Ferdinand Rebay (1880–1953) was active at one of the most fascinating periods of European music and taught by one of the most respected musicians of the time – Robert Fuchs, at the Vienna Conservatoire. Fuchs was both a composer and a pedagogue, and among his esteemed pupils were Mahler, Wolf, Sibelius, Zemlinsky and Schreker. Fuchs considered Rebay to be one of his best pupils, although the young composer found it impossible to flourish within the environment of the Second Viennese School and continued to work within the late Romantic idiom. Rebay turned to the guitar due to the influence of his friend Jacobus Ortner, Professor of Guitar at the conservatoire. Aware that the neglect of guitar repertoire for over half a century had led to a decline in the quality of writing for the instrument, Rebay set out to write complex, serious music that continued in the tradition of Giuliani and Sor.

This new recording contains the complete music for viola and guitar: The Sonata in D minor, Kleine moderne Tanz-Suite, Three Russian Folk Songs and the Lyrische Suite, beautifully played by the Duo Impérial: Joël Impérial (viola) and Gilbert Impérial (guitar).

This album is a sequel to ‘Café 1930’, which also featured Piercarlo Sacco and Andrea Dieci in violin/guitar arrangements of Piazzolla. Released in 2014, ‘Café 1930’ was praised for the virtuosity of Sacco and sensitive partnership of Dieci: ‘The record is a great gift for any party and every occasion, even for oneself when looking for something out of the ordinary, but full of charm and interest.’ (www.saltinaria.it) ‘In a new exciting mix of the traditional dance with jazz and classical music influences… All the pieces are played with energy, drive and an innate feeling for the characteristic Tango spirit by Piercarlo Sacco and guitarist Andrea Dieci.’ (www.neuguitars.com) Their sequel opens with the title track, one of Piazzolla’s best-known tangos, named after the street where he lived during his years in New York. Imágines 676 is an explicit reference to a club in Buenos Aires located in Calle Tucuman 676, where he used to play with his quintet, alternating with musicians such as João Gilberto and Stan Getz. For Fièvre and Détresse, Sacco has matched the melody with the smokier, rough-breathing sound of the viola. Several out-of-the-way Piazzolla tangos are included here, such as Psicosis, Suavidad, Dernier lamento, Tango choc and Made in USA, again in the free and passionate arrangements that made their first album a critical success.

Poulenc once declared that ‘the musical transposition of a poem must be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.’ By the age of four he was already able to recite Mallarme’s Apparition by heart, and while still very young he made his first efforts at setting verses to music. He loved listening to poets read their own work, and he was a voracious reader, who saw his purpose as a composer to embellish to enrich but never to obscure the words or their meaning. Poulenc loved singers and good singing as much as poetry. All these cycles were written with particular artists in mind; several of them for his life partner, the baritone Pierre Bernac, but he also worked very closely with Clare Croiza and Denise Duval, among others. Thus his vocal lines reflect their individual personalities while being couched in his own, very singable, jazz-inflected idiom. Valentina Coladonato has chosen a path less travelled through Poulenc’s song oeuvre, avoiding the Chansons villageoises and Air chantes. Yet in La Fraîcheur et le feu, setting Poulenc’s contemporary Paul Eluard, we find an intensity and urgency of expression to rival his masterpiece, the Dialogues of the Carmelites. Motifs from the opera recur in another Eluard cycle, Le travail du peintre, which addresses seven modern painters in turn from Picasso to Villon. A bittersweet air lingers over the Dernier poeme by Desnos, Aragon’s C and the monologue La dame de Monte Carlo; but his extrovert, amusing music-hall side comes to the fore in Les chemins de l’amour, based on Jean Anouilh’s Leocadia and dedicated to Yvonne Printemps, who was a singer of light music. Even within the same cycle there are contrasting moments that eloquently illustrate Poulenc’s own artistic credo: ‘My music is my portrait’. A specialist in early and new music, the soprano Valentina Coladonato has worked with conductors including Riccardo Muti and Claudio Abbado. She and Claudio Proietti have also recorded the Shakespeare Sonnets of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for Brilliant Classics (BC95548).

