Brilliant Classics proudly presents the 5-album sets series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music freshly packaged with eye-catching colorful and booklets containing liner notes in English. A new series at an unbeatable price!

The present installment features Mozart’s complete piano sonatas, performed by pianist Klara Würtz.

Excerpt from a review of a previously released edition of this set:

The Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz's Mozart performances here are, in a word, miraculous. Listening to this set left me almost speechless. By the time I finished auditioning just the first six sonatas, I knew that Würtz’s Mozart was something special. Highest recommendation.

-- Jeffrey J. Lipscomb, FANFARE

Giovanni Picchi (1572-1643) flourished in Venice, notably as the organist at the Scuola di San Rocco. He became renowned as a composer of both secular and sacred music, attested by his presence in the Nobiltà di dame by Fabrizio Caroso, the most important collection of dance music of the time. A collection of his canzone was published in 1625 and his fame spread to England, where a Toccata for harpsichord was transcribed within the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (of which Brilliant has recently released the first-ever complete recording, 95915). Other important sources for his keyboard music include collections published in Venice in 1621 and an undated collection of intablatures (transcriptions and elaborations of music by other composers) which is now held in Turin. Together they amount to some of the most brilliant and appealing music for the harpsichord from 17th-century Italy. Picchi’s harmonic language was especially daring, and his flair as a performer is reflected in the style of his writing, which exploits the full range of the instrument. In complement to Picchi’s work, Simone Stella has chosen other jewels from Venetian composers of the time: toccatas, ricercare and canzone by Annibale Padovano, Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and Vincenzo Bellavere. Bellavere is another neglected figure nowadays, but the Toccata recorded here is a gloriously ornate example of the genre, alternating intricate counterpoint with filigree decoration.

Review

Keyboard music was an important genre in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Organists played a major role in music life, and the posts of organist in the main cathedrals and churches were rated highly. Only the top of the bill was good enough to act as such, for instance at St Mark's in Venice. Given that there were so many cathedrals and churches in Italy, it is not suprising that we only know the most famous masters of the time. The two Gabrielis and Claudio Merulo are among the best-known, who worked as organists at St Mark's. The disc under review includes music by some lesser-known organists: Annibale Padovano was organist alongside Merulo, and Vincenzo Bellavere occupied that post only for nine months, being succeeded by Giovanni Gabrieli after his death. Like the Gabrielis and Merulo they figure on this disc probably to fill the empty space, but they also could put the oeuvre of Giovanni Picchi into its historical context.

Picchi is a composer who is pretty well-known by name, if only because one of his works, a Toccata, is included in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, one of the main collections of keyboard music from the decades around 1600. His music is far less known and not that often performed. If it is, it is mostly as part of recitals or anthologies. To the best of my knowledge, there was no recording of his complete keyboard works on disc. It was Ton Koopman, who early in his career recorded his keyboard music. That was in the vinyl era, and as far as I know, it has never been released on CD, which is a big shame. Therefore, the recording by Simone Stella fills a gap in the discography.

Picchi's career seems to be a story of hit and (mostly) miss. He was born into a family which included several musicians, and was likely a pupil of Giovanni Croce, who from 1603 until his death in 1609 was maestro di cappella at St Mark's in Venice. From that one may conclude that he received an excellent musical education. He also knew many people from the higher echelons of society, which should have been helpful in assuring a musical position of some importance. In the mid-1590s he became organist at the Basilica dei Frari; he held this position until his death. However, attempts to add posts in other churches failed. In 1606 he applied for the post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, but it was given to a pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli. In 1612 he attempted to succeed the latter as organist of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, but lost to Giovanni Battista Grillo. In 1623, Grillo died, and Picchi was given his job. Two further applications failed: in 1623 he tried to be appointed first organist, and in 1624 to become second organist at St Mark's. One may wonder why he suffered so many setbacks. There was undoubtedly a stiff competition from many keyboard players who were just as good as Picchi. His failures may also have been due to his character; who knows? It can't be his music, if what has been left is anything to go by.

In 1619 Picchi published his Intavolatura di balli d'arpicordo, a collection of keyboard music entirely based on then common dances. This kind of music seems to have been his speciality, as in 1600 his likeness appeared at the frontispiece of an important dance treatise. The keyboard dances were reprinted in 1621, but three further books of dances which Picchi promised to publish "when I see that this first book proves pleasing to the public", have never appeared (assuming that they have not been lost). It is rather speculative to conclude from this, as Howard Ferguson does in New Grove, that his music was not that well received. It seems that Picchi was well respected and appreciated by his contemporaries.

