The precursor to this album made a Critic’s Choice of the Year in Gramophone (2013). The program presented includes works by Benjamin Britten, William Mathias, Arnold Cooke, and Gerald Finzi. Michael Collins brilliantly walks the line between being a soloist and conductor, as he serves as both in this recording. The accompanying ensemble here is the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The Elora Festival Singers, conducted by internationally acclaimed director Noel Edison, is one of the most exciting of contemporary choirs. Their disc of Eric Whitacre’s choral music was nominated for a GRAMMY® in 2010. Now they turn to the art of the Christmas carol, a genre covering a variety of styles, both popular and refined, each piece expressing religious sentiments and beliefs. The music ranges from much-loved settings to new works, from polyphony to more straightforward melodies, in a recital stretching from the Middle Ages to the music of today.

Classical Music

This collection draws together many of the much-loved and most-requested shorter choral works by John Rutter. Gathered from across the Collegium catalogue, 'Be Thou My Vision' includes all of the church anthems and other sacred pieces for which Rutter is justly famous, representing for the first time a handy compendium of the best-loved Rutter works in their definitive performances by the Cambridge Singers, directed by the composer. 'The recordings of Rutter conducting his own music with the Cambridge Singers remain gleaming beacons of irrepressible music-making.' - BBC Music Magazine

George Frederic Handel's music has thrilled a wide audience for over 300 years. Today it is more popular than ever and you can find it almost everywhere: on opera stages, in churches and concerts, even on the TV broadcasts of the Football Champions League. Handel was celebrated throughout Europe during his lifetime, in Hamburg as well as in Italy - they called him "dear Saxony" (il caro Sassone) - and of course in England, his main place of work. For the Pfeiffer Trumpet Consort, which has dealt with Handel's work since it's foundation, it was only natural to design his fifth album on Cantate in the year of his 250th death exclusively with works by Baroque's most important composer besides Bach. In numerous works, the trumpets set the triumphal highlights, reason enough for the ensemble to make their own arrangements in the greatest possible variety. In addition to the main work - the "Fireworks Music" - a small insight into Handel's extensive oeuvre should be granted, for example with excerpts from the oratorio "Saul", the world-famous aria "Lascia ch'�o pianga" to the "Collection of Original Marches", a probably unique compilation of small cabinet pieces from Handel's operas, oratorios and instrumental music. - The Pfeiffer Trumpet Consort was founded by the brothers Joachim, Harald and Martin Pfeiffer together with the organist Peter Schumann at the Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg, initially with four trumpets. Mathias M�ller, the timpanist, soon joined. When it comes to it's own arrangements, the Pfeiffer Trumpet Consort is particularly keen to combine the possibilities of today's instruments and baroque playing practice. The ensemble continues to appeal to a wide audience of audiences with great enthusiasm.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was one of Italy’s most influential and important composers during the 20th century. He was inspired to write for the guitar after meeting Andrés Segovia, and in the years that followed he wrote over one hundred works for the instrument. The Quintet for Guitar and String Quartet, a rare combination, reveals perfect sonority and construction with a serene Iberian mood. The Sonatina for Flute and Guitar contrasts joyfulness with poignant melodies, while the Eclogues are bucolic and lively. Written for Segovia and his wife Paquita Madriguera, the Fantasia for guitar and piano presents an expertly blended texture for this combination of instruments. Guitarist Leonard Becker is the Second Prize winner of the International Hannabach Guitar Competition 2020, held in Augsburg, Germany. He has performed with orchestras including the Pilsen Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he performed Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuezin 2019. Alongside Louis Vandory, Valerie Steenken, Elisabeth Buchner and Márton Braun he is the founder of the Tedesco-Quintett (guitar and string quartet), which won First Prize at the International Chamber Music Competition ‘Gerhard Vogt’ in 2019.