Words drew the best out of Poulenc. His songs, choral pieces and operas mold themselves to his carefully chosen texts with affecting simplicity and sensitivity to language and to the personalities of his singers. Among the most dedicated of his interpreters was the soprano Denise Duval, for whom Poulenc conceived La voix humaine in 1958 to a monodrama written by Jean Cocteau 30 years earlier and revised by the playwright for the lyric stage. Alone in her salon, a woman – unnamed – speaks to her former lover for the last time. She calls him, the line breaks, he replies, but we hear only her side of the story: anguished, pleading, honest, self-deceiving, unbearably touching. Daniela Mazzucato made her La Scala debut in 1973, singing Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro under the baton of Claudio Abbado. Since then she has appeared at the world’s great opera houses singing major soubrette and lyric-soprano roles such as Musetta opposite Mirella Freni; Oscar in Un ballo in maschera conducted again by Abbado and directed by Zeffirelli; and latterly musical theatre and character roles such as Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw and Marcellina in Figaro. To Poulenc’s lonely heroine she is well placed to bring both pathos and beauty. No less touching in its way is the entertainment he devised for a group of bored children in 1940 during a summer holiday. They asked him to ‘play’ the much-loved story of Babar the Elephant, and Poulenc sat down at the piano and improvised an accompaniment to the story, soon working it up into a half-hour piece for reciter and piano. The story is told here by the experienced tenor Max René Cosotti, who worked with Glyndebourne Opera during the 1970s (including Ferrando in Cosi fan tutte) and has filled countless roles in Italian opera and operetta at distinguished opera houses throughout Italy.

All Rossini’s qualities as a musical giant are to be found in concentrated form in the famous overtures. The sheer vitality of the music is astounding, and the wealth of thematic material ensures that each is remarkable in its own different way. The Rossini anniversary of 2018 presented an opportunity to shed new light on these familiar works, but in a form that the composer himself would have recognised. This long-established mandolin quintet took a mix of old and newly commissioned arrangements and toured them across Italy to great success before making the present recording. The quintet takes its name from the mandolin virtuoso Giuseppe Anedda (1912-97) who popularised the instrument throughout his native Italy with his own ensemble and established for it a place in classical concert halls and modern works beyond the ‘early music revival’ of the 50s and 60s. He took part in pioneering recordings of Vivaldi and early performances of Stravinsky’s Agon. This all-Italian quintet (comprising a pair of mandolins, a mandola, guitar and double bass) was founded in Anedda’s memory in 2003 to carry on his work. Its members are all soloists and teachers in their own right. They commissioned Michele Di Filippo to arrange the first four overtures on this album: L’Italiana in Algeri (1813), Il Viaggio a Reims (1825), La Cenerentola (1817) and La Scala di Seta (1812). The other four overtures are from Il Signor Bruschino (1813), Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816), Tancredi (1813) and La Gazza Ladra (1817), for which the quintet performs from transcriptions made and published in the first half of the 20th century by Mario Macchioci and Enrico Marucelli. All the arrangements preserve the heady excitement of the famous ‘Rossini crescendo’ as well as the chamber-like dialogue between wind and strings in the original scores.

REVIEW:

Let me preface this review by saying I am a sucker for oddball arrangements of familiar classics. A group of eight Rossini overtures transcribed for mandolin quintet would certainly qualify as such. But this release transcends my own idiosyncrasies, for these arrangements work very well indeed, preserving the charm and liveliness of these frothy works and adding an extra dimension to them.

The sound quality of the recording is quite vivid and the brightness of the mandolins comes across quite well without being piercing. The placement of the musicians is quite precise in the wide soundstage. The ends of each piece do have a bit too much echo for my tastes. There’s no dynamic compression here, permitting the carefully mounted tension to grip the listener and not let go until the conclusion of each piece. There’s sufficient variety in the pieces that I didn’t feel any need to take a break between the different overtures.

In all, I found this disc tremendous fun and a creditable variation on these well-known works.

– MusicWeb International

Born in 1975, Silvia Colasanti has an extensive catalogue of works to her credit in all the major classical genres, but her style is principally characterized by its attention to drama, whether experienced on or off the lyric stage. In 2019 the premiere of her Proserpine opera was staged to open the prestigious Spoleto Festival. ‘The score is like elegant lace,’ reported Classical Music Daily, ‘with very skillful orchestration and well-balanced vocal writing. It is not an experimental score but a good piece of music where the main themes are intertwined and can be easily played by the orchestra as well as recognized by the listeners.’ These qualities may also be appreciated in Colasanti’s work for string quartet. The expressive markings for Due destini, starting Agitato and Immobile, reveal the work’s destination of travel towards two quite different places, creating an expressive tension which the string quartet is uniquely well placed to sustain. Aria does not imitate vocal writing but rather draws on the Italian meaning of the word, ‘airs’, with music that breathes and shudders and vanishes on the wind. Di tumulti e onde, dedicated to the Quartetto di Cremona, is subtitled Studio per Faust, and its predominance of darkness over light and tumult over calm is a characteristic feature of Colasanti’s language. Finally there is a trio of pieces that develops the themes of a piece she wrote for string quartet and percussion to accompany a text written by Patrizia Cavalli. The theme is that of a woman waking and dreaming, not unlike the lonely figure in Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and now transformed by Tre Notti into music of sudden fears and restless hopes.

