Scarlatti and the mandolin: this album provides a fascinating and unusual encounter between one of the most important composers of the baroque period and an instrument that originated in Naples and enjoyed great popularity throughout Europe, especially in Paris and in other European capitals during the 18th century. The Pizzicar Galante ensemble, founded in Paris in 2012 by mandolinist Anna Schivazappa and harpsichordist Fabio Antonio Falcone, reveals hidden aspects of these musical gems from the Italian Baroque. Drawing inspiration from a mysterious 18th-century French manuscript containing the first movement of Scarlatti's Sonata K 89, preceded by the indication 'Sonatina per mandolino e cimbalo', the musicians deliver a fresh and original interpretation of these works. The music is full of contrasts, rich in virtuoso passages, surprises and effects but also full of sweetness and humor, combined with a certain meditative melancholy. Specialized in the Italian repertoire for mandolin and basso continuo, Pizzicar Galante gives voice to different instrumental timbres. Among these, the charming, crystal-clear sound of an original 18th-century Neapolitan mandolin: an absolute rarity that makes this recording truly unique.

Dancing with the rain, in order to conjure, just for a moment, what we thought invisible. Driven by curiosity, eagerness, passion, excellency and tradition, the Percussions de Strasbourg ventures to embody the unique energy of a programme in tribute to four Japanese composers with admirable universes. Rain of petals, rain of screams, rain of silences, all these emotions are harmonized and kept in motion by Franck Rossi, Jean Geoffroy and the Percussions de Strasbourg. (Minh-T�m NGUYEN) Founded in 1962, the Percussions de Strasbourg are world-renowned ambassadors of musical creation. With their exceptional repertoire, the group performs twentieth century masterpieces and commissioned new works with the same concerns: to bring life to a contemporary heritage while revisiting it constantly, and to continue to innovate in a context of artistic diversification.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Cori�n Aharoni�n's work is characterized by bold gestures and explosive debates. The intensity of this composer's active engagement with his historical and contemporary environment gives rise to powerful and energetic sounds rooted in the culture of Latin American political resistance. Aharoni�n's entire aesthetic philosophy can be discovered in the smallest space, like a nutshell. His music is characterized by short sequences within a small range, rigorous use of material, lively sound gestures, explosively dramatic densifications, a non-discursive character, stringent rhythmic organization, block-like static constructions, repetition combined with stringent motivic transformation, suspense-filled silence as an aesthetic resource, and richly suggestive activity. Cori�n Aharoni�n (1940-2017) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the son of Armenian immigrants who had survived the genocide of 1915. In addition to composing, he was involved in a broad range of artistic and institutional activities promoting resistance to fascist dictatorships.

Classical Music

This unusual album shows the contemporary trombone in a rich variety of guises – dramatic, lyrical, flirtatious, solemn, capricious and many more – in four recent concertante pieces for trombone and symphonic wind band, demonstrating the striking versatility of the instrument. It’s an international undertaking, too: the soloist is English, the band and conductor American, and the composers American, Danish, Dutch and English, all four writing in a language that is direct and immediate. Brett Baker is viewed internationally as a leading brass performer and educator. One of the most often recorded brass soloists, he is passionate about encouraging composers to write pioneering new repertoire. Brett is Programme Leader for Musical Arts at the University of Salford. He continues to be an ambassador for Michael Rath Brass Instruments and is Principal Trombone of the Black Dyke Band. He is Festival Director of both the Singapore and Thailand Low Brass Festivals and is a Past President of the British Trombone Society.

This reverie offered by Brice Sailly in homage to François Couperin is presented in the guise of a trip to Arcadia, that utopian land which lies hidden in the heart of European geography. The selected harpsichord pieces, most of them evoking childhood and the birth of love, sit beside excerpts from the Concerts royaux that set the scene rather as Watteau might have done, leaving to the less well-known airs de cour the task of describing sentiments in words. Couperin discreetly whispers the most luminous of truths. Here all is benevolence, a smile on the lips, a light heart, and melancholy is gently dismissed in favor of consolation. Open to various musical activities, Brice Sailly is a member and founder of the Franco-Icelandic group Susser Trost and has done projects with many artists, from early music specialists to musicians of the electronic music scene.

