BRIDGE / BLACKWOOD: Cello Sonatas

BLACKWOOD, Easley: Radical Piano

Moving music of late-Romantic spirituality by three great 20th-century English composers.

Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor, Stanford Motets Op. 38, and Parry "Songs of Farewell."

Handel's violin sonatas, familiar to violinists and chamber audiences, have been inexplicably neglected on disc. These intimate, inviting sonatas show the seldom-heard side of Handel's genius.

"Violinist Rachel Barton triumphs in her first release for the Cedille label… Indeed, Rachel Barton's wonderfully vital Handel performances bring us some of the most refreshing, life-enhancing Baroque playing heard in years." -- Chicago Tribune

"[Rachel Barton] is one of the rare mainstream performers with a total grasp of Baroque style and embellishment, and the whole disc is a delight… The exhilarating bravura of her incisive articulation and sharply pointed rhythms is matched by Barton's singing line in her poised and elegant lyrical movements. Superb continuo players David Schrader and John Mark Rozendaal contribute to the real sense of ensemble teamwork." -- Fanfare

"Few non-specialists have gotten inside this procedure [of ornamentation] as convincingly as violinist Rachel Barton. Her playing is splendid on all levels - lovely tone, wonderfully expressive phrasing, secure technique, and strong involvement with the music. But the most unusual aspect of Barton's Handel is the convincing and imaginative way she embellishes the repeats in the music - adding runs, ornaments, and flourishes that give a different aspect to a phrase we've just recently heard… They help to enliven a cherishable disc." -- Classical Pulse

"A spritely partnership between violin and cello, with deft rhythmic accompaniment on harpsichord… The music's virtuosic character is rendered with superb, resonant double and triple stopping and de-emphasized dance motion in the allegros. Barton lets the music's raw, improvised feeling hang out a little, giving the recording a refreshing zest." -- Classical Net

"[Rachel Barton] uses a baroque bow with her modernized 17th-Century violin, making a wonderfully warm yet still focused sound, and her passage work is brilliant yet lyrical - much like the cascades of a coloratura - and her ornamentation is both thoughtful and virtuosic. This is a wonderful recording." -- American Record Guide

TCHAIKOVSKY: String Quartet No. 2 in F major / Souvenir de F

Pianist Ramon Salvatore, a champion of American music, harvests a program of attractive, distinctive yet neglected works by four prominent, living composers on his first recording for Cedille Records.

The disc offers debut recordings of Robert Palmer's neoclassically seasoned Third Sonata (dedicated to Salvatore) and Paul Bowles' evocative Carretera de Estepona. Other works include Bowles' Six Latin American Pieces, John LaMontaine's dramatic Piano Sonata, Op. 3, and Hunter Johnson's Piano Sonata, which The New York Times described as "an engrossing combination of Hindemith-like counterpoint and American blues."

The composers, who received advance copies of the recording, praise it robustly. Palmer notes "a clarity and understanding of every part of the work that is truly outstanding." He describes Salvatore as a "superb musician" and likens him to the late John Kirkpatrick for his dedication to popularizing neglected American masterpieces.

Bowles calls the recording of his pieces "the best I had heard." Johnson declares the recording of his Sonata "a knockout in every respect. I would call it definitive -- everything exactly right -- one by which to measure all other performances of it." To LaMontaine, it's "nothing less than stupendous."

Salvatore's interest in American music extends back into the 19th century, but he devotes this recording to "a lost generation of works" by American composers whose personal styles blossomed in the 1930s and 1940s -- styles marked by new harmonies and rhythms an ocean apart from European influences that once dominated American music.