Giacomo Orefice is best known as a late Romantic opera composer. His piano output mainly consists of evocative short pieces that draw inspiration from poetry and paintings, as well as landscapes, nature, and scenes from daily life. The childlike atmosphere of Ninnoli is followed by the delightful Valse des amoureuses, Orefice’s only piano piece published outside Italy. The Preludi del mare describe a day at the seaside from the first lights of dawn to the rising of the moon. These impressionist worlds are enhanced in the Quadri di Böcklin by a sound palette that expresses the symbolist painter’s moods of sorrow and solitude. The melancholy Cipressi, a piece of unknown origin, is now seen as Orefice’s musical epitaph.

Doktor Faust was left incomplete at the time of Busoni’s death. Intended as his masterpiece, the opera’s genesis was complex and long. Based on Goethe’s tragic play, the story of Faust’s pact with the devil is well known but the opera’s structure represents Busoni’s unique conception, cast in two Prologues, a beautiful orchestral Intermezzo and three scenes. Exploring ideas of rationality and metaphysical doubt as well as the concepts of artifice and pretence inherent in operatic performance, the result is one of the most creative and unsettling of Busoni’s works.

Béla Bartók’s friendship with violinists Joseph Szigeti and Zoltán Székely allowed him to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the violin that informed his writing. Both Rhapsodies for violin and piano are structured in two parts, a Lassú and a Friss – a Moderato followed by an Allegro. The First Rhapsody draws on Bartok’s ethnological studies in its use of Romanian folk dances, while the Second is a more enigmatic work. The Violin Sonata No. 1 is an earlier piece full of atmospheric drama and grandiose gestures, impressionistic in places and concluding with rich Hungarian folk motifs.

Despite the triumphant reception of his first opera, Gaetano Donizetti was young and inexperienced when he was commissioned to write Chiara e Serafina in 1822 for La Scala. Composed in haste, it was met with disapproval at its premiere and subsequently disappeared without a trace. Thanks to this revival at the Bergamo Donizetti Festival, after exactly 200 years Chiara e Serafina has returned to the stage with a fine production that brings to life an entertaining tale of pirates, lovers, disguises, deceit and peril in 17th-century Majorca.

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Held in high esteem by his contemporaries, Orfeo Vecchi stands out as a remarkable figure with regard to the sacred repertoire he produced from the late 1500s. Respectful of the written texts while elegantly expressing pictorial content through subtle dialogue, antiphony and counterpoint, the 20 pieces of the Motectorum sex vocibus liber tertius form a rich and eclectic collection that fully reveals Vecchi’s mastery and religious inspiration. This world premiere recording has been made by musicians involved in recovering the wealth of unpublished materials held in Vercelli Cathedral, where Vecchi studied and worked for much of his career.

Stefano Golinelli was an acclaimed virtuoso pianist who was also appreciated as a composer in his day. He played an important role in the 19th-century Italian musical renaissance, but his name has faded from view over time. The emotional power of Golinelli’s music is well represented in his first two piano sonatas, the earliest of which, Op. 30, shows the influence of Schumann and Mendelssohn. The Op. 53 sonata features a wealth of melodic ideas and musical surprises – its opening is an Italian homage to Chopin, and the work also contains a beautiful Andantino movement.

Der fliegende Holländer was one of the operas that allowed Wagner to assert his place as the foremost German operatic composer of the time and to develop the foundations of his visionary mature works. Premiered in Dresden in 1843 its story is of the Flying Dutchman – the ghostly sea captain doomed to wander the seas eternally unless redeemed by love. This new staging was praised by seenandheard-international.com and for being ‘a triumph in faithfully presenting Wagner’s opera with an innovative production which was both exciting and created special effects’.

These four central-European composers share a history of persecution and emigration but survived the worst excesses of the time. Their works for flute and piano reflect very different aesthetic positions. Schoenberg’s uncompromising Sonata for Flute and Piano is an arrangement of his Wind Quintet, Op. 26 of 1923–24 made a few years later by the Austrian composer Felix Greissle. The Suite by Ernst Krenek is delightfully neo-Classical, whilst the Czech Emil Burian crafted an eloquent, light-hearted work, heard here in its first recording. Paul Dessau’s Guernica was written for piano in 1937 and memorialises the tragedy of that bombed city.

