The Six Partitas, BWV 825–830 were the first of a series of works for keyboard instruments that Bach published under the general title of Clavierübung (Keyboard Practice). They consist of a set of six harpsichord suites, are amongst the last set of keyboard suites Bach composed and the most technically demanding. In fact, although Bach was age 40 at the time, these were the first of his compositions to see publication. The Partitas follow the basic form of the Baroque dance suite. An elaborate opening movement is followed by four stylized dances: the Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue.

Paul Hindemith and Karl Amadeus Hartmann were born a decade apart and died in the same month. Hindemith was the more inclusive artist while Hartmann more fully reflected the cultural concerns of his time; as conveyed by the contemporaneous but aesthetically very different pieces on this release. Composed in 1942 during his stay in the United States, Ludus Tonalis was first performed in 1943 in Chicago. It is one of the greatest solo piano works of the mid-20th century, exploring matters of technique, theory, inspiration, and communication. This masterpiece comprises all 12 major and/or minor keys and was intended to be the 20th century equivalent to J.S. Bach’s The WellTempered Clavier. Written just three years after Ludus Tonalis, Hartmann’s Piano Sonata [No.2] depicts the shuffling feet of 20,000 camp prisoners from Dachau whom Hartmann watched being marched away from the approaching Allies. The subtitle of Hartmann’s work, ‘27 April 1945’, is clarified by an epigraph the composer (in his own words) positioned at the head of the score: ‘On the 27th and 28th of April 1945 trudged an endless stream of Dachau prisoners of war past us … unending was the misery … unending was the sorrow’. This is made explicit by the (central) Lento, a ‘Marcia funebre’ that ranks with Hartmann’s finest utterances; its sombre and fatalistic tread – shot through with fanfare-like elements – reaching an impassioned climax before regaining its mood of numbed sorrow. Esther Walker is pianist who combines “virtuoso fire and musical temperament” with “lyrical sensibility” in an almost ideal way.

The present release is the second volume of Roman Rabinovich’s complete cycle of Haydn Piano Sonatas. Rabinovich has performed throughout Europe and the United States in venues such as London’s Wigmore Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and the Millennium Stage of Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Lauded as ‘a master of tone-color’ (International Piano, 2018), Rabinovich made his Israel Philharmonic début under the baton of Zubin Mehta at age ten. He was a top prize winner at the 12th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in 2008.

Celebrating Lysander Piano Trio’s 10th anniversary in 2020, they present their FHR début with a new album featuring première recordings of new American piano trios commissioned or premièred by the ensemble. The works included on this album, with their richness of styles and origins, provide an exciting and optimistic glimpse into music being written for piano trio today. Of particular note is ‘Love Sweet’ written by Grammy Award winning composer Jennifer Higdon and featuring the brilliant soprano Sarah Shafer. The Lysander Piano Trio has been praised by The Strad for its “incredible ensemble, passionate playing, articulate and imaginative ideas and wide palette of colors” and by The Washington Post for “an uncommon degree of heart-on-the-sleeve emotional frankness.

Following on from her two previous successful FHR albums of J.S. Bach, Papastefanou has now recorded one of the most iconic works in the history of music, the Goldberg Variations. This challenging, inventive masterpiece feels completely natural under Papastefanou fingers and will surely be a recording to be revered, like her previous Bach recordings for FHR. Alexandra Papstefanou graduated from Athens Conservatoire, where she studied piano under Aliki Vatikioti. She followed her studies with Olga Zhukova at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, with Peter Solymos, at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and, on a scholarship from the Alexander Onassis Foundation, at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, USA, with the highly influential teacher György Sebők. She has also taken lessons from Alfred Brendel. She has performed all of Bach’s keyboard works and, in a series of recitals, has presented his complete Well-Tempered Clavier, Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, and The Musical Offering as well as his keyboard concertos.

This reissue brings together for the first time, in newly remastered hi-resolution transfers from the source tapes, the Edizioni Curci stereo recordings of Italian composer Alberto Curci's four works for violin an dorchestra. These four superb performances by one of the great Italian violinists, Franco Gulli, appear here for the first time on disc. The anonymous orchestra, conducted by Franco Capuana, is almost certainly made up in the main of members of the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala. Curci's concertos are delightful melodic works, some with folkloristic elements. Although rarely heard, these are beautiful and alway slyrical passionate compositions for solo violin and orchestra. For half a century Franco Gulli was one of the world's top violinists, a noble ambassador for the Italian string style and a superb musician. One of the most engaging aspects of Gulli's artistry is a profound feeling of intellectual rigour and understanding. He had a brilliant career, was an influential teacher and his discography is large covering many genres.