The printed edition just mentioned includes only nine pieces. In addition, Stella plays the Toccata from the Fitzwilliam Book and five pieces that have been preserved as part of a manuscript which is today in the National Library of Turin. Whereas many keyboard works of the time can be played on either the organ or a strung keyboard instrument (harpsichord or spinet), Picchi mostly composed dances, which require a harpsichord. Only the pass'e mezzi may be suitable to be played on the organ, but I can't remember ever having heard them on such an instrument. All these pieces are technically brilliant works, with lots of passagework. There are also harmonic peculiarities as well as passages with unusual rhythmic patterns.

The other composers included here have become mainly known as organists, as I already mentioned. Here they are presented with harpsichord pieces, although every piece can also be played on the organ. As Claudio Merulo and the Gabrielis are well-known, it may be useful to give here some information about the two unknown quantities.

Annibale Padovano was from Padua, and seems to have a made a name for himself quite quickly, as in 1552 he was appointed organist at St Mark's without any competition. In 1565 he moved to Graz, where he became organist at the court of Archduke Charles II of Austria; one year later he was promoted to 'chief musician' and a few years later as director of music. His keyboard music consists of two printed editions of ricercares and toccatas. Where Vincenzo Bellavere was born, is not known, but his first post was that of organist of a church in Padua. In 1568 he was appointed organist of the Scuola Grande di S Rocco in Venice. In 1584 he returned to Padua, but in 1586 he was appointed organist at St Mark's in Venice, as successor to Andrea Gabrieli. Nine months later he died, at the age of 46.

Whereas Picchi focused on dance forms, the other composers are represented here with more common genres, such as toccata, ricercare and canzon. Pieces based on vocal models were very popular at the time, and Andrea Gabrieli's Canzon francese detta Frais et Galliard is an example of this; the chanson is from the pen of Jacobus Clemens non Papa. Giovanni Gabrieli's Canzon I detta La Spiritata was conceived as a piece for an instrumental ensemble. The well-known theorist and organist Girolamo Diruta made a transcription for keyboard.

I am still hoping that one day Koopman's recording may become available on CD. However, Simone Stella is a worthy alternative. His interpretation is not fundamentally different from Koopman's, as far as I can remember the latter. The pecularities of Picchi's music come off to the full here, with the help of the splendid harpsichord Stella plays: a copy of an instrument by Carlo Grimaldi. His articulation is excellent, as is his sense of rhythm, which is essential in these dances. The remaining items are played just as well.

This recording of Giovanni Picchi's oeuvre is as good as one may wish.

--MusicWeb International (Johan van Veen)

Featuring composers such as Piazzolla, Brouwer, Arcas, and Barrios, this album is an exciting adventure through pieces with latin musical roots. Guitarist Luciano Tortorelli is a professor of classical guitar and also performs frequently in concertos. He is one of Italy’s foremost guitarists. Tortorelli also performs an original piece on this album: Dobru noc Brno, which was composed as an homage to the Brno Guitar Festival.

One would be hard pressed to find an opera more proudly Southern Italian than Cavalleria rusticana, set in Vizzini, a small mountain village in the Sicilian hinterland that was the birthplace of the story’s playwright, Giovanni Verga. Its enduring popularity makes it surprising indeed that the last studio recording dates to exactly 30 years ago (1990, Semyon Bychkov), preceded just a year earlier by Giuseppe Sinopoli’s critically acclaimed production dedicated to his father, who, like its protagonists and Verga, was Sicilian. This new interpretation is thus long overdue and joins a small but prestigious circle of recordings, with Carmine Gallone (1953, film), Tullio Serafin (1960), Herbert von Karajan (1965), James Levine (1978), Franco Zeffirelli (1982, film) and Georges Pretre (1983) predating Sinopoli. This new production of Cavalleria Rusticana brings together some of the most prominent artists on today’s international opera stages under conductor Filippo Arlia, a native of South Italy’s Calabria and youngest-ever Director of an Italian conservatory (Nocera Terinese’s ‘Tchaikovsky’ Conservatory). The recording’s soloists are no less impressive: tenor Piero Giuliacci (Turiddu, winner of the ‘Mascagni d’Oro’ 2013 and ‘Pavarotti d’Oro’ 2017); mezzo-soprano Alessandra Di Giorgio (Santuzza); baritone Domenico Balzani (Alfio); mezzo-soprano Irina Dolzhenko (Lucia); and soprano Giorgia Teodoro (Lola) who, like Arlia, calls Calabria home. This recording revives Mascagni’s voice in a new millennium with artists capable of honouring the verismo vocal color he pioneered, before an entire generation of opera composers followed suit.

