The Sonatas for piano & violin, K. 378, 454 and 526 represent the pinnacle of Mozart’s creativity for keyboard and string ensemble. Their composition is inscribed in the artistic and personal life of Mozart and mark a stage in his development at decisive moments of his life: remarkably, they were not specially commissioned. They were composed in a free style yet the music speaks of the musician’s internal tension at the time when he decided to break free from his links to Salzburg and from the burdensome tutorship of his father to take control of his own creativity. On this release, the Sonatas are performed by violinist Stephane Rougier and pianist Sophie Teboul.

The conception of Lide ta Ixidor did not follow the usual characteristics of lyrical theatre close to the nationalist ideology: the allusion to lost freedoms, love of the Basque language, a legendary common past, an idyllic rural setting and the value of religion, which were relegated to the present work; although as an exception, it is set in a farmhouse near the Biscayan palace of Zubialdea and includes the birth of Jesus and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. At the premiere on 24 May 1910, the press, chroniclers and music critics included all kinds of laudatory adjectives.

Imagining how Scarlatti’s sonatas sound on other instruments, beyond the harpsichord or other keyboards, can be a temptation difficult to overcome. It was difficult for us and it must have been, too, for those who had in their hands some of the hot manuscripts, fresh out of the oven, in the eighteenth century. Because, in this point, a new mystery emerges: what happened to all those acquaintances that Scarlatti had the opportunity to find in Rome or Venice? Did he keep in contact with other European composers, such as Thomas Roseingrave, once at the service of the court in Madrid? What happened to the bridges built with London? How is it possible that some of the sonatas that today are only preserved in the manuscript of Venice were known in England as early as 1744? On this release, La Tempestad attempts to answer some of those questions. Led by Silvia Marquez, La Tempestad, founded in 2000, has become a force to reckon with in the Spanish early music world. “The precision, finesse, and insight of its musicians catch the listener from the first note.”

The pieces contained in this album are not only the result of ten years work and their own matured performative proposal but also the challenge of approaching the 5 "essential" pieces of the violin, clarinet and piano repertoire. Of course, we could talk of other widely interpreted pieces of great artistic value, but their authorship (5 big names of the 20th century music) give us credit on this selection. It is also of great interest the fact that, even though the 5 pieces were composed only 20 years apart (between 1919 and 1938, the inter-war period) they correspond with 5 completely different styles, serving as a wonderful summary of what happened in the history of art during that period. The works are beautifully performed here by Eduardo Raimundo, Mario Perez, and Francisco Escoda.

It is the part the cello must interpret by assuming or acquiring a human nature. Dvor�k transforms it into a warm lyrical baritone. He repopulates it with harmonics and nuances. And he shows us that the best way to overcome cello "limitations" is none other than to transcend it. Dvor�k turns the cello into a meta-cello. Just as in a Mephistophelian pact, he achieves the feat of "animating" it. And the soul is in the score. You have to know how to find it. No one better to do it than Adolfo Guti�rrez Arenas, from his sensitivity, spontaneity and affinity to an instrument he would never have wanted to explore if Bach and Dvor�k had not persuaded him otherwise.

"This music is silent because its audition is internal… Its emotion is secret and does only take a sound shape in its resonances under the huge cold dome of our solitude". Federico Mompou described this way in his admission speech to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George not only the profound significance of his work titled Silent Music, but also his essential values and the sensitive attitude of both interpreter and listener to submerge in the asceticism that its course proposes. A description which is in line with the author of the verses that stimulated so much sound beauty, the most illustrious of our mystics, Saint John of the Cross, who, in the Prologue to his The Spiritual Canticle, names the explicit music in his verses: silent, because it is calm and peaceful intelligence. Although each book of Mompou’s Silent Music is composed on different tempi, the work possesses a united structure; the configuration in four books only responds to its chronological order of composition and not to a formal organization previously designed. Luis Aracama is considered by critics to be one of the most outstanding and eclectic Spanish pianists of his generation. The versatile musician is founder and artistic director of the Festival of Contemporary Music of Ponferrada, and his interest in the music of our time has led him to premiere works of various modern composers, many of which have been written specifically for him.