This is the second volume in the EP series ‘The Library’. The idea behind this series is to explore both the history, and the new horizons, of The King’s Singers close-harmony repertoire. Close-harmony is the part of their work for which they are best known, and their library of thousands of arrangements is one they’re determined to explore, maintain and develop. The track -listing is designed to celebrate some old favorites from the library alongside brand new arrangements and adaptations, created especially for these recordings, which may perhaps become ‘old favorites’ of the future. Volume 2 was recorded in the beautiful surroundings of Snape Maltings, Suffolk (UK) - a place most famous for its association with Benjamin Britten - and it proved to be a relaxing and inspiring place to work for two beautiful wintry days. The King’s Singers were founded on 1 May 1968 by six choral scholars who had recently graduated from King’s College Cambridge. Their vocal line-up was (by chance) two countertenors, a tenor, two baritones and a bass, and the group has never wavered from this formation since.

Czech by birth, Paul Wranitzky settled in Vienna where he became highly respected as an orchestra leader and composer. Today overshadowed by his friends Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Wranitzky was the most important symphonist in Vienna in the late 1790s. The colorful overture to Der Schreiner (‘The Carpenter’) is followed by three contrasting symphonies. The dramatic ‘La Tempesta’ contains elaborate storm effects, which predate Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ by over a decade. The compact Symphony in A major represents Wranitzky’s early symphonic period of the mid-1780s while the Symphony in F major is notable for its catchy themes and masterful scoring. This second volume of world premiere recordings follows Vol. 1 (8.574227) released in April 2021.The scores for both recordings are the result of exhaustive research amongst numerous European archives by top Wranitzky scholar Daniel Bernhardsson. Pizzicato gave Vol. 1 four stars, writing: ‘The orchestra’s playing is fresh and spirited, with plenty of melodic immediacy and a charmingly elegant lightness.’

Much of Franz Joseph Haydn’s long career was in service as a court musician to the wealthy Esterházy family. It was early in Haydn’s time at the Esterháza palace that Prince Nicolaus took a liking to the hypnotic sound of the baryton – a bowed instrument with an extra set of strings that vibrate sympathetically or are plucked for tonal contrast. The baryton was considered the pinnacle of 18th-century aristocratic instruments, and the outstanding beauty of Haydn’s trios represent its final renaissance, placing this remarkable antique firmly into the poised and tasteful Classical style of the day. The Valencia Baryton Project comprises musicians from the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía opera house in Valencia and the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, who came together with the vision of performing the almost 160 works by Joseph Haydn written for the baryton, a cross between a viola da gamba and a lirone. At the heart of the ensemble is the traditional baryton trio – baryton, viola and cello – for which Haydn wrote 123 works of outstanding beauty during his time as court composer for Prince Esterhazy of Austria. Members of the Valencia Baryton Project have performed in chamber ensembles including Quarteto Radamés Gnattali, the Elan Quintet, Gogmagogs and Trio Vanguardia and with orchestras including the RTVE Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the BBC Philharmonic. The Valencia Baryton Project is the first ensemble to record the baryton for Naxos.

Praised by The New York Times for her ‘clear articulation … unequivocal phrasing … [and] expressivity’, Ingrid Jacoby has established herself as one of her generation’s most poetic and admired pianists.Winner of numerous prizes and competitions, she has, since moving to England, performed with many major orchestras, including the LSO, the LPO and the RPO, as well as the London Mozart Players, and worked with many eminent conductors.Her new recording of Mozart’s Concertos K467 and K488, complete with the Rondo K386, and accompanied by the internationally celebrated ASMF conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, follows on from her acclaimed earlier recording of the Concertos K449 and K595 which received excellent reviews from Int’l Record Review, Gramophone and Fanfare magazines, among others.The accompanying booklet contains notes by Richard Wigmore and personal insights by Ingrid Jacoby on Mozart.

