Fauré was a reserved, self-effacing man particularly drawn by the intimacy of chamber music. Deeply attached to the romanticism of an earlier age, he is considered the last of the romantics. Debussy described him as a ‘maître de charme’, an epithet that still rings true. During the First World War Fauré remained in Paris as head of the Conservatoire, and despite its external turmoil, this period (lasting for him until 1921, the year of the Second Cello Sonata) was the most productive of his life. His compositions of this period are notable for their force and even violence from a composer who is usually renowned for his delicacy and restraint. In fact the first movement of the First Cello Sonata is among Fauré’s most angular and assertive pieces. The Second Sonata shares a flowing, elusive quality with much of his late music, but it falls on the ear with almost deceptive ease: ‘How lucky you are to stay young like that!’, remarked Vincent d’Indy to the 78-year-old composer when he first heard the sonata’s effervescent finale. Fauré himself remarked with typical understatement that ‘Music consists in raising us as far as possible above what is. I carry within me a certain desire for things that do not exist.’ There is a sense in which these late cello works speak in a Romantic language which the composer already knew was dead – and yet every note within them is uniquely his own, averse to tragic declamation yet unwilling to shake off a melancholy spirit of reflection.

It’s easy to identify the classical guitar with Spanish repertoire. After all, Andrés Segovia, who revived the fortunes of the instrument in the early decades of the 20th century after long neglect, was a Spaniard. This does not do justice, however, to the major contribution made to 20th-century guitar repertoire by a number of national schools, among which the United Kingdom’s is particularly outstanding for the quantity and quality of the pieces. This album offers a significant sample of music for solo guitar by four important composers: Cyril Scott, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten and William Walton. Despite being relatively unfamiliar to the wider public, the figure of Cyril Scott (1879–1970) is one of real interest. Though it was written in 1927, Scott’s Sonatina has only entered the repertoire of today’s guitarists in recent years. Its solid compositional mastery gives rise to a beauty at once enigmatic and captivating. Lennox Berkeley’s (1903–1989) compositions for the guitar span almost half a century and are a faithful record of his stylistic evolution. Berkeley’s 4 Pièces pour la guitare is a sparkling collection in spirit very close to the style of composers such as Albert Roussel and Francis Poulenc. The Nocturnal after John Dowland Op.70 (1963) by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) is also a theme and variations, but rather than present the theme and develop it with variations, Britten inverts the form, revealing the theme only at the very end of the piece after it is gradually unveiled in fragments of a musical mosaic cleverly scattered across the preceding variations. The irreverent japes of William Walton’s (1902–1983) Façade for speaker and instrumental sextet, which in 1922/3 marked the composer’s debut as an enfant terrible, soon gave way to a late-Romantic style closer to Bax and Vaughan Williams.

This box is an update of Brilliant Classics’ acclaimed Haydn Edition, with an additional 10 CDs of content including classic performances of the Trumpet and Horn concertos (Philharmonia Orchestra) and the Cello Concertos (Jan Vogler). The set of Haydn’s Masses is now complete, with renditions of the ‘Nelson’, ‘Creation’ and ‘Little Organ’ Masses and the Heilig- and Theresienmessen by New York’s Trinity Church Choir and Rebel Baroque Orchestra. Also new in this edition is Haydn’s final opera, L’anima del filosofo, performed by the Bavarian Radio Choir and Munich Radio Orchestra, along with world-famous sopranos Arleen Auger and Emma Kirkby in Haydn’s Songs and Cantatas. The Buchberger String Quartet add to their already monumental catalogue of ‘Papa’ Haydn’s quartets with readings of Op.50/4–6, Op.54 and Op.76/4-6, while Federico Guglielmo, Ginevra Petrucci et al. contribute new recordings of the duos for violin/viola and 2 flutes. Finally, all 8 of Haydn’s ingenious Nocturnes grace this updated box, as performed by the Wiener Concert-Verein. As before, the complete keyboard works (including all sonatas) feature here in vibrant performances on fortepianos, the keyboard instrument of Haydn’s day.

CONTENTS:

• CD1-33 Symphonies
• CD34-40 Concertos
• CD41-52 Masses, Oratorios
  
• CD53-64 Operas
  
• CD65-85 Vocals (non-opera)
  
• CD86-107 String Quartets
  
• CD108 Die Sieben letzten Worte (instrumental)
  
• CD109-145 Duos, Trios, Divertimenti
  
• CD146-158 Keyboard Sonatas, Divertimenti, Menuets
  
• CD159-160 Misc.
  

