for this recording, from among the 125 or so in the Dounias catalogue, conform to the traditional quick-slow-quick construction. In contrast to the Vivaldian template, however, Tartini integrates the material of the opening tutti within the solo passages, and shuns passagework of sequences even in the outer movements, but most particularly in the solemn and tender slow movements, where Tartini the technician gives way to Tartini the singer and the maestro di capella, composing for himself and his ensemble to accompany the liturgy.

Now into its seventh volume, Pieter-Jan Belder’s series continues to uncover more works from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. In this volume he turns his attention to the works of father and son Giles and Richard Farnaby, William Byrd, and selected anonymous works. The book and its manuscripts provide us with an insight into Elizabethan and early Jacobean socio-cultural life. After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 by Henry VIII followed by Mary Tudor’s blood-soaked crackdown, it was clear that being a Protestant in Tudor England was risky business. Once Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, she established a moderate form of Protestantism and halted the campaign of religious persecution. But the damage was already done, and many composers decided to steer clear of religion altogether and focus their efforts on secular music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is a vital record of such works. Compiled in the late 1700s, the book today resides in a dedicated museum in Cambridge. The first section of this release surveys Giles Farnaby’s musical output. Bony Sweet Robin is a setting of a popular Renaissance tune and Sir Walter Raleigh once in a letter to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester wrote that Dudley was in the Queen’s favor, describing him as ‘her Sweet Robin’. This graceful arrangement is Continental in its nature and similar to the Italian madrigal, with a conjunct and cantabile melody line and through-composed structure. As for Richard Farnaby, the four pieces recorded here are all that survives of his output. Nobodyes jig is his best-known work; a playful dance which requires a skilled performer to successfully execute the fast-paced polyphonic music. The final part features works by Byrd as well as anonymous works including almans, pavans, and keyboard arrangements of lute pieces and popular ballads.

Most prolific yet perennially underappreciated of composers, Telemann became Capellmeister of the court chapel in Eisenach, birthplace of J.S. Bach, in 1709. Bach had by then taken up a post in Weimar, but the two men became friends, and Telemann dedicated to him a Concerto in D major (TWV 51:D6), of which the slow movement opens with a festive BACH motif, in a transposed version. This is one of three first recordings on the album. The other concertos and sonatas in this recording were also composed during Telemann’s time in Eisenach. A pair of quartets, in D minor (TWV 43:d2) and G major (TWV 43:G12), follow the same principle in the treatment of the parts, whereby in the slow opening movements the instruments take turns – in TWV 43:d2 the viola, in TWV 43:G12 the flute – and the other parts accompany. The Sonatas IV in C major (TWV 43:C1) and F major (TWV 43:F1) were originally composed for two violins, viola and basso continuo, later adapted by a Parisian publisher to include an upper part for a wind instrument. Further value to any Baroque-music enthusiast is added by the inclusion of two sonatas and a concertino written by Johann Melchior Molter, who is now known almost exclusively through the compositions he wrote for his own instrument, the trumpet. By contrast, these works present a less extrovert side to the composer, who belonged to the generation after Telemann (though in fact died two years before him, in 1765) and worked in Eisenach after the elder composer’s departure. The two quartets date from a later period of Molter’s career, when he was based in Karlsruhe: fully mature, richly worked chamber sonatas in a highly ornamented Italian idiom. The cheerful, vivacious Concertino is essentially a duet for violin and harpsichord. With this album, the Leipzig-based Camerata Bachiensis make their debut on Brilliant Classics. Founded in 2012, they are now ensemble in residence at the city’s Bach Museum, and they make frequent appearances at the major early-music festivals in central Europe.

In 1716 Telemann published a new collection of chamber music, designed for violin or flute or oboe with basso continuo accompaniment. He aimed his dedication not towards a noble patron, but at several important musicians of the time, demonstrating a new, proud self-image of the artists among themselves. The composer himself authorized performance of them on the keyboard alone, and so Andrea Coen has taken Telemann at his word and made his own lively arrangements. Each partita consists of a prelude and six brief dances or arias. Despite such seemingly formal uniformity, the cycle of Kleine Kammermusik contains a wealth of ideas, and it is not without reason that Telemann later recycled much of its melodic material: thus we may find here his musical world in miniature. In a short space we find French rondos and chaconnes, reminiscent of the affettuoso style of the Italian trio sonata, chromatic songs of lamentation and dances such as the Minuet, the Jig, the Gavotte and the Passepied. Andrea Coen is an organist, harpsichordist, and fortepianist, who has studied with such distinguished artists as Ton Koopman and Alan Curtis, and has collaborated with such figures as Christopher Hogwood and Monica Huggett. His recordings of Baroque and early-Classical keyboard repertoire for Brilliant Classics have attracted glowing reviews. Coen made the first complete recording of Telemann’s Fantasias (94228). According to MusicWeb International: ‘Coen, an experienced, insightful instrumentalist with a profound knowledge of historical performance practice and a sackful of important recordings under his belt, could make Telemann sound special even on a typewriter.’