For the second volume of the music of Eric Coates, John Wilson has built his programme around three contrasting ‘major’ works. The Suite Summer Days was premiered in October 1919, shortly after Henry Wood had fired Coates from his position as lead viola in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. An immediate hit, the suite received rave reviews and many more performances. It was recorded in 1926, Sir Edward Elgar telling Coates that he had played it so often that he had worn out the album! The Selfish Giant, from 1925, based on Oscar Wilde’s story, was the first in a series of highly successful musical retellings of fairy tales. The Enchanted Garden originated in a commission from the Swedish Broadcasting Company. Although he described The Enchanted Garden as a ballet, Coates conceived it principally as a concert work. Composed in June and July 1938, it was premiered in a BBC radio broadcast in November that year, immediately before Coates took it on tour to Stockholm. Of the other, shorter pieces on the album, Calling All Workers is arguably Coates’s best-known work, composed in the summer of 1940 and dedicated ‘to all who work’. The march was adopted by the BBC as the signature tune for their new daily radio show ‘Music While You Work’, and was heard twice daily for twenty-seven years – clocking up more than 16,000 broadcast performances.

REVIEWS:

The second volume in John Wilson’s Eric Coates edition for Chandos reprises the excellence to be found in the first. Wilson has recorded much Coates for other labels but to find him return to the repertoire in a more formalized way is especially good news.

– MusicWeb International

Wilson has been a Coates champion for decades and has the natural lightness of touch to make these works, including a substantial ballet, The Enchanted Garden, and an Oscar Wilde-based phantasy, The Selfish Giant, sparkle.

– Sunday Times (UK)

Along with Petrali, Davide di Bergamo and Fumagalli, Giovanni Morandi was one of the most influential organ composers of the 18th century. During his time as Master of Music at the cathedral of Senigallia, he wrote a great deal of liturgical works for organ. Morandi’s organ pieces feature brilliant melodies, pianistic writing, and sonic effects which mirrored the Italian opera world that was thriving around Morandi. This particular recording is made on an organ built by Gaetano Callido for the Paris church of SS Simon and Thaddeus in Borca di Cadore, as well as on an 1830 organ built by Antonio and Angelo Amati. Full organ specifications are included in the booklet.

This survey is the sequel to comparably comprehensive Brilliant Classics collections of 20th-century guitar preludes and sonatas. The sonatinas included take their place as part of a long process of study conducted by Cristiano Porqueddu over the past few years. The high percentage of world premiere recordings - more than half of the entire tracklist - should give a good idea of how the research was conducted: as with the two previous releases, space has been given to those works that rarely appear either in concert or on record, in order to give voice to a considerable amount of excellent music almost completely ignored. Porqueddu made a longlist of over 60 sonatinas by 20th-century and by living composers, before narrowing down the final choice to the 17 performed here. Before Porqueddu, of course, there was the pioneer of modern guitar performance a century ago, Andres Segovia, who commissioned and inspired countless composers to write for him. One of those was the English composer Cyril Scott, and while Segovia expressed some misgivings about the result – ‘I’m not head over heels about it’, he wrote to his friend Manuel Ponce – the three-movement Sonatina makes a fine test of any guitarist’s musicianship and effectively inhabits the Spanish guitar tradition with its mysterious slow introduction and hypnotic central, Flamenco-style slow movement. The sonatinas by Mark Delpriora, Carlos Surinach and Albert Harris are no less compressed in expression, using the sonatina form to pack ideas into ten minutes that would occupy half an hour in the hands of lesser composers. The seven works of Angelo Gilardino are more expansive, though full of character, testifying to the unique relationship between composer and performer: Porqueddu himself. The pieces by Alberto Franco and Franco Cavallone were also composed with Porqueddu in mind, while the Sonatina Lirica by Segovia’s English pupil John Duarte is a hidden gem. ‘a most compelling collection from five composers, none of whom were guitarists… coruscating variety, fine recorded sound and lovingly shaped playing.’ (MusicWeb International). ‘Porqueddu’s work is once more of excellent quality and shows how he is able to create individual interpretations of contemporary repertoire.’ (Seicorde).