In 1790, one musical dictionary described Leopold Kozeluch as ‘without question the living composer most loved by young or old’; his works displayed 'liveliness and grace, the noblest melody combined with the purest harmony, and of the most pleasing organization blended with rhythm and modulation.’ His music may have been eclipsed by the legacies of the towering figures Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven since his death in 1818, but performers such as Jenny Soonjin Kim are leading a Kozeluch revival which should see the reputation of this Bohemian-born master rise once more. Having completed his studies in Prague, including lessons with Dussek, he made his name in Vienna as a teacher and successful publisher as well as composer. Though he composed in all the major genres, the best of him is to be found in the keyboard sonatas gathered here. He was regarded as a pioneer of writing for the fortepiano rather than the harpsichord, and he won particular praise from the influential writer Charles Burney: ‘[Kozeluch’s] style is more easy than that of Emanuel Bach, Haydn or Mozart; it is natural, graceful and flowing, without imitating any great model, as almost all his contemporaries have done. His modulation is natural and pleasing, and what critics of the old school would allow to be warrantable. His rhythm is well phrased, his accents well placed, and harmony pure.’ Jenny Soonjin Kim recorded this series between 2013 and 2018 at the Kresge Chapel in Claremont Graduate University, where she oversees the teaching programme for piano and fortepiano studies. Sylvia Berry (Early Music America 21, no. 4, Winter 2015) wrote of the second Kozeluch volume: ‘Kim’s playing is crystalline and lyrical, with exquisitely sensitive phrasing. She is an assured virtuoso who interprets Kozeluch’s music beautifully.’

The Dutch musician Krijn Koetsveld has often conducted Bach, and he was founder-director of The Netherlands Bach Ensemble. However, it is the name of Claudio Monteverdi with which he is indelibly associated: he first encountered the composer’s music in 1972, and describes it as ‘love at first sight, which never passed’. This relationship matured over time into the foundation of a soloistic vocal group, Le Nuove Musiche, with the technical skills, the scholarly understanding and the musical sensitivities to do justice to the highly intimate, sophisticated genre of Renaissance madrigal, of which the nine books by Monteverdi represent its summit and fullest flowering. Recording all nine books, and several other mini-dramas and vocal chamber works which fall within the genre but outside the books themselves, began in 2004 and was only completed in 2018. Koetsveld contributes a lively and authoritative introduction to the whole project in the booklet. He remarks: ‘Nine books of madrigals, all of them unique, contributing to the transition from the Renaissance to the baroque, a musical history in sound.’ As the series has been released, its importance has been widely recognised in the critical press. In 2017, Fanfare observed: ‘Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda is representative of Koetsveld’s approach. The harmonic outline of the continuo is restrained and precise, the tutti playing of the strings articulated clearly. Both instrumental and concerted textures are so transparent one could take dictation to the recording. In a luminous performance as the narrator, Falco van Loon is focused and crystalline; Wendy Roobol is a clean, nimble Clorinda. Arnout Lems is the most dramatic of the soloists, voicing Tancredi in a rich but gentle baritone.’

Each one of Bohuslav Martinu’s (1890-1959) three cello sonatas belongs to a significant period or event in his life. Composed in May 1939, the first seems indelibly marked by the tension and anxiety which gripped Europe in the months before war broke out, though the composer was also going through a crisis in his personal life, having lately had an intense extramarital affair with Vítezslava Kaprálová, a young composer and conductor. The First Sonata is a tense and often angry work, even in its brooding central movement, and the mood carries over into the beginning of the Second , which was one of the first works completed by Martinu after his emigration to the US with his wife and children. This was another period of stress and homesickness, which may be heard in the Czech character of the melodies growing stronger during the sonata’s course, until the finale synthesises old and new worlds with a fusion of jazz and Bohemian folk melody. Like much of Martinu’s later music such as the last symphony and The Greek Passion, the Third Sonata of 1952 is more elusive – often almost naïve in character, and finding release in a neoclassical gigue which perhaps symbolises the composer coming to terms with a homeland whose soil he would never again touch. Many cellists of distinction have been attracted to these compact but challenging works, and audiences with them. Rivera Lazeri is an Italian cellist at home in the world of new music, partnered here by a pianist, David Boldrini, who has made critically acclaimed Brilliant Classics albums of music by Cimarosa and Czerny, among others.