The keyboard works of Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari (1763-1842) represent a synthesis of the styles circulating around Europe at the turn of the 19th century. The sonatas on this album, from his Opp. 9, 10 and 12 collections, reveal both his admiration for Mozart and his own tendencies towards Classicism, in dialogue with the French galant style, with the melodic traits of the Italian operatic style, and with the virtuosic formulae of the innovative piano music associated with Muzio Clementi. The six Balletti are more modest in scale and probably intended for domestic use by amateurs. On the other hand, the Caprice Op.8 undoubtedly addresses the power and dynamic range of the new piano, with an innovative, unresolved conclusion on the dominant. Born in the Trento region of Italy, Ferrari studied music in Verona and could play the flute, oboe, violin, viola and double bass by the age of twenty. He became friends with both Paisiello and Thomas Attwood, the friend and contemporary of Mozart, whose quartets dedicated to Haydn made a deep impact on the young Ferrari. Having written operas in Naples, in 1792 he moved to London, where he met Haydn and Clementi and quickly became a leading singing teacher, with the Princess of Wales among his pupils. It was there that he achieved his most lasting professional success. He wrote a pair of piano concertos, and about 50 sonatas. The instrument used in this recording is a replica of a five-and-a-half octave 1804 Walter und Soehne fortepiano, built by Paul McNulty in 2008. Like Ferrari, Stefania Neonato hails from the Trento region; she is now professor of fortepiano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, and her activities in teaching, performance and recording are concentrated on Classical-era music for fortepiano.

Born in 1804, Louise Farrenc became a professional-standard pianist while still a teenager, and later music teacher to the household of the Duke d’Orléans and from 1842 professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. Her substantial legacy of composition was largely forgotten after her death in 1875 and is only now being revived. She wrote mainly in the field of orchestral and chamber music:

‘I would defy anyone,’ says the pianist Linda Di Carlo in a personal introduction to this new recording of Farrenc’s music for violin and piano, ‘to cast aspersions on the chamber music in particular on the grounds of her gender.’ No less than Théophile Gautier wrote admiringly of the First Sonata from 1848: ‘an excellent addition to her catalogue of works, and written, like most of them, in an austere classical style reminiscent of the great masters.’

It was Joseph Joachim, no less, who gave the Second Sonata’s premiere in March 1850 at the Salle Érard in Paris. The sonata opens with a distinct echo of Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata, and the opera buffa spirit of Mozart hovers over the finale, but the elfin dance of the Scherzo is entirely Farrenc’s own, characteristic inspiration. The Variations Concertantes on a popular Swiss melody has more of the perfume of the salon: a work of charm, written to display the prowess of any soloist.

On this recording, the violinist taking up the challenge of Farrenc’s subtly challenging music is Daniele Orlando, concertmaster of I Solisti Aquilani with a distinguished discography to his name, including a much-acclaimed recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. This 2019 recording is the only budget-priced album available of Farrenc’s music for violin and piano: an ideal introduction to a significant figure in 19th-century French music belatedly receiving her due.

REVIEW:

The sonatas have real energy and drive, and both players are urged to give their utmost. I would be surprised if an audience wholly unfamiliar with the Beethoven sonatas would be able to pick these out from Op. 12, or even Op. 30. That said, they are a lot later than Beethoven, though not far advanced beyond him. I do love the quick interplay of the parts and the way one will pick up the tail of what the other has said and run with it. I wonder if Beethoven himself didn’t kill that kind of sonata with the Kreutzer; that work put paid to the violin/piano repertoire for decades, and it’s really only with Brahms that it came back. Performances are excellent, as is the sound.

-- American Record Guide (Michelle Thomson)

