In another moving recording from Glossa's treasure trove from the late 90's, flutist Wilbert Hazelzet teams up with his usual collaborators Jaap ter Linden and Jacques Ogg to bring us a selection of pieces from Louis-Antoine Dornel, a shadowy figure of the French Baroque active at the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the beginning of Louis XV. Brian Berryman provides the second traverso and the very informative liner notes. Wilbert Hazelzet has dedicated himself since 1970 exclusively to the baroque flauto traverso. He studied the ancient instrumental techniques and the performance of the music from the 18th century according to contemporary treatises about flute playing and singing. Considered by many as the world's leading baroque flute player, in 1978 he became a member of Musica Antiqua K�ln, and with this world-famous ensemble he appeared in Japan, India, China, the USA, Canada, and all over Europe, from Finland to Portugal and from Ireland to Russia. He is the first flautist of Ton Koopman's Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, has appeared for numerous radio and TV stations across the world and has recorded for several companies such as DGG, Erato, Harmonia Mundi, and, in recent years, Glossa. Wilbert Hazelzet is a Professor at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

Let us go back to the end of the 1970s... Adelheid and Andreas Glatt, creators of the legendary Accent label, produced a pair of memorable recordings with Konrad Jungh�nel (who continues - more than 35 years later - being one of the truly great interpreters of Baroque music): these were the recordings which, without doubt, served to restore the reputation of Silvius Leopold Weiss, an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach; and from that point on early music lovers were talking about him once again.

With the passing of Frans Br�ggen in August 2014, the boxset of the Beethoven Symphonies released by Glossa in 2012 (GCD 921116) surely stands as one of the great recording legacies of the conductor and his legendary orchestra. For the Cabinet series, Glossa has now selected what is certainly the German composer's best-known symphony, the Ninth. With a team of vocal soloists, a chorus, an orchestra and a conductor all on remarkable form, this deeply-poetic reading makes a lasting impression on the listener - which is, after all, what Beethoven was seeking.

Classical Music

One of the challenges for a modern-day viola da gamba virtuoso is the need to be constantly searching for (and finding) new and demanding solo repertory with which to demonstrate his or her technical and interpretative prowess - especially given that the supply of this dried up during the course of the Baroque era. One of Fahmi Alqhai’s solutions to this challenge is the more-than- legitimate recourse to transcriptions, and in a tour de force on The Bach Album he presents four such reworkings – all made by himself – of solo instrumental masterpieces by the great composer. With the viola da gamba being a “mixed” instrument – both choral and capable of playing melodic lines – Alqhai has adapted the Second Violin Sonata and the Fourth Cello Suite, and also the Flute Partita. He has also added the astonishing – and inexhaustible – Chaconne from the Second Violin Partita. Alqhai has made this Chaconne the final flourish of one of his concert programmes and his recording for this new Glossa release, made in the Estudios Sputnik in Seville, clearly shows how his interpretation has been honed by all his live performances. That these transcriptions sound as though they could have been written for the viola da gamba is, of course, testament to Bach’s genius. It is, however, also, a reflection of the naturalness and vivid communication that is the hallmark of Fahmi Alqhai’s playing and musical thinking.

Following in the slipstream of the recent release of the opera Il Bajazet by Francesco Gasparini, involving Auser Musici and Carlo Ipata, Glossa is pleased to bring back a recording from 2003 (previously issued by Symphonia) containing comic intermezzi from the same composer, and from the same director – already back then demonstrating a perfect understanding of the style of this Handel contemporary. • As well as Mirena e Floro (1718), the recording includes Dori e Daliso, a cantata featuring violins and produced for the Roman palace of the Ruspolis two years beforehand.