Giuseppe Rosetta (1901-1985) studied in Rome under Respighi but soon returned to his Piedmontese birthplace of Vercelli. There he remained, leading and enriching the local musical culture as an organist, choir conductor and music teacher. He spurned fame and dedicated himself to his vocation and to God. His beautifully crafted music is accordingly modest in expressive ambition: elegant, reflective, at times melancholic, generally characterized by introspective, meditative qualities – nothing brilliant or demonstrative. Very little of it has been recorded, making this new album a valuable contribution to a wider appreciation of postwar Italian music. Rosetta taught composition to Angelo Gilardino, who eventually encouraged him to write guitar music, resulting in the Preludi per GIlardino of 1970. These are beautifully and idiomatically written for the instrument after close consultation with the guitarist. Also from 1970, the Canti della Pianura (Songs of the Plain) is a personal evocation of the countryside of the Po Valley where Rosetta lived and worked. The four movements correspond to times of day: the dawn (Mattutino), the afternoon (Meridiana), the evening (Vespertina) and the night (Serenata). The Fantasia dates from 1979, but Rosetta’s conservative idiom recalls the language of his teacher Respighi and contemporaries such as Casella and Pizzetti: he wrote out of time, vividly evoking a lost era of Romanticism on an instrument that sings naturally of nostalgia and regret. As a student of Gilardino, Gian Luca Barbero has become intimately familiar with the private musical world of Giuseppe Rosetta, and is himself a guitar teacher of renown in Italy. The present release marks his debut on Brilliant Classics within the label’s ever-growing library of guitar music.

This precious collection of piano-four-hands works from the foremost musical minds of Portugal in the 20th and 21st centuries can serve as a welcome introduction to the classical music of Portugal for those who may not know it. But there is a greater significance and added value to this thoughtful recital programme, in that it traces back the genealogy of modern Portuguese classical composition – and pianism! – to roots firmly planted in German Romantic soil. It links the living composers to their teacher and inspiration, the great composer–ethnographer Fernando Lopes-Graça who undertook research into Portuguese folk music on a par with what Vaughan Williams and Bartók & Kodály did in their own nations, and then links Lopes-Graça back to his piano professor, the great virtuoso and music educator José Viana da Mota, himself a pupil and disciple of Liszt. The album opens fittingly with a set of Portuguese Folk Melody treatments by Lopes-Graça, the third in his three-volume set being dedicated exclusively to piano four hands. Immediately, the national colour welcomes listeners to the distinct ethnicity of Europe’s far southwestern corner, a historic and pre-historic crossroads for Celtic, Roman, Gothic and Moorish cultures. This is followed by the Sonatina of his student, Sérgio Azevedo, bristling with the Neoclassicism he inherited from Lopes-Grac¸a. Then to the wellspring, Viana da Mota’s Opus 7 singing with a Mendelssohnian lyricism, yet nonetheless tinged with the innate longing of the Portuguese soul. The expressionistic, effusive atonality of Lapa’s Storyboard returns the listener to the modern era, and to finish, Victorino d’Almeida’s heartfelt Ballad (for a child about to be born) embraces melody and tonality once again, from a post-modern vantagepoint.

REVIEW:

The Portuguese duo of Duarte and Madeira play all of the works here with nationalist fervor. This is an opportunity for them to use all their abilities to bring Portuguese music into the spotlight. The largest work on the program is the final Balada (for a child to be born) by Antonio Victorino D’Almeida (b.1940). It is a big piece, clearly inspired by the romantic Ballades of Chopin and Liszt, with effective 20th Century touches. It is quite effective. In all, this is a most enjoyable recording.

