This CD contains settings of texts by Petrarch by Italian Renaissance composers.

Mozart: Piano Concertos

CHOEURS DE L'OPERA DE VIENNE -

BACH: GOLDBERG VARIATIONS ANT

Fou Ts'ong's excellently recorded Chopin series continues with four late works, and with some of the best playing that I have heard from him. Outstanding pianistic craft is displayed almost everywhere, as in the double trills of the Barcarolle and treble trills of the Polonaise-Fantaisie... In some quiet passages of the Barcarolle, as in the Berceuse's exquisite traceries, Fou Ts'ong approaches Debussy's ideal of a piano without hammers, his tone suggesting the utmost sensitivity. And in the Barcarolle, though every detail is exactly shaped, it is the grand sweep of the music as a whole that dominates.

Without underestimating the problems of the other pieces, it can safely be said that the Polonaise-Fantaisie is the most difficult work here to interpret. Fou Ts'ong does many excellent things, especially in the poco pià lento section; and note the dream-like reverie in which the music restarts after the return of the introductory gestures. But he does not achieve quite the flow, the sense of conviction, that mark his other...performances. Just the same, this issue still should have the attention of all Chopin collectors.

-- Gramophone [7/1979, reviewing the Berceuse, Barcarolle, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie]

...Ferro conducts with a mixture of ease and ebullience... [T]he Ferro set is well cast, with Enzo Dara as an amusing Magnifico, the young Francisco Araiza ardent and freshvoiced as the Prince, and Lucia Valentini Terrani—the leading Cenerentola of her time—giving a reading that is ripe, meaningful and suitably virtuosic in its lustrous, dark-grained way.

-- Gramophone [6/1991]
reviewing the complete Cenerentola

Of the many new friendships enjoyed by the 21 year-old Chopin on his arrival in Paris, none proved more lasting than that with the distinguished cellist, August Franchomme (just two years his senior), for whom he eventually wrote his one and only cello sonata. It could well have been their first early collaboration in a commission for a Grand Duo on themes from Meyerbeer's Roberto le diable—so rightfully serving here, in a richly relished interpretation from Bylsma and Orkis, as centrepiece—that set the Frenchman atingle to provide his cello with more.

Not too many tears need be shed that all his other works included here have long disappeared from the repertory. Alone, on his own two feet, he was certainly no Chopin (who, incidentally, must have truly loved him to sanction the merging of two of his own truncated Nocturnes in the transcription for cello and piano in track 3). But there are attractive touches of local colour in the opening and closing sets of French and Russian variations, while the Grande va/se, Op. 34, shows how willingly Franchomme was prepared to let his cello just dance and sing. Enough enjoyment, in fact, for every collector to rejoice at such rarity enterprise.

I suspect that this music might have won Franchomme even more immediate friends if coming from a team less dedicated to matters of 'period' sonority and style than Bylsma and his colleagues have always been—and, incidentally, the Erard piano from which Orkis conjures so many arresting things was a present from Queen Victoria to her dear Albert, housed at Balmoral from 1855-1977. But don't be put off, as in this context I was, initially. Your ear soon tunes in. The recording itself very closely and vividly conveys these players' wide range of dynamics and colour as well as such extraneous proofs of musical involvement as Bylsma's gasping intakes of breath. The all-embracing insert-notes of the supporting cellist, Kenneth Slowik, are a true bonus.

-- JOC, Gramophone [4/1995]

STRAUSS: EIN HELDENLEBEN, DON

...[I]n such a spirited reading [as this performance of the Prokofiev First] the parallels between the Prokofiev and the Bizet [Symphony in C] are very much highlighted: the 'classical' symphonies of Prokofiev's title—those, presumably, of Haydn and Mozart — seem comparatively remote. But for all their brilliance elsewhere the players manage to be sinuously winning enough in the Symphony's slow movement... [a performance] of the very first class.

-- Gramophone [5/1969, reviewing an LP release of the First Symphony]

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Bernstein gives a highly romantic version of the first movement... [I]t could hardly be better done... The playing throughout the whole symphony is in the highest class and the recording is of the same quality.

-- Gramophone [10/1967, reviewing the original LP release of the Fifth Symphony]

CHOPIN: POLONAISES, ETC ALEXA

This disc received a 1997 Grammy nomination for "Best Chamber Music Performance".

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

Luna

BERLITZ PASSPORT - THE MUSIC O

BERLITZ PASSPORT - THE MUSIC O

BERNSTEIN FAVORITES- TCHAIKOVS

MONTEVERDI: VESPRO DELLA BEATA

Selections recorded 1984 and 1985.

SCHNITTKE: VIOLIN SONATA NO 1,

BEETHOVEN: DIABELLI VARIATIONS

TAKE 2 - DEBUSSY: ORCHESTRAL W

After Robert Holl’s outstanding recent disc of Brahms Lieder, Marjana Lipovsek, a singer of no less searching musical sense and sensibility, adds her own selection to the catalogue. Her strong and spirited Eastern European mezzo-soprano brings an appropriate inwardness and intensity to four of the five Op. 105 songs. Purposeful phrasing runs gently through the senses in ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’, like the song’s eponymous melody, and penetrates the very heart of the soul’s winter in ‘Immer leiser’. All, though, is not angst. Lipovsek and her accompanist Charles Spencer are sensitive to the rapidly shifting moods within a group of songs, so that the numb darkness of Heine’s cool night of death is recreated as evocatively as the light-filled morning of his ‘Es schauen die Blumen’. Later, a steely vocal strength for ‘Von ewiger Liebe’ can dissolve to the lunar evanescence of ‘Die Mainacht’. Lipovsek’s thrilling grasp of the regional idiom of the final three folksongs is in glaring contrast to the infelicitous English (American) translations in the accompanying text: I doubt that Brahms’s poets would own up to an ‘incalibrate glow’, a ‘cute little child’ or, still worse, ‘a together time’.

-- Hilary Finch, BBC Music Magazine

MAHLER: SYMPHONIES NO 9 & 10 (

Live in Osaka

MAHLER: SYMPHONIES NO 6 & 7 M