This new release features highlights of Dresden church music from the Carus catalogue. The set with 10 albums brings together several of Dresden's most important church composers such as Heinichen, Hasse, Zelenka and Homilius. The "Kyrie Gloria Mass" from Bach's B minor Mass according to the Dresden parts is also included in the release as a special treat. The performers include the Dresdner Kreuzchor conducted by their artistic director Roderich Kreile, the Dresdner Kammerchor and the Gaechinger Cantorey conducted by Hans-Christoph Rademann as well as the Vocal Concert Dresden conducted by Peter Kopp.

The brilliant soprano Mar�a Cristina Kiehr, together with lutenist-vihuelist Ariel Abramovich, presents her first solo album devoted to Renaissance music. With her broad experience in sixteenth-century polyphonic repertoire, and a project almost completely using her native language, Kiehr brings to the music of Spain's Golden Age her own unique perspective. Imaginario reconstructs an imaginary and unknown book of vihuela songs, inspired by the seven marvelous books published between 1536 and 1576, but this time as if published in Valladolid or Seville between 1570 and 1580. Constructed in the shadow of the earlier books, each one of it's songs makes reference either in it's music or text to another song from those earlier books. The vihuelist Jacob Heringman, together with whom Abramovich created and recorded Cifras imaginaries, is also part of this project, together with the mythical British tenor John Potter, ex Hilliard Ensemble and ECM artist, who performs an enigmatic piece for tenor and vihuela. A unique project, in every sense of the word, this stretch of the imagination takes the recorded repertory of the Spanish Renaissance one step further, venturing into the world of musical fiction based on a blend of creativity and science, and with a team of researchers difficult to surpass.

As composer, pianist and educationalist, the Prussian Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917) was one of most highly respected musicians of his day, although his star faded soon after his death. His music – more conservative and classical in orientation than that of his pianist-composer brother, Xaver – sits somewhere between Chopin and Brahms, with echoes of Schubert and Schumann. This first installment of a survey of his piano music is intended to put these immediately attractive works before the public once again – for the first time in over a century. They are played here by the Portuguese pianist-composer Luís Pipa, professor of piano and chamber music at the University of Minho, near Porto, following up on his well-received Toccata Classics album of music by his compatriot José Vianna da Motta.

EN SEUMEILLANT

Winter feasts like the Latin Saturnalia and the Germanic Yule, airborne gift-giving figures like the Norse Odinn Jólnir, the Slavic Ded Moroz, the Dutch Sinterklaas: from time immemorial December skies have been rather busy. Pagan patterns were readapted to Christianity – and a canonised bishop from fourth-century Asia Minor, Nikolaos, whose feast occurred near the winter solstice, merged with another bearded benefactor. Wotan’s hood and Nicholas’s mitre were mixed up, and by the nineteenth century Santa Claus was ready to don new red and white robes and to deliver toys on both sides of the Atlantic. The pieces on this recording (mainly from a thirteenth-century English manuscript) belong to the liturgy for the eve of the Feast of St Nicholas: they allude to his picturesque feats, such as the rescue of three needy maidens or the taming of a storm. Readings and additional songs come from the repertory associated with this widely popular saint, celebrated throughout the Middle Ages from Italy to Iceland. Originally released in 1998, this joint performance by La Reverdie and Cantori Gregoriani received enthusiastic reviews in several music magazines: ‘For those who want to enjoy some of the best liturgical singing this is highly recommended’ (Early Music, 1999).

Oscar� Cinema' might be a suitable alternative title for the new album with which the strings of the Santa Cecilia Academy under the direction of Luigi Piovano - principal cellist of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and much admired conductor - begin their collaboration with Arcana, after two recordings for Eloquentia released in 2014 and 2015. Yes, it's true, the three Italian composers represented here - Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone and Nicola Piovani - all won the highest honours at the American Oscar� ceremony. But this CD goes further. Alongside some of their most famous movie themes - from La strada to The Mission, from Life is beautiful to Amarcord - it also includes works written by these three screen giants for performance in concert. Although they concentrated their work on the cinema, Rota, Morricone and Piovani were still composers above all else, and their activity did not exclude an independent and committed creative dimension. Some of the pieces featured on this disc were composed or arranged for the Archi di Santa Cecilia and Luigi Piovano and are dedicated to them.