Each of the three violin concertos by Telemann on the seventh volume (but not the last!) of our complete series merits separate consideration in view of its singular musical character and special transmission history. In two cases stylistic descriptions and evaluations are bound up with the question of the authenticity of these compositions. This applies to the Overture Suites TWV 55:A8 and TWV 55:A4. Our expert booklet author Dr. Wolfgang Hirschmann regards the attribution of the first suite to Telemann as entirely justified, even though it perhaps involves a rather early example of this composer’s concerts en ouverture. The interpretation of this work by the Wallfisch Band is a multifaceted and just as virtuosic rendering that makes a compelling case for this fine one-of-a-kind piece situated between the concerto and suite genres – a work that absolutely has to be included in a complete recording! Although the second overture suite really should be assigned to the ranks of the anonymous, Adolf Hoffmann categorically labeled it as a piece by Telemann in his dissertation on the orchestral suites (1969) and classified it as a “masterpiece” by this composer. The solo violin is highly effectively employed along with a finely developed feeling for tone-color effects, and the movements are ambitiously elaborated in length and form. No matter how plausible the case for Telemann’s authorship may be – these works enable us to participate in a fascinating journey back in time to European music culture around 1720.

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The award-winning Canadian composer elaborates, “One can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance.” The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording.

When Ignaz Pleyel concluded his work on the last of his twelve “Prussian Quartets,” he had already garnered a great deal of experience as a composer of string quartets. His unmistakable musical voice had brought him countless admirers – including, not least, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who enthusiastically wrote of the Quartets op. 1 in a letter to his father. The dedicatory preface suggests that Pleyel had composed all of its pieces in Italy. He described them as “musically profound,” thereby indicating that Haydn’s Quartets op. 20 may have been their immediate model. The fugue movements in the Quartets Benton 328 and 330 are fascinating. Although Pleyel claimed that he had written them in the Italian style, Mozart was not fooled here: in their refined elegance he recognized the unique signature of Pleyel’s teacher Joseph Haydn. Nevertheless, the pupil had succeeded in writing a brilliant series of quartets in keeping with his own ideas and combining the clarity of the Italian style with the wealth of technical imagination characterizing the Viennese style.

A large measure of Mozart's increasing fascination with the clarinet from the later 1780s was due to his interaction with one of the cutting-edge virtuosi of the day, Anton Stadler, for whom both of the works on this CD were composed as well as the Clarinet Concerto, K. 662. Both works are played here by Australian virtuoso, Owen Watkins on reproductions of period clarinets, including a basset instrument, with extended lower range, for the Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581. Jaap Schr�der, an expert in the violin repertoire of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, founded the Sk�lholt Quartet and lead the Quartetto Esterhazy and Smithson String Quartet, performing and recording classical quartet repertoire for the first time on period instruments. Oboist Owen Watkins has performed and recorded with many premier ensembles in the USA, Europe and Australia, including Boston Baroque, the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston Camerata, Washington Bach Consort, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Pinchgut Opera and Orchestra of the Antipodes, Orchestra 1788 and the Cambini Quintet. A faculty member of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute for twenty-five years, Penelope Crawford is internationally acclaimed as one of America's master performers on historical keyboard instruments. From 1975 to 1990, she was harpsichordist and fortepianist with the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra, one of the first period instrument ensembles in North America.

At Puccini's time, transcriptions were very important and widespread, you just need to take a look at the some of the scores published by Casa Ricordi to get an idea: in fact, on the back cover you would be able to read an astonishing list of transcriptions, of fantasias and potpourris, either rewritten for piano solo (or four-hands) or for the most various ensembles, for piano and mandolin, violin, flute, guitar, or for other instruments, either in a solo or in combination with many others. It was the result of a publishing policy that was in full swing at that time and that was addressed to a large public of amateurs, a public keen to learn the repertoires meant to be played by many instruments, like opera scores. These pieces were played at home, in front of a very small and selected audience, the amateurs often wanted to perform operas that they had attended to. But that is not all, these performances were also able to popularize compositions that would have be left unknown otherwise. In the XIX century, the transcriptions for piano, especially for piano four hands, were an important vehicle for the diffusion of musical knowledge. Purposely thought for this formation, in this album the piano duo by the spouses Fabrizio Datteri and Nadia Lencioni is performing compositions inspired by the famous works and the immortal melodies of Giacomo Puccini.