Francesco Cavalli, a central figure in the development of 17th-century Italian music, was as popular in his time as Verdi was in his. Though Cavalli was immensely successful as an operatic composer he wrote important sacred works in the grandiose tradition of the chapel of St Mark’s in Venice as well as shorter, more intense or spiritual pieces. These proved to be revolutionary in their individualism and Cavalli’s stylistic and expressive creativity can be heard in this selection which includes the world premiere recording of Confitebor. All come from a single collection published in 1656.

This album presents the complete works Ligeti composed for string quartet between 1950 and 1968. The two numbered string quartets are predated by a lyrical early Andante and Allegretto, the folk-music inflections of which pre-echo the hints of Bartók in the first quartet, Métamorphoses nocturnes. The calculated anarchy, dynamic extremes and sublime atmospheres of the Second Quartet present Ligeti at his most distinctive. These spectacular works are performed here by the Verona Quartet, firmly established as one of the most distinguished ensembles on the chamber music scene today.

REVIEW:

This album, celebrating Ligeti’s 2023 centennial, presents his complete works for string quartet composed between 1950-1968. The two numbered string quartets are predated by a lyrical early Andante and Allegretto, the folk-music inflections of which foreshadow the hints of Bartók in the first quartet, Métamorphoses nocturnes. The calculated anarchy, dynamic extremes and sublime atmospheres of the Second Quartet present Ligeti at his most distinctive. These spectacular works are performed here by the Verona Quartet, winner of the Cleveland Quartet Award and currently serving as Quartet-in-Residence at Oberlin College and Conservatory.

-- TheViolinist.com

Unlike many modern composers of his day, Bruno Maderna did not renounce the memory nor the traditions of the past, seeing contemporary music as having the same expressive and linguistic goals as old music but organised in a different way. The works in this recording represent the important role melody had in Maderna’s aesthetic, the lyrical significance of Widmung and Aulodia per Lothar seeing their recurrence in later pieces. Serenata No. 2 recalls the spirit of Webern, Serenata per un satellite is like a musical game, and the multi-stylistic Venetian Journal is a merciless social, human and musical satire.

During his student years in Naples, Saverio Mercadante wrote a sequence of flute quartets at a time when Italy’s musical landscape was dominated by opera. The first two quartets reflect his command of lyricism, thematic invention and use of embellishments. These examples of the quatuor brillant style are augmented by the concertante virtuosity of the Quartet in E minor in which all instruments have more decisive roles to play in music of gravity and excitement that even reflects the influence of Rossini. These are world premiere recordings.

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The 19th-century reclamation of Bach’s music, spearhead by Mendelssohn and then Schumann, was later to be further developed most famously by Ferruccio Busoni. However, another key figure was composer and organist Joseph Rheinberger, whose arrangement for two pianos of the Goldberg Variations was made in the spring of 1883. Noting that the work had been ‘the object more of theoretical appreciation than musical performance’ Rheinberger sought to clarify its imitative polyphony and where he felt it necessary, added new parts of his own writing to the original score, to create a viable Bach-Rheinberger composition.

Franz Liszt’s project of transcribing all of Beethoven’s symphonies took him 25 years to complete. His approach retains a deep fidelity to the original score with piano writing that is sumptuously rich and always perfectly suited to the instrument and its possibilities. A celebration of music as an independent and absolute language, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is considered the perfect utterance of his musical philosophy, while the Second Symphony looks to the future as it wrestles with the conventions of symphonic tradition. Gabriele Baldocci’s second volume in this edition (CDS7771) was admired in ClassicsToday.com, in which the ‘Beethoven/Liszt ‘Eroica’ symphony transcription conveys an impressive, multi-levelled pianistic sheen’.

Composed for the Paris Opéra, the romantic but ultimately tragic narrative of Donizetti’s grand opera La favorite is set amidst the Moorish invasions of Spain and the power struggles between religion and the state in the 14th century. The novice Fernand abandons his monastery having fallen in love with the noble Léonor, not knowing that she is the King’s mistress and favourite. Drawing on traditions established by Rossini and Meyerbeer, La favorite is noted for Donizetti’s innovative use of the orchestra and for some of his most renowned and enthralling arias. This acclaimed production opened the 2022 Donizetti Opera Festival in Bergamo, and is performed with its original French libretto.