This program presents a comprehensive overview of works by contemporary Italian composers played on the harpsichord, collected by Luca Quintavalle. Included are pieces for harpsichord already composed but not yet recorded (Morricone, Fedele, Solbiati, Nova, Galante, Cacciatore, Maestri, Di Cecca), arrangements for harpsichord by the artist, with the consent of the composer (Vacchi, Francesconi, Filidei, Lanza, Solbiati, Gervasoni) and completely new pieces written for the artist (Vacchi, Colombo Taccani, Palumbo, Baboni, Schilingi, Montalti, Capogrosso). It is fascinating to witness the experiments of contemporary composers when writing for the harpsichord, this “ancient” instrument, nowadays mostly used for Renaissance/Baroque music, but proving to be an endless source of unheard-of sounds and timbres, affects and sonorities. Luca Quintavalle is one of the most remarkable keyboard players of the moment. He has collaborated as a soloist with orchestras such as Concerto Köln, Les Talens Lyriques, Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble, Cappella Gabetta, Il Canto d’Orfeo, Harmonie Universelle, Divino Sospiro, Il Pomo d’Oro, Capella Augustina, La Folia Barockorchester, Kölner Kammerorchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and WDR Sinfonieorchester. His first solo recording of Jean-Baptiste Barrie`re’s and Bernard de Bury's harpsichord music by the label Brilliant Classics was chosen as “Recording of the month” from MusicWeb International and got really positive reviews (“a great deal of excellent playing by Luca Quintavalle; enjoyable listening, which may be unreservedly recommended.” Early Music-Oxford Journal; “I don't expect this recording to be surpassed” American Record Guide. Recently he recorded the Piano Sonatas by Anton Eberl for Brilliant Classics, to great critical acclaim.

- From an early age Benedetto Marcello proved to be a man of great versatility: a poet, writer, musician, lawyer, judge, administrator and philologist, holding important posts in these functions during his entire life. As a composer he wrote a substantial oeuvre, covering all important fields of composition: sacred and secular choral works, opera and a large body of instrumental music.

- An important part of Marcello’s life was devoted to the Estro poetico-armonico, a substantial collection of musical settings of the first fifty Psalms in an Italian paraphrase written by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani (1697-1749). They were not compositions intended for the liturgy, instead, each Psalm is a spiritual cantata, a form that followed in the wake of the oratorio and religious music in general, spreading rapidly through Italy from the early 17th century. The aesthetic style of the Estro poetico-armonico avoids excessive use of counterpoint and harmony, and focuses on catching melodies and expression of the emotions of the text.

- This new recording presents the Psalms 42 and 50, performed by the Coro Istituzione Armonica and the Ensemble Il Narvalo, conducted by Alberto Turco.

Joseph Martin Kraus, regarded in his lifetime (1756–1792) as one of the world’s six most formidable composers, has like many other contemporaries since languished in the historical shadow of Mozart. Kraus was hailed by none other than Joseph Haydn as Mozart’s equal in terms of creativity and genius but had a career more like Haydn’s and was more of a polymath. Born in central Germany, he studied composition in Mannheim, Mainz, Erfurt and Göttingen. In 1778 he decided on a career in music and emigrated to Sweden, where he became Vice-Kapellmeister at the court of Gustav III in 1781 and Kapellmeister in Stockholm in 1788. Trained as a violinist (who, like Mozart, preferred the viola), he nonetheless was a talented pianist. Francisco de Miranda, a nobleman on a grand tour in 1787, described Kraus playing the fortepiano ‘like an angel’. Sadly, the composer left relatively few works for the keyboard. This disc provides a thorough exploration of these works, from the satirical to the sublime, the expansive to the perfunctory, with the real tours de force being the two fortepiano sonatas, both issued in 1788 by Swedish publisher Olof Ålström. Though limited in number, these works for solo keyboard (almost certainly composed for the fortepiano) represent the variety and originality that are among Kraus’s musical trademarks. The two sonatas in particular challenge the technical limits of the instrument, requiring both dexterity and interpretive ability and often foreshadowing the piano music of thirty years hence in content and scope.

The Mass and songs by Guillaume de Machaut are probably the earliest consistent body of work attributable to a single composer in the Western canon. As such, they form a foundation stone to centuries of both melody-oriented song and contrapuntal polyphony that come thereafter. They have their own rich recording history, too, from the gentle and sometimes pedestrian efforts of pioneering groups like Pro Musica Antiqua and the New York Pro Musica, through to the dynamic and swinging recordings of the Orlando Consort. The Ensemble Gilles Binchois is (as its name suggests) steeped in an idiom that requires a deal of research as well as vocal skill to master. So thorough a survey of Machaut's output is almost unrivalled in the current catalogue.