After the success of ''L'ultimo romano'', his album of music for archlute from the 1718 collection of the Roman composer Giovanni Zamboni, Simone Vallerotonda presents something totally new with his Baroque ''power trio'' I Bassifondi: ''Alfabeto falso''. Their debut album is devoted to Italian and Spanish music for guitar and theorbo from the first half of the seventeenth century. A little-known repertory, characterized by rhythmic oddities and harmonic extravagances that challenge those of contemporary jazz. Ordinary ''alfabeto'' was the system used by guitarists of the period to mark chords: each letter corresponded to a single chord. But, in the ''false alphabet'', those letters which were marked with a slash indicated chords containing dissonances, often very bold. The trio, comprising guitar/theorbo, percussion instruments and colachon, reconstructs an ensemble typical of the seventeenth century. Breathtaking rhythms, ''dirty'' chords, improvisations and variations: these are the colors they seek to convey in their sound. The beauty and the challenge of this disc lie precisely in providing an interpretation that respects everything notated in the score, and in the choice of arrangements and timbres. This music sounds modern and perhaps slightly provocative to us, but all of it was written around 1640.

Almost every pianist, it seems, wants to record Ravel, but virtually all of them have overlooked a treasure trove of music for solo piano: the composer's short score for Daphnis et Chlo�. Some parts of it are unplayable by a single pair of hands, but with judicious arrangement this working draft can be mined for diamonds. Only a handful of musicians have made their own suites for solo piano; here the Lithuanian pianist Indre Petrauskaite, carefully observing Ravel's original textures, has produced something new: a 40-minute concert suite of unsuspected Ravel for solo piano that also respects the dramatic outline of the original ballet. The other, more familiar works here extend the ideas of antiquity and transcription. Indre Petrauskaite recently performed this programme at City University of London for the completion of her DMA degree.

There are several parallels to be found in the lives of the Southern French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) and the Moravian-Bohemian composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). Both needed the metropolis of Paris, that seething artistic melting pot after the First World War, in order to refine their originality; both were open to all kinds of musical styles, from South American folklore to North American jazz through to Bachian counterpoint; finally, both had to flee the Germans in France in 1940, heading for the USA - Milhaud on account of being a Jew, and Martinu as a patriotic Czech in exile. The two composers' complete works for string trio, contrasted here for the first time, uncover various similarities - even though each work bears the hallmarks of its composer, and Martinu's trios were written in Paris, whilst Milhaud did not compose his until he had reached America. The works are characterised by a playful, spirited tone as well as the charm of Mediterranean and Czech folk tunes. But there is also what Milhaud termed, and valued, as "discipline" in chamber music: strict counterpoint and technical skill - utilised radically, without slipping into dry pedantry. These are four marvels of intimate music-making, assembled by the Jacques Thibaud Trio with their own artistic instinct and flair.

The tale of Hans Winterberg (1901–91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, he settled in Munich after the War as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but with his death his estate disappeared into a legal limbo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janácek, Ravel, Schoenberg and other mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy and grim humour reminiscent of his close contemporary, Nikos Skalkottas. Brigitte Helbig, who grew up in Munich and also studied there, is one of Germany’s livelier young pianists, with a respectable track record in the performance of new music.

A broad and meticulous selection of orchestral works and concertos by Gerald Finzi is here matched by a first-class cast of soloists, supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sir Andrew Davis, expert in British repertoire and conducting this year’s Last Night of the Proms. Paul Watkins displays exhilarating virtuosity in the Cello Concerto, a central work on this album, composed in the wake of the devastating news that Finzi was terminally ill, but yet filled with ‘vigorous, almost turbulent thematic material’, as he wrote in the programme note for the work’s premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 1955. Louis Lortie, for his part, tackles the high-spirited and majestic Grand Fantasia and Toccata, the Fantasia originally conceived as part of a concerto for piano and strings and first performed on two pianos. This contrasts with the more restrained Eclogue for Piano and Strings, timeless, and blessed with a mood of benediction. This album also features the orchestral Nocturne (subtitled ‘New Year Music’), dark, misty, and at times ironic.

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REVIEW:

Sir Andrew Davis’s feeling for the composer’s sensitive, harmonically conservative language is abundantly clear in these vivid readings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Soloists too are well chosen. Cellist Paul Watkins proves a master of expressing powerful feelings through the prism of British reserve. Admirers of Finzi’s music can buy without hesitation.

– BBC Music Magazine

The tradition of composing a funeral mass dates back to the times of the late Middle Ages, but it was brought to artistic perfection by later composers. Alfred Schnittke initially wore the intention of writing a small instrumental Requiem, which was to be one of the parts of the Piano Quintet. Eventually, however, he rejected this idea and created a fourteen-part Requiem. The work is expressive and full of dramatic contrasts. The instrumental parts of electric guitars of a set of drums surprisingly refer to the composer’s polistylist interests. Composed in the same stream, the three religious songs refer to Orthodox church music, introducing a mood of contemplative reflection and prayer reverie.