From Arturo Toscanini and Sir John Barbirolli to Riccardo Muti and Antonio Pappano in our own time, Italian-heritage performers have often brought special qualities of sympathy and understanding to Edward Elgar’s (1857-1934) music. Now comes a new recording made in the ‘boot’ of southern Italy, lending Mediterranean warmth and passion to a trio of Elgarian masterpieces. The Sicilian-born cellist Giovanni Sollima has made well-received albums for Brilliant Classics of music by Offenbach (94475) and by his father Eliodoro Sollima (96287). His latest recording, made at the Teatro Politeama in the one-time ‘lace capital’ of Europe, Catanzaro, illuminates one of the core works of the cello literature with an affecting sense of line and sensitivity to the melancholy introversion which colors every bar of the Concerto composed by Elgar in the wake of the First World War. Twenty years earlier, Elgar’s reputation was secured with audiences across Europe and America through the whirlwind success of his “Enigma” Variations. The stoic beauty of ‘Nimrod’, the gentle wit of ‘Dorabella’ and the nervous excitement and pride of the autobiographical finale spoke directly to listeners who would never know the composer or his ‘friends pictured within’. The agitated, impassioned voice of Elgar in the Variations belonged to its end-of-Empire time and place, orchestrated with a mastery which would soon draw the admiration of Richard Strauss and many more musicians on the other side of the English Channel. Even that quintessential expression of Englishness, the first of five marches which Elgar collected under the Shakesperean banner of “Pomp and Circumstance” and later repurposed to set ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ for the finale of his Coronation Ode, won the composer standing ovations when he conducted it in concerts across mainland Europe. Under the affectionate baton of their music director Filippo Arlia, the Orchestra Filarmonica della Calabria interpret Elgar’s music with a sensitivity and extroversion worthy of the composer.

During the late 18th century, compositions for string trio with a wind instrument were extremely popular in amateur circles; and in keeping with this highly fashionable trend, Mozart composed four quartets for flute and strings while on a tour of France and Germany with his mother. The 22-year-old composer had lately made the acquaintance of a solo flautist, Johann Baptist Wendling, who was in contact with a rich flute-playing patron. A handsome fee was offered for some concertos and quartets – more than Mozart’s annual salary as a court musician back at home in Salzburg – and so he set to work, completing the first quartet, K385, on Christmas Day 1777. The other works here may have been composed later – perhaps Mozart ran out of enthusiasm for the project – but they all count as examples of refined chamber music conceived for skilled amateur players and domestic consumption, While hardly as complex a showcase of Mozart’s compositional skills as the string quartets he dedicated to Haydn, all four quartets abounding in gentle wit and good humour, and written not as mini-concertos for flute and string trio but as chamber music for equal partners. Every now and then Mozart touches the sublime, as so often he could, such as the slow variation movement of K285b, which recalls the similar movement in the ‘Gran Partita’ wind serenade in its weightless gravity of expression. This new recording of the quartets offers a substantial bonus, in the shape of the Oboe Quartet K370 arranged for the ensemble at hand. The performances are led by the Italian flautist Andrea Manco, who in 2003, at just 20 years old, became principal flute of the Teatro Regio orchestra in Turin under the directorship of Gianandrea Noseda.

Brilliant Classics proudly presents the brand-new 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: Beethoven complete symphonies, Bach Passions, Schubert symphonies, Mozart piano sonatas, Telemann Tafelmusik, Vivaldi 4 Seasons plus concertos, Shostakovich string quartets, Dvorak symphonies, Grieg Lyric Pieces, and Haydn London Symphonies. World class performers include Staatskapelle Dresden with Herbert Blomstedt, Staatskapelle Berlin with Otmar Suitner, Klara Wurtz, Hakon Austbo, Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra with Adam Fischer, Rubio Quartet and others. The fresh and colorful artwork is eye-catching while the booklet contains liner notes in English. A new series at an unbeatable price! The present installment features Antonin Dvořák’s complete symphonies performed by the Staatskapelle Berlin under the baton of Otmar Suitmer.

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

Suitner’s versions of the symphonies came as a big and really happy surprise. Sample the vitality and freshness Suitner brings to the scherzo of the Second Symphony, or the dramatic power at the climax of the Seventh’s first movement. The performances are all of a piece: vibrant, propulsive, wonderfully played, without a single dead spot or interpretive misstep. They belong in any serious Dvořák collection.

-- ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

Comparatively few listeners even today know how much Dussek did toward developing the technical resources of the piano. The contemporary of Mozart, and a great pianist in his own right, he composed more than fifty Sonatas, twelve Concertos and many smaller pieces responding to the tastes of his audiences and publishers for smaller and lighter pieces such as variations on popular themes. The Sonatinas gathered here were composed primarily for instruction: simple and conventional in style, smaller in technical and emotional range, as well as shorter in length than his sonatas. Yet Dussek was a great melodist and, even when trivial, he never ceases to be graceful and pleasing. Dussek was resident in London throughout the 1790s and published there a good proportion of his prophetically Romantic sonatas and shorter pieces such as these sonatinas, which appeared in print in 1793 (Op.20) and 1794 (Op.34). Each Sonatina in the Op.20 set – also known as Op.19 – falls into a pair of short but distinct movements: a fairly quick, always sunny Allegro followed by a slightly slower Rondo. This is not the place for the keyboard fireworks of his later sonatas. Dussek was catering for the musical preferences of London middle-class amateurs, who hankered after a Romantic spotlighting of melody within the thinner, clearer lines of the Classical keyboard idiom. The 'song without words' texture can be traced in a direct line from Dussek through to Mendelssohn and beyond. The Sonatinas Op.20 were originally published ad libitum accompaniments for flute whereas Dussek’s introductory dedication to Op.34 makes their didactic purpose clear: ‘Twelve progressive lessons for the Piano Forte in which are introduced several characteristic airs of different nations, dedicated to the Right Honorable Lady Harriot Montague.’