OTHER INFORMATION:

- Recordings initially made and issued in the 1990's
- The CD-ROM includes essays by Dominique Vellard on all the music, plus sung texts (CD-ROM translations in modern French, English, German and Spanish).
- 'A very fine recording that serves more importantly to enhance Machaut's genius in these sympathetic and often beautiful accounts.' Gramophone

Leopold Kozeluch (1747-1818) was born in Bohemia but spent his professional life in Vienna, where he became a famous musician and composer, for a time even eclipsing Mozart’s fame. The sonatas included in this second volume have 3 or 4 movements, of the same scope as Haydn’s sonatas. They are written in the Galante Style, with easy flowing melodies, featuring a highly developed keyboard virtuosity in the abundance of scales, arpeggios, runs in thirds and sixths, repeated notes and tremolos. Jenny Soonjin Kim plays a fortepiano (Kozeluch preferred fortepianos to harpsichords). The first volume of the complete Kozeluch Sonatas was praised by the press for its spontaneity, keen sense of the style and effortless and brilliant technique.

The son of a Weimar-based organist, Johann Krebs (1713-1780) entered the Thomasschule in Leipzig under the tutelage of Capellmeister Bach at the age of 12 in 1726. There he remained for the best part of a decade, and a glowing testimonial from Bach commended his talents on the clavier, violin and lute, as well as in composition. Krebs never attained the Leipzig post which his instrumental talents deserved, but he served as an organist in several churches south of Leipzig through the course of a long and distinguished professional life which reached fruition as organist at the court of Prince Friedrich of Gotha-Altenburg from 1755 onwards. The inveterate traveler and commentator Charles Burney reported that ‘M. Krebs of Altenburg, scholar of Sebastian Bach, has been much admired for his full and masterly manner of playing the organ.’ The style of Krebs’s own music reflects the transitional period in which he lived. The hand of the master lightly guides the cosmopolitan elegance of the three partitas on album 1 of this collection. Krebs compiled a Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice) of his own in 1744, from which Michele Benuzzi performs a C major suite and, six lively Italianate sonatas. A volume of six suites from 1746 shows the influence of the galant style which was coming into fashion at the time, embodied by the output of Bach’s most accomplished son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Several more suites here are sophisticated examples of Krebs’s mastery in the ‘French and Italian taste’ as well as demonstrating the fluency of his keyboard writing and the craftsmanship of his counterpoint.

This important collection joins several other albums of little-known keyboard music from the period, recorded for Brilliant Classics by Michele Benuzzi. A student of Ottavio Dantone, he has performed the complete sonatas of Scarlatti and given recitals at major festivals in Europe and Asia.

Leopold Koželuch (1747-1818) was a Bohemian composer-pianist who moved to Vienna in 1778, three years before Mozart settled there. The sonatas (49 in total) share qualities with the work of his teacher Dussek, and Burney’s contemporary assessment of Kozeluch’s music stands true today: ‘natural, graceful and flowing, without imitating any great model, as almost all his contemporaries have done. His modulation is natural and pleasing… His rhythm is well phrased, his accents well placed, and harmony pure.’ Volume 3 covers Sonatas Nos.17-33, written between 1785 and 1791. No less than Haydn’s work in the genre, they invent ever-new and imaginative forms. The two-movement No.18 contrasts a gentle set of variations with a dashing Allegro; the three-movement No.19 in F minor opens with a grave slow movement introducing a passionate, exploratory Allegro agitato; the A major No.20 returns to the free-spirited pastoral idiom of Kozeluch’s background, with a lilting opening Allegro, a reflective but smiling Adagio and freewheeling finale. Such variety of form and temperament continues throughout the collection. ‘Jenny Soonjin Kim plays with an almost Baroque flair well-fitting of the music… The period treatment that Kim brings to the kozeluch Koželuch sonatas gives them a crisp texture and very nearly tactile character... Kim's performance is commanding and authoritative. The sonics are superb… an inspired and inspiring collection.’ (All About Jazz, reviewing volume 1) ‘Kim’s playing is crystalline and lyrical, with exquisitely sensitive phrasing. She is an assured virtuoso who interprets Koželuch’s music beautifully. This set will interest pianists who would like to augment their repertoire with unknown gems from the period.’ (Early Music America) On this album Jenny Soonjin Kim plays a modern German copy of an Anton Walter fortepiano made in Vienna in 1795.