Although the word salon derives from a room in a domestic dwelling (In 1836, Robert Schumann referred to Salonmusik (a term he incidentally coined) as a 'combination of sentiment and piano passage'), it also came to refer to private gatherings of composers and well-to-do members of society congregated in order to appreciate musical performances of a shorter and more varied nature, as distinct from those of longer chamber works. By the 1830s, the musical salon emerged as a vehicle for virtuoso performers who encapsulated the romantic ideals of enhanced emotional subjectivity and greater artistic individuality, with the piano at the center of it all. The charming, off-the-cuff pieces that so delighted audiences up until relatively recently seem to have faded away with the last performers of the romantic tradition. This album serves to illuminate the brilliant music that many of these underrated yet highly talented 19th century composers gave us. '... played with a purity, profundity and sense of dramatic architecture that truly stops you in your tracks. Really, bravo.' (Gramophone, 'Editor's Choice' - VILSMAYR Partitas [FHR38])

Russian violinist Dmitry Smirnov’s début recording on FHR features works by master baroque composer (J.S. Bach), a leading figure of 20th century music (Béla Bartók) and a wonderful newly discovered work by influential Swiss violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger who died in 2019. The Schneeberger Sonata, written two years before Bartók’s Sonata, is a violin show piece, displaying much imagination in its idiomatic and virtoustic violin writing – this is the first recording of the work. There are many connections that link these three works together – the Bartók and Schneeberger sonatas show influences of Bach. Also, Bartók’s First Violin Concerto was premièred by Schneeberger. On this album Smirnov plays a modern violin made by Philipp Bonhoeffer (Bartók and Schneeberger) and a 1795 Johann Schönfelder violin (Bach).

This is the first time a whole album of Handel featuring viola da gamba has been published. Includes the premiere recording of Kassel Sonata No. 5 George Frideric Handel is generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of the baroque era, known especially for his operas, oratorios, concertos and keyboard works. His chamber works include a fine selection of solo and trio sonatas with basso continuo, written for a variety of instruments such as the violin, recorder and transverse flute. In Handel's lifetime the viola da gamba (or viol, as it is also known), was highly regarded in some parts of Europe and Handel featured the instrument in numerous works. In the eighteenth century, the practice of performing music written for other instruments was fairly common, and countless examples of instrumental transcriptions of varying kinds survive from this period. Included in this album are several transcriptions of works of Handel's, as well as pieces which are attributed to him such as the Sonata in C major with Obbligato Harpsichord and a sonata from a recently unearthed collection called the Kassel Sonatas, which here is a premiere recording. Aziz's previous FHR album 'Risonanze' (FHR83) has received much critical acclaim. 'This is a recording to be reckoned with' (American Record Guide)

Adam Golka’s third album for FHR begins a wonderful journey in which he records all of Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas. This first volume, released in Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year, includes one of the composer’s most celebrated works, the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata in C minor, alongside the contrasting Sonatas, Op. 10. All four sonatas were written 1796-98. Since first self-presenting and performing Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas at the age of 18, Adam Golka has immersed himself in studying the master’s works. He has studied Beethoven under the guidance of masters such as Leon Fleisher, Alfred Brendel, Sir András Schiff, Murray Perahia, and Ferenc Rados. In 2011, Adam performed a cycle of all five Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Lubbock Symphony, with his brother Tomasz at the baton, and last summer, he made his San Francisco Symphony début at the Stern Grove Festival in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. He will celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020 by playing the whole cycle of Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas in multiple cities, which includes a self-produced video series named 32@32, made in collaboration with filmmaker Zac Nicholson and designed to be part of the concert experience.

1839 was Schumann’s most productive year of writing for solo piano, and the last year he wrote a major work for piano solo. The following year, Schumann wrote no works for solo piano, focusing a new energy in writing songs. 1840 is famously known as his ‘Year of Song’ (Liederjahr), hence our coined title ‘Year of Piano’ with all the works on this album, apart from 3 Stücklein, written in 1838. This is Papastefanou’s third album for FHR. Alexandra Papstefanou graduated from Athens Conservatoire, where she studied piano under Aliki Vatikioti. She followed her studies with Olga Zhukova at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, with Peter Solymos, at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and, on a scholarship from the Alexander Onassis Foundati on, at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, USA, with the highly infl uencial teacher György Seb?k. She has also taken lessons from Alfred Brendel.