The output of Marcel Dupré (1886-1971) is so vast and various that only scholars and fellow organists can expect to grasp its scale. Most listeners require a discerning ear to pull out some of the many highlights. The Italian organist Alessandro Perin has done so here, without confining himself to Dupré’s ‘greatest hits’, the characteristic pile-ups of chorale harmonies and torrents of semiquavers in toccatas and variations that find their natural home on the instruments of Cavaille-Coll as an apotheosis of the French Gothic organ style. Instead, Perin’s selection is more diverse. It begins with the Suite Op.39: four pieces originally written as part of a collection of 12 Studies, though they bear no trace of didacticism. Rather, there is a Lisztian quality of invention to their virtuosity, from the glittering cascades of the opening Allegro agitato to the driving counterpoint of the finale. The four settings of the Ave maris stella chant are progressively more ornate, from a simple statement of the chant over a walking bass, through an intricate Bachian chorale prelude, to a final, brilliant toccata. The ‘old Christmas carol’ featured in Op.20 variations is known in English as Now the green blade riseth: in one of his most justly celebrated works, Dupré treats the theme to a dazzling array of transformations, stretching the organist’s technique to the limit. At the height of the Second World War, Dupré composed the Evocation in memory of his father, and gave its first performance at the Cathedral in Rouen in 1941. Exactly what is being evoked is left to the listener to decide, though only the tender second-movement elegy casts its gaze back with fondness; the strident progress of the first movement seems to reflect the troubled times, and the finale has its own struggles to overcome in a final blaze of C major triumph.

The mythical figure of Pan is evoked by several composers on this album – explicitly so by Debussy, in his invocation to the Greek god which opens his set of six Epigraphes antiques and is here recorded for the first time in an arrangement for solo harp. Throughout the album, however, the world of Greek mythology infuses the music with a spirit of magical distance and enchantment. Claudio Ortensi and Anna Pasetti begin and end with a pair of rarely heard but delightful Divertissements grecs, by Jules Mouquet and Phillippe Gaubert. Another pair, of exquisite Esquisses antiques, reflects the refined taste and craft of Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht, better known to us now as the conductor of a classic account of Pelléas et Mélisande. The Greek fountain-nymphs known as Naiads are sensuously portrayed by William Alwyn in a substantial tone-painting, and the tale of Apollo and the satyr Marsyas is told in haunting fashion by the contemporary Italian composer Tiziano Bedetti. A more fleeting evocation of fauns is brought to life by his elder colleague Salvatore Sciarrino, and between them comes the Third Capriccio by Nino Mazzoni: a piece of two contrasting movements which begins with a delicate and elegant dance for naiads and closes with a sharply drawn sketch of Pan himself, laughing and carousing. Claudio Ortensi and Anna Pasetti formed their duet in 2011, and since then have given many concerts as well as an annual series of masterclasses dedicated to exploring and refining performances of flute and harp repertoire.

Angelo Gilardino’s unique blend of folk and contemporary earned him a spot among the most important guitar composers of the last fifty years. His works are marked by a Mediterranean glow and a feeling of a love for life. This new release shows the composer’s affinity for Sicily. Especially notable are the first three tracks, which are receiving here their world premiere recording. Gilardino wrote his own illuminating liner notes for this album. His previous recordings have been heralded as “…surreal in nature and open in texture…This is a treat for adventurous pursuers of the guitar concerto on the look-out for refreshing and distinctive contemporary additions to the repertoire.” (MusicWeb)