While this selection of little musical gemstones is probably best known for its educational purposes in the keyboard world, this music can take on much more depth and poetry in the hands of a sympathetic interpreter such as the Belgian guitarist Jan Depreter. Compiled in 1725, the notebook is an intensely personal and charming compendium of favorite pieces played on a daily basis in the Bach household, from early-morning practice sessions to nighttime lullabies and consolations. For generations of music enthusiasts, Anna-Magdalena’s Notebook has provided an introduction to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and offered a unique insight into the musical life and character of the Bach family, as well as a rare glimpse of 18th-century domestic music making. The manuscript is arranged not in graded levels of technical difficulty but according to an artistic plan, beginning with the prelude from Johann Sebastian’s A minor Partita and ending with the chorale O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, taking in along the way the Aria from the Goldberg Variations as well as short pieces by his sons and ancestors. The aria from the cantate Ich habe genug!, shows how even highly organized compositions were freely adapted to fit a more intimate performance. The German gitarre-und-laute.de site praised Depreter’s previous Brilliant Classics album for its ‘flawless and beautiful’ playing of the complete guitar music by Joaquín Turina. He is an experienced professor of guitar based in his home city of Antwerp, and this album is the result of 20 years’ study and performance, being the combination of sessions that took place in 1999 and 2019. In whichever guise, the Klavierbüchlein ‘brings back some tranquility and serenity to counterbalance the hectic struggle that is often modern-day life,’ says Depreter. ‘It is the kind of music I would like to hear myself when coming home.’

The Venetian composer Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690) wrote a total of eight cantatas and canzonettas for bass voice with a continuo accompaniment, all but one presented here in new, historically informed recordings by a distinguished Italian ensemble specializing in Italian chamber music of the Baroque. His cantatas are longer than those of other Venetian composers of the period, with richer counterpoint between the vocal part and the continuo and freer movement between recitative and aria. Just as the recitatives are often rich in pathos, so the arias reveal great variety of form in both the vocal and the continuo part. While the continuo part is sometimes spare and at other times more elaborated, it supports the vocal line with naturalistic illustration of the text. Legrenzi often conjures up comical situations for the bass voice: for instance, in the canzonetta Son canuto e d’un bambin, where the words revolve around the idea that there are slaves of love even in old age; or in the cantata Dal calore agitato, where the subject is the erotic dreams of a poor Arcadian shepherd. The three trio sonatas on this recording are among Legrenzi’s best instrumental compositions. They come from the six printed collections of instrumental sonatas, and are all à violino (played in this version on the cornett, which was common practice in the 17th century) and viola da brazzo). Within conventional formal structures, Legrenzi invests these works with a remarkably advanced sense of melody. The impression is Legrenzi was most at home working with a small ensemble, rather than with the larger groups of instrumentalists that had become common in 17th-century Venice.

This fascinating programme brings together some of the most iconic percussion music by Varese, Reich, Cowell, Chavez, Harrison and Cage, written in the 30's and 40's of the 20th century. The composers on this disc share their American identity, deriving their inspiration from such diverse sources as medieval music, African culture, astrophysics, Latin-American and Mexican music. The Italian ensemble Tetraktis is one of the most innovating and groundbreaking percussion groups of today. They work closely together with contemporary composers and freely adopt influences from other musical cultures like Rock, Pop, Jazz and Dance. They regularly perform in festivals all over the world.

Any listener who has heard the punchy, rousing and original account of Monteverdi’s Vespers released in 2016 by these forces on Brilliant Classics will be keen to hear music from the same source performed with similar vitality and attention to historical detail. Federico Bardazzi duly obliges with this recreation of Easter at the Basilica San Marco, around the year 1600. Chants alternate with spectacular, antiphonal toccatas and canzonas that bounce off the walls of the generous church acoustic, as well as a slight but still exuberant sonata by Giovanni Paolo Cima. Enclosed within are the separate movements of the four-part Mass by Monteverdi, and the liturgical reconstruction concludes with a setting of the Ave maris stella which, like the Mass, is to be found in Monteverdi’s collection of Selva morale e spirituale, no less treasurable in its way than the better-known Vespers compilation. Indeed the Selva morale dates from several decades later in Monteverdi’s output and reflects an even greater harmonic refinement: the linear polyphony of the Mass obeys the rules of the stile antico, while the psalm settings and hymns such as Laudate Dominum and Cantate Domino belong to the more sectional and vividly illustrative style of the seconda pratica which became particularly associated in his work and that of his successors with the secular madrigal. Bardazzi notes that Monteverdi would have expected to perform this music with a mixed-voice choir; the male-only ensemble is a late-19th-century practice. His lively tempi and instrumental arrangements, switching between basso continuo and colla parte instruments, are intended ‘to allow Monteverdi’s creative genius and originality to permeate the strict counterpoint.’