The present album is a reissue of a legendary recording by a legendary ensemble, La Venexiana. Recorded at the 2005 Semana de Mu�sica Religiosa Festival in Cuenca, Spain, the ensemble's founding members (Rossana Bertini, Giuseppe Maletto, Sandro Naglia and Daniele Carnovich) are to be heard in the company of a select group of instrumentalists and singers, all of them under the direction of Claudio Cavina, for a memorable journey through the pieces contained in Claudio Monteverdi's Selva morale e spirituale. Rather than following the order of the printed edition, La Venexiana has preferred here to arrange the sequence of pieces into three substantial liturgical settings, each one equipped with it's own self-governing character. The first two albums contain one office of Vespers each, taking advantage of the fact that Monteverdi provided double (and sometimes even triple) versions of the Dixit Dominus, Confitebor, Beatus vir, Laudate pueri, Laudate Dominum, Magnificat and Salve Regina. The programme for the third album has essentially been created around the Messa a 4 and includes other free-standing mass sections. The effect is of constructing a grand Missa solemnis that perhaps might have been heard on November 21, 1631 in Saint Mark's to celebrate the cessation of the plague epidemic in Venice.

Classical Music

Classical Music

With a quartet of violin concertos by Jean-Marie Leclair, Leila Schayegh continues her exploration of the instrument's repertory, combining musical insight, virtuosic brilliance and historical understanding. Leclair, who grew up in Lyon and studied in Turin before moving to Paris (he held a short-lived official post at Louis XV's court in the 1730s) produced solo sonatas (and duos) as well as his acclaimed concertos. In her booklet notes, Leila Schayegh, who currently teaches Baroque violin at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, comments on how Leclair - an outstanding violinist himself - was in thrall to the Italian instrumental style but was concerned that his music should not be played too fast; he was praised for his nettet�, a combination of impeccable technique and musical perfection. This first volume in Schayegh's projected series of recordings of the Leclair violin concertos embraces the Nos 2 and 6 works from the two six-concerto series of Op 7 and 10. The G minor concerto, Op 10 No 6, is frequently cited as being the highpoint of Leclair's output. For this dazzling new exhibition of the Swiss violinist's art, Schayegh - who plays a late-seventeenth-century Andrea Guarneri instrument - directs Basel's La Cetra Barockorchester, which features Eva Saladin as it's Konzertmeisterin and Sonoko Asabuki as a further principal violinist.

Classical Music

A few years after Stradella's assassination (!) in 1682, a story of the episode that led to his death appeared in the duo-Bourdelot-authored 1715 Histoire de la Musique. The booklet of this CD – with its recording from Enrico Gatti, his Ensemble Aurora and Emanuela Galli in the title role – contains the latest results of Carolyn Gianturco’s Stradella investigation, including some completely new information.

Classical Music

Classical Music

In Clorinda e Tancredi, a programme built around the vocal talents of soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and tenor Luca Dordolo, Marco Mencoboni and Cantar Lontano provide a powerful display of how, in his later secular works, Claudio Monteverdi made the music serve the word at its most intense. A sequence of madrigals – in the broadest sense of the definition of the form – is spearheaded by a dramatic interpretation of the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (with Luca Dordolo as Testo). Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli – who also appeared on Glossa’s recent Alcina of Francesca Caccini and Silla of Handel – takes centre stage for an impassioned rendition of the Lamento della ninfa, an ostinato- driven work nicely counterbalanced on this recording by a bonus track of Giovanni Felice Sances’ mesmerizing Usurpator tiranno. Two of the other pieces chosen to represent the Baroque musical “shock of the new” for this recording prepared by the Monteverdi specialist Marco Mencoboni are Ed è pur dunque vero (from the Scherzi musicali) and the Lettera amorosa (Settimo libro dei madrigali).In his booklet essay for this new manifestation of Glossa’s abiding passion for the Seicento, Pierre Élie Mamou offers an absorbing analysis of Monteverdi’s adoption of the stile moderno, especially in terms of how it clashed with the ideals of Giovanni Maria Artusi and how it was expressed so potently in the Combattimento.