– American Record Guide

Pietro Yon (1886-1943) played in what is widely regarded as one of the finest-ever performances of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, conducted at Carnegie Hall in 1935 by Arturo Toscanini. Yon was sharing the stage with the likes of Elizabeth Rethberg and Ezio Pinza; he had acquired a comparable celebrity within the organ world in his lifetime, having emigrated from Italy to the US at the age of 21, and become Organist of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the foremost seat of Catholicism in the US. A New York Times profile portrayed him as an adopted New Yorker who moved in high-society circles and enjoyed ragtime and vaudeville, and he welcomed the likes of Caruso and Toscanini to his home as friends. When he died in 1943, the world-famous conductor numbered among the 1300 mourners at St Patrick’s. Yon’s own music has a post-Romantic, mid-Atlantic flavour reflecting his background without belonging to a single ‘school’. Christmas in Settimo Vittone or Rapsodia Italiana draw on his Piedmontese heritage. The trio of large-scale organ sonatas occupying the third album emerge from the virtuoso tradition of 19th-century keyboard writing exemplified by Liszt and translated to the organ by French contemporaries such as Guilmant and Vierne. Album 1 is dedicated to a collection of 12 Divertimenti including not only the Italian-themed character pieces mentioned above but also an expansive ‘American Rhapsody’ – like a transatlantic version of Howells, perhaps, sharing its chromatic harmony with the music of Leo Sowerby – and shorter study-like pieces which exploit the full range of colours available on the organ of St Patrick’s which he had extensively renovated and updated to reflect changing tastes, rather as Pierre Cochereau did at Notre-Dame in Paris.

Like Virgil Fox before him, Jean-Baptiste Robin has a mission to popularize the organ by performing music on it that might already be familiar in other versions. The French virtuoso already has an estimable discography of his own and other composers’ music, including a well-received debut on Brilliant Classics, ‘Symphonic Organ’ (94726), which features the showpiece E.M. Skinner instrument now located in the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal in Cincinnati, Ohio. For his latest album, Robin has pitched up in Los Angeles to play the kaleidoscopic Rosales organ installed in 2004 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall organ. This has already featured on recordings of the Saint-Saëns Third Symphony, and its reeds and mixtures are eminently suited to the colors of the French Romantic repertoire. And in a hall sponsored by Disney, why not tell magical stories? Robin has devised a fairy-tale for organ, opening with an improvisation on the March from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Clouds gather over the grim passacaglia opening Duruflé’s three-movement Suite Op. 5 (dedicated to Dukas, he of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) but they clear in the lilting Sicilienne, and the sun shines brilliantly over the concluding Toccata, a true organ showpiece. There follows the dreamy Clair de lune, whose gently sustained mood is admirably suited to sensitive organ registration, and the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude of Chopin. Preceding his own powerful reflection, The Hands of Time, Robin plays his own transcription of the Mother Goose Suite by Ravel. Inspired by the composer’s orchestration of the ballet, he accentuates the solo reeds (clarinet, cor anglais, cromorne, oboe), as well as the acutely refined swell box.

Though his star has fallen since his death in 1859, Louis Spohr was once commonly ranked alongside the greatest of his contemporaries. Like Beethoven he gained fame in Vienna and wrote prolifically in all the classical genres, but he travelled more widely, and his operas and oratorios won particular acclaim in France and England respectively. Spohr’s curse and gift was fluency: whether written in serious or popular vein, his music is unfailingly mellifluous and beautifully written, falling easily on the ear while offering a satisfying challenge to its performers. As a violinist Spohr was considered second only to his friend Paganini. His brilliant virtuoso style and great skill in phrasing effectively founded a German school of violin playing. He understood equally well how to write for soprano and for clarinet, and the centrepiece of this collection is his set of Sechs Deutsche Lieder Op.103 (1837), which follow the example of Schubert’s late and sublime song Der Hirt an dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) in weaving a clarinet obbligato around the vocal line. Spohr himself had produced several previous sextets of German-language songs but in this cycle he was inspired to new expressive heights by his long friendship with the clarinetist Johann Simon Hermstedt. This fruitful partnership had also resulted in two clarinet concertos and the lighter fantasies included here: the Potpourri Op.80 based on themes by his German contemporary Peter von Winter and the less-familiar Op.21 Fantasia on themes from his own unstaged opera Alruna. Both of them are gloriously melodic as well as affording ample opportunities for brilliance. More Mozartian in its lyricism is the Andante variation movement from his Op.34 Nottorno, originally scored for wind ensemble and arranged here for clarinet and piano.

