• Milan-born pianist, composer and conductor Giorgio Gaslini is a jazz musician of international fame, who to his credit has given more than 3,000 concerts, recorded 100 CD's and is a ten-time Critics Award winner. The flute works were composed between 1955 and 2011. Their performer and dedicatee is Roberto Fabbriciani, with whom Gaslini has had a long collaboration."

This album is a wonderful showcase of over forty years of activity of the Witold Lutoslawski Chamber Philharmonic. The albums programme shows the repertoire versatility of a chamber orchestra (from Baroque to contemporary music). Thus, we are dealing with a kaleidoscope of various compositional styles, which allows us to appreciate the ensembles multifaceted capabilities. The Witold Lutoslawski Chamber Philharmonic in Lomza was established in 1977 as the Lomza Chamber Orchestra. During its 40 years of existence, it has given almost two thousand concerts in Poland and abroad. It has received a number of awards for its activity and contribution to the development of musical culture, including the Podlasie Brand of the Year 2018 and Lomza Business Angel 2019.

This album is dedicated to the works for flute and orchestra by Ottorino Respighi - a leading exponent of the “Generation of the Eighties” and a very refined composer, gifted with an excellent skill in the use of instrumental timbres - includes the world premiere recording of two works for flute and strings that came back to light after a long oblivion (and now published by Roberto Fabbriciani for the editors Suvini Zerboni). Fabbriciani can also be considered the first interpreter ever, given that there is no evidence of performances in the period in which they were composed. The “Suite” and the diptych “Melodia” and “Valse caressante” are in fact works dating back to the composer's first prolific period, remaining until now manuscripts in custody of the Museum of Music in Bologna and the Fondazione Cini in Venice. The Serenade for small orchestra and the suite “Gli Uccelli” complete the production, expanding the vision of Respighi's compositions to the writing in his full maturity.

The combination of flute and guitar was a feature of early tango recordings – instruments central both to the genre and to the music of Astor Piazzolla. The composer’s quintessential Histoire duTango charts the form’s evolution from its appearance in the barrios of Buenos Aires to its eventual assimilation by classical composers. The Six Études tanguistiques for solo flute is Piazzolla’s only work for a melodic unaccompanied instrument. The remainder of the program presents a sequence of arrangements by Vicente Coves and Kazunori Seo and includes some of Piazzolla’s most famous and beautiful compositions as well as preserving a historically important, previously unreleased recitation by Horacio Ferrer.

Prague Philharmonia Wind Quintet plays charming music for wind instruments and piano - for this time they play together with one of the most renowned Czech classical pianists - Ivan Klánský. The repertory of recording is very colorful and inspiring. To put Mozart, Martinu and Poulenc side by side seems entirely natural in programme design terms. Both Martinu (1890-1959) and Poulenc (1899-1963) had found in Mozart one of the main founts for their own neoclassical music. The recording is opened by Mozart's Piano Quintet in E flat major for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano. Sextet FP 100 by Francis Poulenc for wind quintet and piano is imbued with a typical Parisian nonchalance, French colouring and with Poulenc's mischievousness balanced out with his firm faith. Bohuslav Martinu's Sextet seems to be more like a suite (5 parts composition), but the music of each of the movements is very original and enjoyable. Prague Philharmonia Wind Quintet with Ivan Klánský are presenting us highly professional and truly enjoyable interpretation of all these pieces.

Frederick II, King of Prussia, was a gifted musician who built up a court orchestra noted both for its quality and its size. Great musicians such as Graun, Quantz and C.P.E. Bach were members and contributed hugely to its standing. A patron of the fine arts, Frederick was a highly accomplished flautist whose works, performed in small private concerts, show a remarkable range of forms and expressive effects with slow movements offering long-breathed arcs of melody. The pieces by Alessandro De Marchi, conceived in the spirit of improvisation, provide a revealing impression of contemporary performance practice. This new release of Frederick the Great’s flute sonatas relates to the450th anniversary of the Staatskapelle Berlin, first established as the Royal Prussian Court Orchestra by the monarch. Claudia Stein became first flute of the orchestra at the age of 23. She recorded Weinberg’s Flute Concertos for Naxos in 2019 (8.573931), which received 5 stars from Pizzicato: ‘Stein plays them absolutely ravishingly, with a touch of melancholy.’