{oh!} The Historical Orchestra, a team directed by Martyna Pastusza specializing in historical performance, invites you to the world of French baroque music. In this era, political and artistic life on the Seine was focused on the stunningly lavish Versailles court of Louis XIV. The Sun King gathered around himself a great array of musicians who were extremely important to him- he danced in ballet shows himself- and the performances were not only a popular entertainment, but also a dramatized allegory of government. Of the composers presented on the album, only Michele Corrette was not associated with the royal court. Apart from him, the recording includes compositions of such celebrities as Jean Baptiste Lully, violin virtuoso and dancer, unparalleled gambist Marain Marais and famous organist Fran�ois Couperin.

Bright and lively music from the Swedish composer Dag Wiren is unveiled here in surround-sound by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Rumon Gamba, only a few years after the completion of their Grammy-nominated and highly acclaimed series devoted to the neglected orchestral treasures of Vincent d’Indy. In this unique recording Gamba uses the large body of a full symphonic string section, rather than the somewhat smaller-scale chamber orchestra setup that has tended to be used for this music in the past. The effect is a more complete expression of the wit and strength of these works. Designed to ‘entertain and amuse,’ as the composer put it in a note, the widely popular Serenade for Strings is here given an even more brilliant and powerful touch. Other, lesser-known works on the album similarly showcase a composer of fascinating range, who could write light and humorous pieces such as the Sinfonietta and the lively Symphony No. 3, as well as powerful rhythmical, and serious works, of which the later Divertimento is an example.

The Norwegian six-member a cappella group, Nordic Voices here presents the extraordinary polyphonic music of Tomas Luis de Victoria, a Spanish composer whose music has continued to move people for more than 400 years, crossing geographical, cultural, and even religious barriers. This surround-sound recording comes ten years after a "warm, consistent and moving" (BBC Music) album of Lamentations, which featured pieces by sixteenth-century composers, including Four Lessons by Victoria. Examples of the composer's exceptional output, characterized by a careful setting of the text and an ability to control texture by a constant grouping and regrouping of different voices, here meet the artistic resourcefulness, versatility, technical precision, and freshness of the young ensemble.

January 8th, 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Carl Schuricht. This release of two live recordings made in 1961 and 1962 pays tribute to a renowned conductor who was only to enjoy great international fame in his old age - as one of teh last representatives of the generation of the old German conductors, and as a master of the classical and romantic repertoire. ''Neither recreating a facade nor exposing feelings'' was how Carl Schuricht once summarized his artistic credo. These two Lucerne live recordings document the compelling persuasiveness and the intensity that Schuricht's interpretational style - his tremendously inspired objectivity, entirely at the service of the music - could develop: in Mozart's final Piano Concerto, K 595 in B flat major, Schuricht proves to be a sensitive accompanist. Together with the French pianist Robert Casadesus he manages to strike the distinctive tone of this concerto between simplicity and noblesse, innocence and wisdom, buffa nad elegy. In cooperation with Audite, Lucerne Festival presents the ''Historic Performances'' series featuring outstanding concert recordings of artists who have shaped the festival throughout its history. The aim of this album edition is to rediscover treasures - most of which have not been released previously - from the first six decades of the festival, which was founded in 1938 with a special gala concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. These recordings have been made available by the archives of SRF Swiss Radio and Television, which has broadcast the Lucerne concerts from the outset.

This new release features Saint-Saëns' Second Piano Concerto with Nelson Freire under the baton of AdAm Fischer. Not many pianists are able to accomplish the stylistic and technical challenges of this concerto, demanding complete precision in fingering and leaps, as well as perfect command of the "jeu perlé": Nelson Freire masters this work with great aplomb, quiet assurance and, at times, a twinkle in his eye. He is completely committed and happy to take risks, triggering veritable "Sturm und Drang", and always congenially accompanied by AdAm Fischer. Twenty years previously, the Brazilian pianist (then aged 22) had made his German radio debut with a recital programme which he recorded at the RIAS's Lankwitz studio in Berlin. In Grieg's Lyric Pieces and the Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos 5 and 10 by Liszt, as well as his Polonaise in E major, Freire not only demonstrated his stupendous manual prowess, but also what was already at that stage his extraordinary touch and stylistic confidence. These early solo recordings anticipate his brilliant later style, completing the picture of the exceptional pianist. All recordings on this album are released for the first time.