George Frederick Pinto (1786-1806) was a child prodigy on violin and piano, playing his first violin concerto at the age of 11. His untimely death at the age of 21 prompted his teacher and mentor, the famous impresario Salomon, to say: ‘If he had lived…England would have had the honour to produce a second Mozart’. Pinto’s surviving music is focused on the piano, but he also wrote three sonatas with violin parts which depart from the convention of their time in being equally weighted with the piano part; perhaps because he could lay claim, like Mozart, to virtuoso abilities on both instruments. They were published in the year of his death, 1806, and they demanded, like Mozart, skilled practitioners above the level of most amateur music-making. In executing the violin part for this recording, Robert Bachara has decided to use extensive ornamentation, indeed in certain places to through-compose and supplement his part, which without doubt highlights the equal stature of the violin part. Pinto’s bold harmonic and melodic language, his experiments in form and keyboard writing are all well ahead of his time and invite comparison with early-Romantic pioneers such as Schubert and Beethoven. They appear to belong to mainstream German chamber music: on the one hand, looking back to Haydn and Mozart; and on the other, heralding Brahms, or even Reger (in the chromatic harmonization of the First Sonata’s finale). For his recording of Pinto Marek Toporowski has chosen a modern copy of a Viennese fortepiano by Walter which does full justice to the vivid colours of Pinto’s music. He is a harpsichordist, organist, pianist and conductor, one of Poland’s foremost performers in the historically informed performance movement.

Esiaias Reusner (1636-1679) is properly known as Reusner the younger. Born in Silesia in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War which was then ravaging Europe, he was taught by his father, who was a musician in the local ducal court. By the age of 12 young Esiaias had entered the service of the Swedish general Count Wittenberg as a page. Having moved around Europe in the employ of several aristocrats, he settled back in his home region by the age of 20 as lutenist to Georg III, Duke of Silesia. He retained this position for another 20 years before moving to Leipzig and then Berlin, where he died in 1679. His cosmopolitan life is reflected in the international character of his surviving compositions: he was the first German composer to write for the French 11-course lute, and in the style brisé of elegant, broken chords associated with the masterpieces of Couperin. There are two collections, of which William Waters presents the first, Delitiae Testudinis, oder Erfreuliche Lauten-Lust, published in 1667 and then in two revised editions. There are 10 suites here, and they reflect the pleasure and relief he sought from the violence and conflict around him: ‘ever since my youth the soft and sweet sonority of noble music that quickens the spirit has been my only amusement and pleasure, and thereto I have sacrificed the greater part of my time with the lute.’ A course of study with the pioneering lutenist Hopkinson Smith changed the course of William Waters’ career. Having trained as a guitarist, he redirected his energies towards the vibrant culture of early music and became a founding member of two significant Catalan early-music ensembles, The Byrd Consort of Viols and the Liaison Ensemble. He is also a member of the Paris-based Lachrimae Consort. He now passes on to students his decades of experience and learning in the field of early plucked instruments as a professor at the conservatoire of Vila-Seca, Tarragona.

Clearly modeled on Brahms’ Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120, Max Reger’s clarinet sonatas Op. 49 contain beautiful melodic lines, intertwining dialogue between the two performers, and extended chromatic harmony. This album, being released at the centennial of Reger’s death, contains his Sonatas Op. 49, as well as his Clarinet Sonata in B-Flat, Op. 107, Albumblatt in E-Flat, and Tarantella in G Minor. Italian clarinetist Claudio Conti performs these works, along with pianist Roberta Bambace. Liner notes are provided in Italian and English.

With just a single modern recording in the catalogue, Franck’s hour-long fusion of oratorio form with symphonic poem counts as a notable rarity in his output, not so sprawling as the evening-long oratorio on the Beatitudes but still a dramatic canvas full of incident and contemplation well worth exploring by anyone familiar with the Symphony or the secular tone-poems such as Psyché and Le chausseur maudit. In fact Franck was in the middle of work on Les Beatitudes in 1871 when he read the ‘National Vow’ newly written by Edouard Blau, which attributed France’s recent misfortunes to divine punishment for the nation’s collective sins. The story’s narrative of Paganism enlightened by Christianity, which is then corrupted by unbelief and finally redeemed by prayer, struck a chord with Franck: ‘I will set this well because I believe in it.’ Rédemption was duly composed with passion and at speed, receiving its premiere on Maundy Thursday 1873. The form is unique, in which a symphonic poem (extracted by the likes of Munch and Toscanini) is surrounded by choruses and soprano arias as well as reflective interludes. The language is Franck at his most opulent and beautifully scored for orchestra. This live Dutch performance from 1976 was directed by Jean Fournet, a noted Franck specialist who made recordings of all the composer’s major orchestral works. Previously available only within large boxsets dedicated either to Franck or to Fournet, this is the single budget-priced version of Rédemption in the catalogue.