Among the Spanish sources from the first third of the seventeenth century, the Cancionero de la Sablonara holds a very special place. It was prepared between 1625 and 1626 for a German noble, Wolfang Wilhelm, who held, among other titles of nobility, those of count palatine and duke of Neoburg and who had visited the court in Madrid between October 1624 and May 1625. This aristocratic music lover showed enthusiasm for the secular vocal music he heard at the court and, at the end of his trip, requested an anthology for his personal pleasure; it was compiled and copied with great care and beautiful calligraphy by Claudio de la Sablonara, main scripter-copyist-of the Royal Chapel. The collection contains seventy-five pieces, including "the best songs that are sung in this court," according to the compiler. This important source, preserved at Munich's Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, features poems in Spanish and Italian metric forms. There are fewer examples of the latter: merely eight compositions written in liras [six-verse stanzas] and one sonnet. The Castilian forms, on the other hand, are represented by five romances [ballads] without a refrain, twenty-nine with a refrain, eighteen letrillas [lyrical poems], eleven romances with a lyrical poem at the end, two series of seguidillas, and several decimas [ten-verse stanzas].

Alberto Urroz, one of the most brilliant pianists of his generation, faces in this recording the challenge to explore his own selection and version of some of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas, inviting us to enjoy a repertoire that is always attractive and inspiring, from which every great performer knows how to extract new nuances, subtleties and perspectives. Alberto Urroz enjoys a career as a soloist, active chamber music player, and accompanist for singers’ recitals and dancers and ballet companies. He is founder and Artistic Director of the Mendigorria International Music Festival in Spain and has produced and created successful multidisciplinary programs featuring music, art, and dance. As a founding member of the European Piano Teachers’ Association in Spain, Urroz has served as secretary since 2012 and Vice President from 2014.

Yes, there is 20th-Century Spanish music written for such an old instrument as the harpsichord! Composers do not impose limits: they love it's rhythm, it's timbre, and they love dreaming of the past. Following the traces of her exciting last album Chaconnerie, harpsichordist Silvia M�rquez Chulilla presents here a stunning bouquet of pieces composed between 1952 and 1996. Apparently a feminine world, it was the charismatic Wanda Landowska who inspired Manuel de Falla, the first leading composer of the 20th century to turn his gaze to the harpsichord. Then many composers from the 20th century enthusiastically wrote for Antoinette Vischer, Annelie de Man, Elisabeth Chojnacka, and Goska Isphording. And in Spain, in the sixties, it was to be Genoveva G�lvez -the first professor of harpsichord in her country- who would manage to make that initially solitary voyage attractive to contemporary composers with it's surprising sonorities -it is for good reason that three of the pieces amassed here are dedicated to her.

The preparation of this cantata has its origin in the poetic text written by Luciano González Sarmiento in 2015, which served the libretto for the music composed by Tomás Marco the next year (2016). Organized in five episodes, The devastated island is a description of mankind in her decline, compelled to live in the loneliness of a devastated island, where she faces the agonizing dilemma between life and death, a dilemma solved by the loving experience reconstructed in the warm sea of the Nereids. It is a work of evocative poetics that tries to fuse together music and word, and to flow by all its timbre, prosodic and phonetic parameters, broken-down in each of the characters according to their experiential features. The narrator acts as a “corypheus” transmitting his woes; the shadow (mezzosoprano) as an oracle of predictions; the choir as the collective expression and the discourse nexus between the main characters of a complex plot and the twilight (tenor) that personifies mankind, castaway in the crossroad of her decline, lost in the stagnation of her own nature.

It is clear and undisputed that the Sonatas belong to the outstanding clarinet music-literature. Brahms succeeds in his two “Sister Sonatas” to show the full sonority of the woodwind instrument while treating the piano as an accompaniment, but equal chamber music partner. Clarinet and piano always stay together – in support and in dialogue. The composition in all of these works can be experienced as a contribution to any understanding of expression and inter-musical relationships: this becomes clear on an inter-musical level of the composition and on an inter-humane level of the interpreters. It is especially this aspect which makes Brahms still experienceable in performance and interpretable today. In this ‘performativity’, the works experience their raison d’être; and in their performance, the intimate dialogue of friendship becomes reality. It is hard to find such a well-balanced and creative union between three artists, whose solo careers speak for themselves, but whose collaboration evoke the true essence of music-making. The most notable element perhaps, which brings Pablo Barragan, Juan P. Floristan, and Andrei Ionita together is their common vision of the communicational power of chamber music, its capacity to inspire and transform and its importance for their professional and personal development.