MYSTERY VARIATIONS ON GIUSEPPE COLOMBI’S CHIACONA • Anssi Karttunen (vc) • TOCCATA 0171 (79:57)


COLOMBI Chiacona. KAIPAINEN Anything Goes. MATALON Polvo. REYNOLDS Colombi Daydream. COHEN Chaconne. TIENSUU Bleuelein. STUCKY Partite Sopra un Basso. SALONEN Sarabande per un Coyote. CAMPION Something to Go On. WALLIN Ciacconetta. ORTIZ Paloma. HEININEN Triple Antienne. HILLBORG Still and Flow. LERDAHL There and Back Again. PUUMALA Se Sillan. DUSAPIN 50 Notes in 3 Variations . HAKOLA Colombi Variation. DUN Chiacona After Colombi. NEIKRUG Tiny Colombi. YUASA Locus on Colombi’s Chiacona. WIGGLESWORTH Arietta. MATTHEWS Drammatico. SAARIAHO Dreaming Chaconne. FEDELE Preludio and Ciaccona. GLOBOKAR Idée Fixe. DAZZI Variation Sombre et Libre d’après Chiacona. TUOMELA Idulla. JOLAS A Fancy for Anssi. SRNKA A Variation. FRANCESCONI Anssimetry. LINDBERG Duello


Mystery Variations contains 30 different short works based on Giuseppe Colombi’s Chiacona. Colombi who lived from 1635 to 1694 replaced Giovanni Bononcini as maestro di cappella of the Modena Cathedral in Italy in 1678. The Chiacona is only one of an enormous number of pieces he wrote for various instruments, chamber groups, and orchestras. It is, however, said to be the oldest piece written for the cello. The music is part of a collection from the court of Francesco II of Este at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. The idea for the Mystery Variations came from composer Kaija Saariaho and Muriel von Braun, the wife of cellist Anssi Karttunen, as a means of celebrating the cellist’s 50th birthday. They asked each of 30 composers to write a variation on the Chiacona . None of the composers knew who else had been asked and Karttunen promised to premiere music that he had not yet heard. Most of the variations range from just under two to just over three minutes long, so all of them fit on one disc. Few of these variations are truly melodic, most depend on texture, drama, percussion, and tonal color to excite the senses of the listener. Only one of the composers, Colin Matthews, uses electronics. Mark Neikrug and Magnus Lindberg use the letters of the cellist’s name as part of their variations. Some composers, such as Tan Dun, who was born in China and Pablo Ortiz from Argentina, make use of their native cultures while others, like Argentinian Martin Matalon and Texan Edmund Campion turn elsewhere. Matalon creates novel textures and far off sounds with a mute while Campion includes some aspects of Happy Birthday in his variation. Roger Reynolds’s Colombi Daydream , evokes an element of foreboding, while Jukka Tiensuu’s Bleuelein and Paavo Heininen’s Triple Antienne have plaintive, pleading qualities.


Composers like Steven Stucky, Kimmo Hakola, Joji Yuasa, Ivan Fedele, and Magnus Lindberg are fully aware of Karttunen’s virtuosity and have written works that show off some of his skills. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Sarabande for a Coyote starts with the cello sounding a bit like a harp, before introducing some charming harmonies that expand the usual cello range. Rolf Wallin’s Ciacconetta has sliding arpeggios that resolve into an impressive dance. Lerdahl’s There and Back Again uses the dance to guide us from Colombi’s time forward to our own and back again. Anders Hillborg’s Still and Flow treats us to his seriously studied version of Bach. The in-your-face style of Veli-Mali Puumala’s… Se Sillan… is rather unique and it added a bit of spice to the mixture on this disc. Kartunnen follows it with Dusapin’s 50 Notes in 3 Variations, an inventive and intuitive work that resolves into a tone color-filled meditation. Also in the meditative mood, Ryan Wigglesworth’s Arietta offers more respite from the dramatic. Kaija Saariaho’s Dreaming Chaconne portrays a pastoral scene with her full-blooded sound vocabulary. In Idée Fixe, Vinko Globokar asks the cellist to sing and I found it a distraction. Gualtiero Dazzi’s Variation Sombre et Libre d’après Chiacona brings us a sweet and smooth melody played in the cello’s lowest notes. Idulla means germinating and Tapio Tuomela brings us a fantasy that includes tonal color and percussion. Betsy Jolas’s A Fancy for Anssi creates rivers of sound that broaden out to reflect fragments of Colombi’s theme. Miroslav Srnka, on the other hand, uses slides and double-stops to make us hunt for the theme while Luca Francesconi makes use of it openly but varies it in unexpected ways. The finale is Magnus Lindberg’s Duello , a dialogue between the Chiacona and music based on the cellist’s full name. It ends with a pleasing melody that leaves the listener feeling that the music was worthwhile hearing. The sound on this disc is excellent and I think many of our readers will find it interesting.