Acknowledged as a model and authority by the great German composer Michael Praetorius, Simone Molinaro (1565-1636) is little known today but was known throughout Europe in his own age. He died as master of music at the ducal palace of Genoa, an eminent role he had held for a decade. Born into a musical family, he trained as a church musician and took vows in the early stages of priesthood before begin dismissed in 1616 as Chapel Master of music at the Cathedral in Genoa, having the previous year married into local aristocracy. All the while he continued to play, to teach and to compose on his principal instrument, the theorbo. This book of dances, fantasias and intabulations was published in 1599 and it demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the instrument and its repertoire. The rich and challenging chords and fingerings demonstrate Molinaro’s own virtuosity as a performer. There is something quintessentially noble about Molinaro’s work as a composer. Although his idiom is that of the Renaissance, his musical ideas reveal the sort of horizontal, linear development that owes much to Flemish counterpoint. In Ugo Nastrucci’s careful ordering of the volume, moments of strict counterpoint alternate with lighter virtuoso variations in the extended passamezzi which contrast with elegant galliards and sprightly saltarellos. Nastrucci closes the album with what is probably Molinaro’s most famous piece, the Ballo detto il Conte Orlando which was transcribed over a century ago in modern notation by Oscar Chilesotti, and rearranged by Ottorino Respighi in the first suite of his Antiche arie e danze of 1917.

Vincenzo Petrali (1830-1889) was an organist-composer active in the north of Italy. Acclaimed in his own time as a master improviser, the equal in this regard to French contemporaries such as Guilmant and Widor, he left a small, beautifully crafted body of original work for ecclesiastical use, around a third of it presented on this new album. He wrote two organ Masses in the tradition of 17th-century Venetian school composers such as Merula and Merulo, in which each verse of the text and its associated Gregorian chant inspires an instrumental meditation: Paolo Bottini has recorded the lesser-known F major Mass, which includes an especially dramatic, march-like Sonata for the Offertory and an ebullient final Allegro festoso. He belonged to the Cecilian movement, exemplified by the sacred works of Mendelssohn, which sought to establish a new and distinctive idiom for church composition, which is heard to best effect in a quartet of Communion pieces at the end of the first album, which fully exploit the size and array of tone-colors available to him on the newly built instruments of the time. In this spirit Petrali also composed 71 studies ‘for the modern organ’, collected in two volumes, and Paolo Bottini presents almost half of them on album 2. While composed with didactic purposes in mind, training pedal technique, introspection or melancholy but often rhythmic precision, sensitivity and imagination in handling different registers and stops and the like, the studies are delightful character pieces in their own right, not much given to surprisingly sunny in character.

The Manzanares flows from the Sierra de Guadarrama and passes through Madrid, on its way to join the Jarama river, which in turn becomes swallowed by the mighty Tagus. On the banks of the Manzanares – ‘‘Los Ecos de Manzanaras’ – the young Madrileños of the 1700s would sunbathe and drive horses into the water. The river was as characteristic of the city’s life as the theatre, the nightlife, the guitar and the folía (Spanish dance). Under the leadership of Philip IV, Spain was a place of dreams and ambitions, with the New World just over the horizon. The king himself was a great lover of music and dance, and he cultivated a court of singers who could accompany themselves on the guitar. They were led for a period by Alvaro de los Rios (1580-1623) who attracted musicians from across the Iberian Peninsula and farther afield to enhance the cosmopolitan vibrancy of Philip’s court. The music included on this recording is representative of the transition from Renaissance polyphony to the new Baroque style: on one hand, there are madrigal-like pieces, with elaborate contrapuntal and melodic imitation, and on the other, completely homophonic compositions based on lively rhythms, dance patterns and poems of a popular nature, such as the seguidillas. The secular songs have been taken from a little-known collection, the Cancionero de la Sablonara composed for the Royal Court of Madrid during the first two decades of the 17th century. The collection features many names little known to us now, making the album full of exciting discoveries for lovers of the early Baroque. The songs are interspersed with contemporary instrumental pieces, played here by guitar, chittarone and Spanish double harp.

During his lifetime Dmitri Kabalevsky was considered by the authorities to be one of the top 5 composers of Russia, on a par with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He was praised for his formalism, general popular style and patriotism. He was not a revolutionary, and this caused his fame to decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His music however has a strong identity, vigorous, alternating power with lyricism, and rooted in the rich folklore of Russia. This new recording contains his effervescent 3rd Piano Sonata and the complete 24 Preludes, Op. 38, written during World War II, each based on a Russian folk song, presenting a wide variety of moods, from the pensive melancholy to fiery passion. Played by the highly talented young Italian pianist Pietro Bonfilio, who expresses his love for the Russian culture with this beautiful recording.