The three violin sonatas on this release are by composers who had enjoyed a direct professional relationship during the period between the two world wars, mainly through their involvement on the teaching staff at the Moscow Conservatoire. Despite being on of Nikolai Myaskovsky's most appealing and approachable later works, his Violin Sonata op. 70 remains rarely performed in concert. The work begins with a wistful first movement, followed by the final movement containing a series of 12 Variations on a theme eloquent and restrained by turns. The following work is by a student, colleague and friend of Myaskovsky, Vassarion Shebalin. Formed in the classically arrayed four-movement design, it shows the composer's musical language at it's clearest and most direct. The final work on this album is by the composer Vasily Nechayev who is hardly known outside of Soviet music circles. His Sonata Op. 12 shows Nechayev was aware of stylistic developments pursued by Bartok and Prokofiev in it's richly whole-tone harmonies and it's motoric rhythms. Sasha Rozhdestvensky and Viktoria Postnikova are a mother and son partnership who form part of a famous Russian music family. These are premiere recordings.

One of the greatest achievements in musical composition history, The Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach is a collection of two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. It seem both books, composed two decades apart, were written primarily for educative personal and private use in the home – probably to be played on the intimate clavichord. One of the most famous works written for the keyboard, The Well-Tempered Clavier is simply enjoyable music of the highest craftsmanship. Alexandra Papstefanou graduated from Athens Conservatoire, where she studied piano under Aliki Vatikioti. She followed her studies with Olga Zhukova at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, with Peter Solymos, at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and, on a scholarship from the Alexander Onassis Foundation, at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, USA, with the highly influential teacher György Sebok. She has also taken lessons from Alfred Brendel. Papastefanou was a finalist at the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland and received the Liebstoeckl and Fazioli Prizes at the International Geneva Competition, as well as the Spyros Motsenigos Prize from the Academy of Athens. She has performed all of Bach’s keyboard works and, in a series of recitals, has presented his complete Well-Tempered Clavier, Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, and The Musical Offering as well as his keyboard concertos.

The first true cross cultural fusion of Indian and western music was back in 1957 with John Mayer’s Raga Music for Solo Clarinet and through the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties his musical output reflected his Indian roots. This release celebrates John Mayer’s orchestral work and sees the further development from his son Jonathan Mayer, including three premiere recordings and one first commercial release. Included in this album is John Mayer’s Second Violin Concerto, originally commissioned for the late Erich Gruenberg in 1978, is it played by Sasha Rozhdestvensky who has a long standing relationship with First Hand Records. Mayer’s Concerto for the Instruments of an Orchestra had its premiere performance in 1976 by The London Philharmonic Orchestra and Bernard Haitink. Jonathan Mayer’s Pranam for sitar, tabla and orchestra is inspired by the Indian dance form Kathak and was premiere in the Czech Republic in 2017, it features the composer on sitar and Shahbaz Hussian on tabla. His Second Sitar Concerto was premiered again in the Czech Republic in 2019 and all works are under the baton of the Indian conductor Debashish Chaudhuri.

A prevailing feature of music of the 16th century and earlier was a split between the deployment of voices and instruments: occasionally replacing each other, or used in alternation - a more concerted effort in writing dedicated instrumental music with increasing degrees of complexity and virtuosity was taking place. The penchant for writing stories about love in it's many forms continued, finding a new home in the developing operatic works as well as the ever-popular madrigal genre, as composers continued to find ways to describe the joy, grief, despair and ecstasy of the human experience of love. Cupid's Ground Bass is a celebration of these developing musical aesthetics of early 17th century Italy, focusing particularly on the composers' language of love in all it's forms.

This album brings together three works for cello and piano. The first of them, Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1, is a cornerstone of the repertoire for this medium. It was composed in 1917 and premièred by cellist Gérard Hekking and pianist Alfred Cortot.

The second, Gordon Crosse’s Wavesongs, is a modern masterpiece and written for this present recording’s cellist Alexander Baillie in 1983. The work ranks among Crosse’s most personal inspirations, as well as being an impressive composition in its own right. The third is a transcription of an early, appealing work by Maurice Ravel. Written in April 1897, and sometimes referred to as Sonate posthume, Ravel’s [First] Violin Sonata is among his earliest extant works.

We begin with one of Shostakovich's earliest chamber works, the Cello Sonata, originally premiered by cellist Viktor Kubatsky with the composer at the piano. Kubatsky later transcribed the cello part for the viola with Shostakovich's approval. His version, along with subsequent transcriptions by Evgeny Strakov and Annette Bartholdy, adapted certain passages to suit the viola. For this recording, I chose to remain as faithful as possible to the original cello version, raising some passages by an octave to accommodate the viola's range. This is followed by Shostakovich's Impromptu, a brief but captivating piece discovered in 2017. The album concludes with Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, which stands as one of the cornerstones of the viola repertoire. Not only is it his final composition, but it's also one of his most profound. In this work, Shostakovich seems to bid a poignant farewell, weaving in quotations from his earlier pieces and even paying tribute to Beethoven in the final movement.