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REVIEW:

In Coen’s capable hands (both as an arranger and a performer), these partitas sound convincing as solo harpsichord works. Coen’s arrangements are clear and transparent. The melodic line is prominent, but the bass line and harmonies are there, too — providing just the right amount of support.

Coen plays an exceptional instrument. The action is virtually silent. This album can be appreciated on many different levels: Coen’s interpretations, Telemann’s choice of keys; Teleman’s sequencing of the partitas. And of course, the quality of the music itself. Highly recommended.

– WTJU-FM [Charlottesville, VA] (Ralph Graves)

Having worked with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Deutsche Oper and MusicAeterna, Sissi Makropoulou has established a reputation among the most talented harpists of her generation, as well as a composer working under the name Sissi Radu. On this, her debut solo album, she brings both talents together. As she explains in her engaging booklet notes, she has been familiar with The Seasons since childhood. They count among the composer’s most intimate works, as well as his most popular. ‘I hear tenderness, benevolence and loneliness – the core of romantic love – in each and every note.’ It is the harp that lends a unique color to some of Tchaikovsky’s most memorable passages such as the cadenzas in Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. In some cases – January, for example - Sissi Makropoulou has transposed the pieces to sit more easily on the harp and to exploit its sumptuous palette of enharmonics. And while the Shrovetide Fair of February presents considerable challenges to the harpist in terms of quicksilver articulation and lightning-fast chord changes, the results speak for themselves in terms of a happy marriage between music and instrument. March, for example, could have been written with the harp in mind. As an encore, Sissi Makropoulou plays her own arrangement of the second movement from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. The gentle mood of this Andantino ‘in the style of a song’ transfers itself sympathetically to the harp in her hands, and is informed by her experience of playing the composer’s music under one of its most inspirational modern conductors, Teodor Currentzis.

Having made her operatic debut at the age of 16, singing Barbarina with the Dutch National Opera, Channa Malkin has since made solo appearances with Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as well as early-music luminaries such as Andrew Parrott and Joshua Rifkin. For her first recording, she has chosen to explore her Jewish heritage with songs from her childhood: ‘Underneath the seemingly simple melodies telling life’s usual stories,’ she writes in the album’s introductory notes, ‘I felt the longing of generation upon generation for a homeland left long ago but never forgotten.’ Channa Malkin is joined here by her regular duet partner, the guitarist Izhar Elias, who is well known to collectors of Brilliant Classics recordings for his imaginative choice of repertoire and vivid performances. Gramophone lavished praise on his ‘sympathetic accompaniment’ to Erik Bosgraaf in their recording of the lute book by Jakob van Eyck (BC93391): ‘As a reference work this set should be considered indispensable; as one to be dipped in for pleasure, highly desirable.’ The selection of Sephardic songs they have made ranges between subjects of love, war, birth and death: epic tales sung by medieval Spanish bards, Jewish liturgical melodies and texts, and Arabic styles of melodic ornamentation. Malkin and Elias have made their own arrangements, letting the music guide them intuitively and drawing inspiration from their backgrounds in early music, Jewish cantorial singing and Spanish folk song interpretation, as well as their personal family histories. Their selection also includes several Sephardic songs arranged by contemporary composers, in order to explore the ways in which this music can be performed as classical art song. Israeli composer, guitarist and Sephardic song expert Daniel Akiva, Spanish composer and conductor Lorenzo Palomo and Joaquín Rodrigo each offer a unique take on the Sephardic song idiom. So does the Italian-American composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: his collection of The Divan of Moses-Ibn-Ezra sets the poetry of an 11th-century rabbi from Grenada.

Alessandro Stradella’s (1639-1682) latterday fame has tended to focus on his sudden death in February 1782 at the age of 41 in mysterious circumstances – Flotow even wrote an opera on the subject – to the expense of his music, which would otherwise guarantee him a place in posterity’s estimation among the most individual voices of the Italian Baroque. Stradella’s operas and oratorios have attracted recordings and performances from early-music luminaries such as Alan Curtis and Fabio Biondi; his relatively slender surviving output of instrumental music remains comparatively little-known and under-recorded. The first mention of Stradella’s instrumental music occurs in a letter from 1676, while the composer was working in the service of Pope Clement X. Shady dealings soon compelled Stradella to leave quickly for Venice where, having just married the mistress of a nobleman belonging to one of the city’s wealthiest and most influential families, he suffered a near-fatal assault in October 1677. We still do not know precisely how and when these Sinfonias were composed, though Stradella occasionally mentions them in his correspondence and borrowed passages from them in his operas and oratorios. They are structured in several brief sections, several with a grave and stately introduction, a dashing contrapuntal movement, a brief aria-like section and a dazzling finale, like a sonata in microcosm, with the dialogue weaving in and out of the solo violin and its accompaniment. However, Stradella probably did not write the Sinfonias as a discrete set, given their internal variety. The sixth and eleventh of the set are at least twice as long as many of the others, and Stradella uses this space to spin an expressive mood of great stillness in his arching introductions.