Almost completely unknown now, the six Sonatas for transverse flute and basso continuo by Felice Giardini (1716-1796), published in London late in 1751, were the first works of their kind to appear in print by a composer working in England. Giardini had taken London by storm with the brilliance of his violin playing, and his success there seemed assured. They were also the first sonatas published for obbligato harpsichord and violin, as opposed to violin ‘solos’ with a basso continuo. In practice, the solo part was often taken by a flute, as we find on this superb new, historically informed recording. Born in Turin, Giardini studied violin with the notable soloist and pedagogue Somis. He moved to Rome and then Naples, and by 1748 had become sufficiently renowned to seek his fortune on an international tour. When he arrived in London in 1750, however, he attracted immediate attention in aristocratic circles, and became a music master for figures including the Prince of Wales, as well as leading the orchestra of the King’s Theatre in London. He conducted the Three Choirs Festival in London between 1770 and 1776 before taking long tours of Italy and Spain. One last tour to Russia proved too much, and he died in Moscow in 1796. The contemporary reputation of Giardini’s Op.3 is indicated by the fact that it was reprinted on the Continent, at a time when relatively few English musical publications found their way into foreign catalogues. Giardini's sonatas are significant as a harbinger of the Classical concertante sonatas by Beethoven and his contemporaries, in that they work with a truly dualistic approach to the instruments. The two-movement sequence, bipartite form, and a flair for idiomatic writing reflect the influence of the popular Italian keyboard sonata.

Now best known for his ‘symphonic songs’ such as the Hymne an die Nacht, Alphons Diepenbrock won the admiration of his contemporaries Mahler and Strauss for the confident, post-Wagnerian handling of large orchestral forces in support of vocal lines soaked in passion and grief. Unlike them, however, he was chiefly inspired by poetry, and his output is dominated by vocal works, which are particularly fine in atmospheric evocation. Even when writing for the sparer medium of voice and piano, Diepenbrock laid his songs out expansively, underscored with yearning Wagnerian harmonies, and any listener in search of repertoire beyond the songs of Mahler and Strauss is in for a treat. Diepenbrock read widely, and drew on many sources for his songs: classical antiquity, religious texts from the Middle Ages, old Dutch poems, German Romantic choruses, modern French poetry and contemporary Dutch writers. The shared theme of these very different styles in his hands was a tendency towards mysticism and spiritual rapture. Little satisfied with mundane reality and the development of society, he found himself peculiarly attracted to poems which exalted the night and her mysteries. In the song output, this attraction is delicately handled in Der Abend and then much more erotically treated in Kann ich in Musen heisse Wünsche tragen, both on album 1. Album 2 is entirely dedicated to French lyrics by the likes of Verlaine and Rimbaud, full of Debussyan nocturne-like character. Album 3 gathers up the songs to Latin, Italian and Dutch lyrics, reaching a powerful climax with Bejaard, composed in 1917, as an expression of Diepenbrock's indignation towards the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914.

REVIEW:

This 3-CD set, recorded between February 1994 and April 1995, was originally issued by NM Classics, but Brilliant Classics has fortunately obtained the permission to re-release it here. The one drawback is that the booklet contains no song texts or translations. On the evidence here, Diepenbrock is certainly an interesting composer, original in some ways, whose music deserves to be heard and should not have fallen through the cracks of time if not one of the great musical geniuses of his day. Nonetheless, this set is well worth your hearing. All of the performances are excellent, all of the singers are first-rate, and thus they present to you the best possible picture of his talent.

– Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

Telemann published the Kleine Kammermusik in 1716 in Frankfurt: his second published collection, intended for performance equally with violin or flute. His preface indicates that these pieces share a light and cantabile style particularly tailored to amateur performers on their respective instruments, with relatively narrow intervals in the solo part. Nonetheless, their unfailingly stylish melodies invite performance by professionals such as this trio of Italian musicians, experienced in period-instrument performance and with a catalogue of distinguished albums on Brilliant Classics to their credit. The dance movements in each of the six Partitas are quintessential Telemann: brief, unaffected by false intensity even in the three minor-key works, always infused with a lively appreciation of harmony, beautifully proportioned structures and voice-leading that enables each voice of the counterpoint to be heard at any point. Telemann himself advertised the lack of chromaticism with charming candor: ‘I also cultivated the brevity of the Arias, partly to preserve the energy of the performer and partly to avoid boring the listener's ears due to the length… Finally, I have tried to present something that could meet everyone's taste.’ In this it can be conclusively said that he succeeded. The most recent collaboration of these fine musicians was a Brilliant Classics album of recorder sonatas by Marcello, Vivaldi and Bellinzani (96052) which attracted critical praise both for the rarity of the repertoire and the idiomatic finesse of the performances.