The six Sonatas, which are often described as ‘Trio Sonatas for Organ,’ hold a unique place in Bach’s oeuvre. In a sense, ‘trio’ is the most natural organ texture: right hand, left hand, and feet each takes one line of counterpoint. However, in the six Sonatas, the contrapuntal lines are granted a degree of independence that is unmatched in Bach’s surviving organ music. Thus, they are atypical of Bach’s output for the instrument, and indeed of organ music in general. The Sonatas are, in effect, ‘ensemble music for one player’ – indeed, several movements originated as actual ensemble pieces. To Bach’s contemporaries, this transplanting of the secular, instrumental trio sonata genre onto the organ would have seemed rather daring. After all, the organ was, first and foremost, a liturgical instrument, with its own venerable repertoire tradition.

One of the key German composers before Bach with over 500 surviving individual pieces, Heinrich Schütz mainly composed church music. Credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany, he continued its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Despite living most of his long life in Germany, Schütz made two trips to Venice in his twenties. The first was between 1609 and 1613, during which he studied under Giovanni Gabrieli. The second trip occurred in the late 1620s, possibly to meet and study under Monteverdi. These visits significantly influenced Schütz’s music as he blended the ornate and theatrical Venetian style with the more subdued Lutheran tradition. This album explores his solo cantatas alongside examples of the brilliant and virtuosic Venetian-style instrumental music.

The present recording consists of seven previously unrecorded wonderful violin sonatas from the early 18th century. This is the second volume of a FHR series in which samples of the musical riches, that lie in the Dresden Schrank II collection, are brought to life through new recordings. A large portion of the Schrank II manuscripts belonged to the composer/violinist Johann Georg PISENDEL (1687-1755), who, whilst travelling throughout Europe, amassed a huge quantity of music, mostly manuscripts. Some he bought from music shops or receive directly from composers. Most, however, he copied out himself. This collection is one of the largest and most diverse repositories of latebaroque music in the world. In this volume, there are three varied sonatas by Martin Bitti which resemble Corelli. A sonata by Henricus Albicastro who is of the South German school of composition. A delightful sonata by Carlo Fiorelli. Finally, two anonymous sonatas which are both complex and intensely expressive, and possibly written by the composers G.G. Laurenti and A. Montanari. The two brilliant musicians on this recording were chosen specifically for their incredible skills, musicianship and specialist baroque talent. Violinist Kinga Ujszászi and harpsichordist Tom Foster, both members of The English Concert baroque orchestra, give exciting and stylish performances in a wonderful crystal clear recorded sound.

For the third in this series of recordings drawn from his archive of concerts with Orquestra Sinfonica Portuguesa (see also Prokofiev and Rimsky-Korsakov on FHR146; Abril, Falla and Weber with Teresa Berganza on FHR153), alvaro Cassuto has turned to music from the late Classical and mid-Romantic eras in a coupling of Schubert and Wagner. Written less than 15 years apart, these two pieces inhabit very different aesthetics while having a common link in Beethoven.

The Future is Female is a three volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These recordings feature more than 70 compositions by women around the globe and includes many premiere recordings. Most pianists grow up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed. This first Vol., In Nature, will be followed later in 2022 by Vol. 2, At Play and Vol. 3, The Dance. American pianist Sarah Cahill, hailed as ‘a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde’ by The New York Times and ‘instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers’ by Keyboard Magazine, has commissioned and premièred over 70 compositions for solo piano. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music by the American Composers Forum.

"This album is a snapshot of the way I live in music. Diversely; organically; intimately; sometimes collaboratively, sometimes solitarily; always sincerely; and anywhere, be it a concert hall or home studio. Stradgrass is the exploration of the violin’s stylistic capabilities, through various American folk styles, from a Classical lens. The word ‘Stradgrass’ first came about in 2015, from the novelty of performing Bluegrass on the Stradivari I was playing at the time: the 1683 ex-Gingold violin, on loan to me until 2018 as a result of my silver medal finish at the 2014 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.

"Hearing Bluegrass played on a Strad is unusual, unfortunately, so I thought it warranted its own term. The word has caught on in the social media world and seems to succinctly encapsulate what one might partly expect from a recital of mine. Stradgrass seems to be a type of musical exploration that is becoming more common within Classical violin training, and I hope this album will further encourage us all to continue that direction." -Tessa Lark

New piano transcriptions by Greek pianist Alexandra Papastefanou of various Cantatas, an Organ Sonata and a Chorale Prelude by J.S. Bach, all recorded here for the first time. The famous Myra Hess transcription of Bach’s cantata Jesus bleibet meine Freude concludes a fascinating new look at some of Bach’s choral and organ works.