The first phrase of Reger’s Op.141 Serenade plunges the listener into the world of joyful music-making among friends circa 1780. The immediate modulation to a higher key in the second phrase brings us back to the more knowing world of late-Romanticism, and Reger thereafter moves between the two with great charm and no little skill. Light and effervescent the temper of these serenades may be but they also make considerable demands on their performers to keep up with the composer’s breathless turn of phrase and invention; these Italian musicians are fully up to speed. The Larghetto slow movement of Op.141 is an expressive high-point on the disc and, like much of Reger’s music, it is far too little known given its tender appeal to the general listener. With these two works, Reger was evidently paying homage to a Classical spirit whichfound its fulfilment – at least in this unusual instrumentation – in Beethoven’s Serenade. The six movements find the young Beethoven at his most carefree and effervescent: even the Andante and variations (which would become a conduit for profound thoughts later in his career) is as light as air and bubbling with melody and witty repartee. Anyone who only knows Beethoven from the symphonies, sonatas and concertos has a very pleasant surprise in store with this disc. Andrea Oliva is principal flautist of the Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and has made many notable recordings with them and their music director, Sir Antonio Pappano, but he has also enjoyed a successful career as a soloist: according to Sir James Galway, he is ‘one of the best flutists of his generation, a shining star in the world of the flute.’ He has recorded Bach sonatas with Angela Hewitt and the chamber music of Saint-Saëns (BC95165) and Dutilleux (BC94738) with his Santa Cecilia colleagues, both released by Brilliant Classics.

Joly Braga Santos (1924–88) was one of the most important composers in twentieth-century Portugal. In his early works his fondness for modal harmony, absorbed from the Portuguese masters of the Renaissance, and his busy counterpoint combine to make him sound surprisingly close to such particularly English composers as Vaughan Williams and Moeran. Although his harmonic language became more astringent with time, it retained a burly sense of humor and a powerful charge of energy, often infused with the spirit of Portuguese folk-dance.

On her third PENTATONE album Bach Unbuttoned, Ana de la Vega brings together a group of exciting young soloists and the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn to present a lively and fresh perspective on Bach as man and composer. The programme contains Brandenburg concertos Nos. 2, 4 & 5, a unique rendition on flute and oboe of the double violin concerto, as well as the breath-takingly virtuosic Badinerie for flute. Flautist Ana de la Vega’s presents her third PENTATONE album, after having released Mozart Myslivecek (2018) and Haydn Stamitz (2020). Oboist Ramón Ortega Quero also starred on the latter album, and is featured prominently on Bach Unbuttoned as well. Violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, trumpet player Cyrus Allyar, harpsichordist Johannes Berger and the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn all make their PENTATONE debut.

One does not have to be religious to appreciate the depth, inspiration, and melodiousness of PSALMS, Eloise Hynes Stowe's new album from Navona Records. Scored for voice and piano, and occasionally supplemented by flute and violin, these psalms and hymns immediately demonstrate the literary and emotional grasp of the biblical texts and ecclesiastical interpretations. Stowe effortlessly manages to clothe the scripture into a tonal tapestry which is equal parts tender and listenable, in an appealing style which wouldn't be out of place in a Christian musical. Exuberant and optimistic, they are a testament not only to the church’s teachings, but also to the intuitive power of music.

This recording focuses on concertante works for two flutes and orchestra by Italian contemporaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There is documentary evidence for Mozart and Cambini having met in Paris. Common to all three works are high-spirited introductory Allegros and brilliantly scored, virtuosic Rondos. The wonderful Largo in Cimarosa’s Concerto is particularly attractive: a true 'Dance of the blessed spirits for two flutes'. Flutists Domique Hunziker and Anne Utagawa have been working together for many years. They founded the group ‘les joueurs de flute’ in 1985. The ensemble features a line-up of eight outstanding performers from Switzerland, Germany, and Japan. For this release, Hunziker and Utagawa are joined by the Orchestre de Chambre Paul Kuentz.

The present release synthesizes some stages characterizing the composition path of Pier Paolo Scattolin: from a cappella vocality to instrumentalism with stylistic dynamics sometimes distant but all having in common the research on sound, from the linguistic phoneme to the eclectic and sometimes experimental use of instrumental emission. The path winds through almost forty years of continuous investigation and dissection of both choral and instrumental sound, the latter of a chamber/soloistic character and in some cases concerted and intersected with the voice. In the a cappella choral repertoire a varied anthology collects poetic and literary texts by Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alda Merini, Umberto Saba, Emily Dickinson, Alessandro Striggio, Agnolo Poliziano, Alceo, Saffo, Ipponatte, Enzo Iacchetti, Agnese Troilo and the composer himself. Some choral pieces are concerted with the Ensemble of ancient instruments Circe from Bologna, whose presence stems from the search for a sound language proceeding towards the stripping and essentiality of a music and a sound coherent with the setting of the poetic texts in order to transfer their instrumental characteristics to contemporary musical expression. In some pieces the solo voices are added as an almost instrumental colour, a timbre enrichment of the sonorities of the organ, the recorders, and the trumpets.