FANFARE: Maria Nockin

Classical Music

LE BEAU 3 Klavierstücke. Original Theme with Variations . Sonata. 8 Preludes. Improvisata . Gavotte. Ballade. 3 Old Dances. Deutscher Reigen. Trauermarsch. Klavierstücke . Barcarole. Abendklaänge • Ana-Marija Markovina (pn) • GENUIN 10177 (79:48)


We often mourn the great music we have missed because of a handful of composers that died prematurely (Mozart, Schubert) or before a major breakthrough (Wagner). A far greater tragedy was the de facto removal of women from the compositional profession for most of the history of Western music, a state of affairs that has improved radically in recent decades.


Luise Adolphe Le Beau may seem like a mere historical footnote for those not familiar with her music (that included me until recently), but if this disc is any indication, this is one composer whose reappraisal is not happening quickly enough. She wrote in most of the major genres of the day, but not surprisingly it is her piano and chamber works that are getting the first modern glances. More often than not I’m skeptical about these revivals, but this fine recording by Marija Markovina of Le Beau’s complete piano works should spark renewed interest.


Biographical information isn’t easy to come by for the German composer, even with notes that are otherwise substantial. Her primary fame seemed to spring from her concertizing, though her compositions did make a minor splash with other composers of the day (Clara Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, and critic Hanslick) and in at least one contest. The demands on the pianist are significant, though by no means on the same level of virtuosity of Liszt or even Brahms. Some of these bear the hallmarks of parlor pieces, but others are substantial enough to take pride of place on a concert stage. The Improvisata has more meat than the name might imply, with a suggestion of a barcarolle in the rolling melody in triplets. The Ballade has some Chopin in its DNA, but there are also touches of Schumann and Brahms here as well as in most of the other works. The central tune is a thing of beauty, and the bravura final pages are stirring.


Her gift for spinning simple and memorable tunes is nowhere more apparent than in the sweetly pastoral Three Old Dances . The most extended work, Original Theme with Variations, dates from her early years, but the skills seem already fully developed. Here the mark of Schumann is most pronounced, with concentrated, inventive variations that reach well beyond the clichés of the Classical or early Romantic era.


I don’t often highly recommend obscure works beyond a pool of dedicated specialists. Here is a happy exception, a generous helping of engaging piano works performed in captivating style by a perceptive pianist. As a bonus for the collector, this is one recording that is sure to stump any competitors in a game of “guess that composer.”


FANFARE: Michael Cameron

Another wonderful disc from Ilya Kaler.

Ilya Kaler’s new recording of the Brahms concerto on Naxos is eminently recommendable. When reviewing his recent recording of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (see review) I remarked that Kaler’s performance was one “of elegance as well as brilliance” that “wears it war-horse status lightly, impressing itself upon the listener by virtue of its freshness and natural feeling”. Those comments are equally applicable to this recording.

Kaler’s conception of Brahms’ score is one that rejoices in its beauties. Ably supported by the warm sounds exhaled by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Kaler’s violin sings with a golden tone and sweetly inflected phrasing. He takes his time over the first movement, but maintains his rhythmic control and sense of the music’s overall architecture. In this his performance succeeds where, as Jonathan Woolf points out, Julia Fischer’s similarly conceived account fails. Kaler also lingers lovingly over the gorgeous slow movement – taking over 10 minutes. His pacing is more conventional in the Hungarian finale, which smiles more than it swaggers here.