Debussy modified the inertias of music without altering the thread of music history; he changed the course without losing north, and avoided the pitfalls that led so many other eminent composers of his era to isolation and melancholy. All this is manifested in the works that Peruvian pianist Claudio Constantini reveals to us in this stunning release, second in a series that presents the recording of the complete piano output of the French composer, in which he performs the 24 Preludes, composed by Debussy in two volumes, the first from 1909 to 1910, while he was already ill with the cancer which would cause his death in 1918, and the second from 1911 to 1913. Together with the first book of Preludes, Claudio Constantini performs the Estampes from 1903 and the Ballade Slave from 1890; and next to the second book of Preludes, his Images oubliées from 1894. Claudio Constantini holds an international and multi-faceted career as a performer of two instruments, the piano and the bandoneon, as well as being a composer in high demand. Born and raised in Lima, Constantini’s unique style is defined by its solid classical roots paired with a passion for popular music genres, among which Latin music and Jazz/fusion play a key role.

This album aims to compile the most emblematic works of the end of the twentieth century while seeking to give more recent music a leading role because, fortunately, some of today's creators are of the same quality as the most firmly-established figures of the previous period. This is not work about the flutter-tonguing "traditional contemporary saxophone", display of the shallowest virtuosity, an accumulation of slaps or "strident multiphonics" used as effects, and which have been made an example of our feeblest "clich�s". Quite the contrary, the intention has been to select a programme where various styles coexist while seeking to keep in common the use the individual composers make of the saxophone, of course using E.T.s, although never as techniques themselves but rather with the aim of offering a message, part of the differentiated language of each. This is the main feature of the current panorama, the quest for a sonic language original to each composer, using the saxophone as the medium, never as the beginning or end of the composition.

In the socio-economic and ideological shadow of the political revolt of May '68, a group of composers mainly trained at the Paris National Conservatory of Music made an irreversible turn in the understanding of sound and composition as early as the beginning of the seventies. With the support of two research, training, experimentation and interpretation organs, as relevant in the Central European academic music scene as could be the Ensemble L'Itin�raire and the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, this group of creators materialized and responded to an aesthetic and technical concern for the internal sound behaviour, which we could find in other composers, such as Iannis Xenakis or Giacinto Scelsi. Once this first spectral wave has been collected and generated from a nucleus as deep-rooted and strengthened as the Parisian, the aesthetics, techniques and applications are diversified. Authors of diverse geographical origins, from Magnus Lindberg to Jos� Manuel L�pez L�pez, assume and enrich the creative possibilities of a thought, which has already been defined as post-spectral. In this sense, we could say that Eneko Vadillo (Malaga, 1973), would embody a third very peculiar wave called neo-spectralist and eclectic. Beyond their possible uselessness when trying to name and delimit a compositional position which is always dynamic and in progress, these terms can help us to describe Vadillo's attitude to sound and composition, as shown by the pieces making up this record, and will serve as the thread of argument for our brief notes. It is obvious that the spectral crosses all of Vadillo's work, from the consolidation of a first creative maturity beginning to be constituted in the first years of the 21st century to the creative paradigms that Alnur and Stella, both written for symphonic orchestra in 2005, represent.

At the beginning of the 20th century in Catalunya, several approaches to music lived side by side, some succeeding and overlapping each other: a German-influenced post-romanticism, of Wagnerian tradition; a Spanish nationalism, promoted by Felip Pedrell; and a "novecentist" style which sought to reconnect with the truest traditional roots, crystallizing into a language of great originality. All these aesthetic approaches co-existed naturally and became entwined in the works of composers whose language was constantly evolving. Within this musical context, the artistic lives began of three important Catalan composers of three consecutive generations: Joan Man�n (1883-1971), Robert Gerhard (1896-1970) and Xavier Montsalvatge (1912 -2002): composers whose extensive output has been performed and received international recognition, and who set out to find their own personal voice from the starting points of different musical styles. All three composed sonatas for cello and piano - works which depart from Spanish traditional music and look to Europe, assimilating the stylistic influences that most suited their contrasting sensibilities and thus making an authentic and original contribution to 20th century musical composition.