The first album dedicated to a Bavarian contemporary of Schubert, featuring a trio of easy-on-the-ear serenades in new recordings, played by an experienced Italian ensemble with a track record of success in reviving forgotten corners of 19th-century salon music. Joseph Küffner (1776-1856) trained as a lawyer but studied the guitar and violin in his spare time. No ordinary ‘amateur’ musician, he performed concertos by Viotti and Mestrino in public, and in due course became a teacher of those instruments, then a regimental band leader; by the age of 30 he was a court musician for Archduke Ferdinand. Two years later, in 1808, his own music was first published – a set of dances for violin and guitar – but many of his surviving pieces remain in manuscript, including seven symphonies. Most of Küffner’s music, however, was composed for his own instruments, and tailored with an eye and ear to a lucrative domestic audience. Some 25 pieces are scored for the combination of flute, viola and guitar heard on this new album, most of them serenades, fantasies or pot-pourris, all unfailingly well-crafted and cheerful in temperament. Having read through most of them, the Classico Terzetto Italiano has to record three of the most delightful. Op.4 is, unusually, cast in a minor key, though hardly tragic in mood. Op.10 is dedicated to the Grand Duke of Würzburg: a tribute from one military man to another, and quoting a march from a then-popular opera, Kreutzer’s Lodoïska. Op.15 includes a witty minuet and what sounds like a homage to Mozart closing with a virtuosic Galop which tests the guitarist’s technique with its brilliant figuration.

New recordings of elegantly crafted chamber music by one of the leading musical lights of Berlin during the mid-18th century. A contemporary biographical sketch of Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708–ca 1763) presented him as ‘cheerful and unpretentious’, which captures these five trio sonatas in a nutshell. Without emulating the contrapuntal sophistication of Bach’s works in the same medium, or the extrovert cosmopolitan spirit of Handel’s chamber music for his English patrons, Janitsch’s music offers pleasures of its own. Recognizably drawing on the trio sonata tradition handed down by Corelli and north-Italian contemporaries, the five pieces recorded here reveal subtle distinctions in sound, scoring, and individual musical ideas that would have been appreciated by members of the ‘academy’ which met every Friday at Janitsch’s home in the Prussian town of Rheinsburg during the late 1730s, and thereafter in Berlin, where the composer moved in service to Frederick the Great in 1740. Janitsch played the double bass, cello and keyboard instruments, and his practical experience lends the basso continuo parts of these trio sonatas a discreet individuality, while the two upper lines are shared between oboe, flute, violin and viola. Very much within the character of Frederick’s court, the expressive key signature of the sonatas is a lively seriousness distinct from the carefree gaiety of, say, Telemann’s Tafelmusik collection. Janitsch’s music is some of the most creative work from the 18th century, with rich melodies and harmonies that reflect the unbridled optimism of the Enlightenment. These works are not only a great joy to play, but are superb to listen to and engage with.

The child Mendelssohn developed extraordinarily rapidly after progressing, apparently late in 1819, from imitative student exercises to composing his own music. Over the next two years he tackled increasingly ambitious large-scale works, including a number of string symphonies, a Singspiel, and his first concerto, in A minor for piano, written early in 1822. The Concerto for Violin and Strings in D minor followed later that year, and the Concerto for Violin and Piano, again in D minor, in the spring of 1823; the latter was also initially accompanied by strings only, but Mendelssohn later added parts for wind and timpani, in which version it is heard here. Even between these two concertos one can hear a striking advance in the young composer’s sense of originality and mastery.

The Violin Concerto draws on Classical-era models such as Mozart, but it is also influenced by French innovations in violin writing developed in Mendelssohn’s own time, and fully exploits the evolving techniques of new virtuosos. Among them was Eduard Rietz, Mendelssohn’s teacher, the work’s dedicatee, still a teenager himself and yet leader of the Berlin Court Orchestra. There is much dazzling filigree writing here but also some deeply expressive modulations which convey an emotional maturity far beyond what one could expect from a 13-year-old composer.

Dating from six months later, the Double Concerto is an even more polished work, full of memorable melody, no less brilliant in its solo writing but astonishingly confident in its handling of material indebted to Bach, to Mozart and Beethoven and somehow none the worse for all that
The Ukrainian violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv is now based in the US, where she works as both a soloist and a teacher, including Head of Strings at the University of Connecticut. She is fluently partnered here by Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who has performed and recorded much of the supremely challenging late-Romantic repertoire: a favorite performer at keyboard festivals such as Rarities of Piano Music in Husum, he is also a member of the piano faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Italian born composer Tommaso Giordani (1730-1806) built his career in London, where he wrote a great deal of music including operas and chamber pieces. These six sonatas are his Opus 4. They are scored for violin and keyboard, and are each 2-movement works in the Galante style, similar to that of Johann Christian Bach. Violinist Lina Uinskyte and keyboardist Marco Ruggeri rise to the challenge of these highly virtuosic pieces.