Two previous albums of pan-flute arrangements on Brilliant Classics have served to showcase the technical brilliance and musical sensitivity of the Swiss pan-pipe virtuoso Hanspeter Oggier, and accordingly been met with critical acclaim. In partnership with the Swiss organist Sarah Brunner he now presents an original combination of folk tunes from the home of the pan-pipe with slow arias and quick dances by masters of the Baroque. Panpipes are difficult to tame, but have an incredibly rich palette of timbres. Hanspeter Oggier plays on a pair of soprano and tenor panpipes built by his father Christoph. Having been fascinated by traditional Romanian music since childhood, Oggier grew up with the records of the Romanian panflutist Gheorghe Zamfir, and he studied with the Romanian panflutist Simion Stanciu, alias Syrinx, for ten years in Geneva. Thus he is familiar with the uniquely irregular rhythms of Romanian folk music. The album opens with Cântec vechi bucovinean, a melancholy-laden song from Bukovina. The round-dance Hora Niculinei makes a lively contrast before the Doina din Transilvania, a rhapsodic love song. Such contrasting expressions also infuse the juxtapositions of Handel’s sublime lament Lascia Ch’io Pianga from Semele with one of Vivaldi’s most typically brilliant concertos originally written for flautino and with a merry dance by Purcell. Not all the Romanian pieces have folk origins, however: Lume, lume (in English: Earth, Earth) was written by the Romanian singer Maria Tanase, known as the ‘Piaf of the East’ who died in 1963. The song is full of sorrow for the passing of life and its drifting qualities are ideally suited to the mysterious, airy sounds of the pan-pipes.

Eliodoro Sollima (1926-2000) was a Sicilian musician raised in the town of Marsala, where the concert hall is dedicated to his memory. From 1954 to 1991 he taught composition at the conservatoire in Palermo, where he was also the institution’s director for 16 years. This is the only album dedicated to his music: new recordings made by a young contemporary music ensemble, who are joined by the composer’s son, Giovanni Sollima, a cellist and composer in his own right who has made several previous albums for Brilliant Classics. Sollima studied piano with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and he wrote for his instrument with a thorough grasp of its range as a Romantic instrument – Italian TV broadcasts preserve some unfussily accomplished performances of Liszt – which courses through his best-known piece, the Toccata of 1951. However, his idiom embraced a Bartokian toughness of rhythm, most vividly demonstrated here by the three movements for piano trio (for which Sollima received compliments from Isaac Stern). In 1968 he wrote a powerful concerto for string orchestra in memory of Bobby Kennedy, and the tortured harmonies of this piece carry over into both the contemporaneous piano trio and the later ‘Evoluziona No.5’ for violin and piano. However, the album surveys the full range of Sollima’s oeuvre, from the brief and touching Aria he composed for a chamber quintet as a 19-year-old, to a compact Cello Sonata written at the age of 22 in 1948. From almost half a century later dates the ‘Legend of St Damiano’, a single-movement piano quartet that effectively synthesizes the evolution of the composer’s music. Luciano Tarantino recorded Giovanni Sollima’s own music on a ‘Cello Solo Journey’ released in 2019 by Brilliant Classics (95964). His own playing can also be enjoyed on a 2014 album of Offenbach’s cello duets (94475).

Who was Lelio Colista (1629-1680)? Known by his early 20s as ‘the Orpheus of Rome’, he began his musical education as a choirboy before soon becoming a performer at the papal Barberini court. He then made his name as a lutenist and a theorbo virtuoso, but his talents evidently extended beyond music. He became an equerry to the Pope at the age of 26 and Keeper of the Sistine Chapel paintings from 1660 until his death around two decades later. He toured Europe widely, earning the admiration of King Louis XIV, before returning to Rome and teaching the art of lute-playing to notable composers of the next generation such as Gaspar Sanz. Very little of Colista’s own music has been widely heard; a neglect which may be attributed to the composer’s reluctance to have it published during his lifetime. The manuscript for these nine three-part sinfonias is kept by the National Library in Turin. They were performed on Christmas Eve 1664 at the Roman church of Santa Maria del Popolo and perhaps not since then, until this enterprising Polish-Italian group of period-instrument musicians has revived them for this recording. The sinfonias all follow a satisfying template, mostly opening with a grave slow movement, and reserving the practice of strict counterpoint for the penultimate movement before the upbeat finale. Only one of the nine is cast in a minor-key, but the recording is completed by another manuscript piece, the Ballo in G minor, which plays with Baroque expressions of mourning.