Estonian composer and cult figure Arvo P�rt is a unique figure in the musical world. The utter simplicity of his works, inspired by deep religious feelings, has a strange, hypnotic power over many a listener, reaching beyond the boundaries of traditional classical audiences. Many recordings of P�rt achieve bestselling status. This 2CD set contains the complete music for piano, featuring the well-known 'Spiegel i'm Spiegel', and 'F�r Alina', played by the champion of Minimal Music, Jeroen van Veen, who has recorded for Brilliant Classics several collections of minimalist piano music

John Johnson and Antony Holborne share much in common, in their music and in their careers, but this album, in setting their work side by side, reveals their individual style and approach to the instrument. It is assumed that they both were born in the 1540s, without authoritative record, but their work in the royal court of the 1560s is attested. Johnson made his career as an accomplished performer, while Holborne’s energies were focused on writing for the instrument. In the case of Johnson, the pavans, galliards and grounds recorded by Yavor Genov incorporate an amalgam of native and foreign (especially Italian) elements. His works show the English taste for cross-relations, surprising harmonic and tonal relationships and, above all, variation. However, like Holborne, he developed the form of the pavan during the course of his career, endowing it with increasing richness of ornamentation and expression, to be enjoyed in full in the melancholy undertow of the Passingmeasures Pavan. Holborne’s lute music is still more painstakingly elaborate, designed perhaps less for public show than private reflection, to give as much pleasure to the musician as to his courtly audience. With two albums on Brilliant, of music by Kapsberger and Zamboni, the young Bulgarian lutenist has introduced himself to international audiences and proved to be a thoroughly sympathetic interpreter of this idiom which trades on subtle intimacies of phrase, decoration and inflection.

Among the most significant composers of guitar duos in the early 19th century, Antoine De Lhoyer was born in September 1768 in Clermont-Ferrand. His musical talents manifested themselves from early on, and he trained in Paris. His teacher Vidal paid tribute to him as ‘the finest guitarist in Europe’. However, at the age of 20, de Lhoyer embarked on a military career as a member of the King’s Guards, shortly before the French Revolution. Life in France rapidly becoming uncongenial for someone with his loyalties, he left France in a hurry and eventually settled in Hamburg, where his compositions were first published at the turn of the 19th century. De Lhoyer’s travels were by no means over, and over the following decades he took up posts as a professional music teacher and performer in St Petersburg, Paris, Corsica, Aix-en-Provence and Alger, the new capital of the French colony in north Africa. Eventually returning to the French capital, he died there in 1852, at the age of 84. The extant duos on this album were composed between 1814 and 1826, and they comprise a substantial proportion of his total output. One would expect the style of his music to reflect the lively, cosmopolitan nature of his career, and so they do, often cast in three- and four-movement sonata forms with picturesque interpolations such as the ‘hunt’ movement of Op.35 No.2 and the graceful Sicilienne of Op.35 No.5. The eight-movement Fantasie Concertante Op.33 is like a Mozartian serenade, with a superbly flowing Andante con variazioni directly succeeded by a brief but tranquil Adagio.

The 'tablature of Jan of Lublin', as this significant collection is commonly known, belonged to the monastery of Canons Regular in the Polish city of Krasìnik near Lublin, and was bound in 1540. The owner and primary scribe was this Jan, or Johannes, of whom very little is known or can be surmised, but the contents of his book are a treasure trove of compositions and musical instruction illustrating what keyboardists of the region in the 16th century would have learned and played, including counterpoint, composition, organ-tuning, liturgical music and — perhaps richest of all — intabulations (arrangements) for keyboard of polyphonic vocal music from across Europe and original compositions for keyboard including 'preambula' (improvisatory preludes) and dances under the generic title 'corea' or with more specific names, several of them Polish. These latter Polish dances give the very international Jan of Lublin collection strong ties to its Polish origins, shedding light on the local musical tradition and its vigorous artistic interaction with Greater Europe. Internationally acclaimed harpsichord and recorder virtuoso Corina Marti has grouped selections from the Tablature into a recital programme in five sections, reflecting both the great variety and juxtaposition of various types of music in the volume, and the richness offered by this place and moment in music history. Marti's ongoing research into aspects of the repertoire and the reconstruction of late-medieval and early-renaissance keyboard instruments and recorders has contributed substantially to the present-day revival of these instruments.