The coupling of Brahms and Schumann is astute. Firstly it makes programmatic sense. Both concertos share the tonality of D – Brahms in the glowing major, Schumann in the dramatic minor. Both were written for Joachim, and the bond between Schumann and Brahms themselves is as well known as it is complicated.

Secondly, the coupling is an attractive addition to the Naxos catalogue. It complements an earlier disc (Naxos 8.550938), on which Kaler joins cellist Maria Kliegel in Brahms’ double concerto, offered as a coupling for Kliegel’s performance of the Schumann cello concerto. Buy these two discs, and you have the complete Schumann and Brahms string concertos at one fell swoop.

The coupling of the Schumann and Brahms concertos is also fairly unusual in the broader catalogue. While recordings of the Brahms proliferate, there are few recordings of the Schumann concerto and when they do appear they tend to be lumped together with more Schumann. Only Joshua Bell, to my knowledge, has coupled these two concertos on disc before. That disc now forms half of a mid-price twofer in the price bracket above this release (Decca – The Joshua Bell Edition – 4756703). Bell's recording is also available at bargain basement price on Australian Eloquence, but sundered from its Brahms coupling.

Schumann wrote his violin concerto very quickly in the autumn of 1853. Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann had reservations about the piece. In happier times Schumann would probably have revised the piece, but the rapid decline in his mental health prevented this and the score languished unplayed and unknown until the 1930s. It is an attractive piece, constructed along classical lines, and deserves more attention and respect than it is usually accorded. The first movement has a symphonic seriousness and integrity, contrasting the wild, surging argument of its first subject with a gentle, sensitive second subject. The central movement is quietly beautiful. The finale, in the form of a polonaise and with prominent wind writing, brings the concerto dancing to a close.

Kaler's performance is successful and offers collectors a distinct choice. Bell's recording has a straight forward brilliance and Kremer's EMI recording with Muti, like Menuhin's electric premiere recording of the uncut score, emphasises the drama of the work. Kaler takes a different view. Again favouring spacious tempi – his first movement at 14:28 takes a minute longer than Bell's and two minutes longer than Menuhin's – he presents the concerto very much as the classical conception of a poetic soul. Where the other interpreters listed above play for Florestan, Kaler takes Eusebius' part.

The balance favours the violin in both concertos, but there is air enough around the soloist, and the warm Lighthouse Concert Hall acoustic gives the orchestral sound a lovely glow. Listening through earphones can be disconcerting in the Schumann where either Kaler's or the conductor’s breathing is quite prominent. I did not notice this so much when listening through speakers.

Keith Anderson's liner-notes live up to his usual high standard, but gloss over the circumstances of the Schumann concerto's rediscovery by Joachim's great-niece and avoid entirely discussion of the political wrangling over the concerto's premiere performances.

Another wonderful disc from Ilya Kaler and a bargain of the month.

-- Tim Perry, MusicWeb International

Marco Antonio Mazzone (1556-1626) was a composer, musician, clergyman, and author of several literary works. In his book of Madrigals for four voices he places the text and the music on the same level, the consanguinity of these two arts: “notes are the body of music and words are the soul, and as the soul must be followed and imitated by the body to be more worthy of it, so the notes must follow and imitate the words.” The first Madrigal book contains both secular and sacred songs. The performance by the ensemble “Le vaghe ninfe” follows the performance practice of the period, in which much importance was laid on variety: a cappella, voice and organ, tablature for guitar or harpsichord, alternating voices and instrumental ensemble. When the madrigal is performd with instruments only the music is preceded by the reading of the poem.

Classical Music

Only now are we fully aware of the true immensity of Vivaldi’s concerto repertoire. The violin is by no means the only instrument he favored: the place of the bassoon in his work catalogue is remarkable for its size and stylistic homogeneity, as well as for his solistic treatment of an instrument previously confined to the continuo. Seven new concertos here join the twenty-six already recorded in the first four volumes of the Vivaldi Edition, an anthology Sergio Azzolini embarked on in 2009 with L’Aura Soave, and now builds on with L’Onda Armonica.