Prague Philharmonia Wind Quintet plays charming music for wind instruments and piano - for this time they play together with one of the most renowned Czech classical pianists - Ivan Klánský. The repertory of recording is very colorful and inspiring. To put Mozart, Martinu and Poulenc side by side seems entirely natural in programme design terms. Both Martinu (1890-1959) and Poulenc (1899-1963) had found in Mozart one of the main founts for their own neoclassical music. The recording is opened by Mozart's Piano Quintet in E flat major for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano. Sextet FP 100 by Francis Poulenc for wind quintet and piano is imbued with a typical Parisian nonchalance, French colouring and with Poulenc's mischievousness balanced out with his firm faith. Bohuslav Martinu's Sextet seems to be more like a suite (5 parts composition), but the music of each of the movements is very original and enjoyable. Prague Philharmonia Wind Quintet with Ivan Klánský are presenting us highly professional and truly enjoyable interpretation of all these pieces.

Two World Premiere Recordings are making this unusual album very attractive, not only for friends of french horn; the sounds and sound combinations are thrilling. Perfectly high caliber the artist crew: Premysl Vojta is one of the leading french horn player in Europe; Florence Millet is very much part of the contemporary music scene, giving master-classes and organising festivals; Ye Wu is Primaria in the Symphony orchestra of the WDR.

John Cage (1912-1992) holds his own special place amidst this stylistic pluralism. Although Cage did not specifically write a trio for horn, violin, and piano, his work Music For (1984) can be easily fleshed out in this instrumental lineup. Music For is a bundle of 17 parts that can be randomly associated with one another. Each possible combination represents an entirely valid version of the piece – ranging from a solo performance to piano duet, string quartet, or ensemble with voice. The version for horn trio is called Music For Three.

Kalevi Aho is one of today’s most prolific composers of large-scale orchestral scores, including 17 symphonies and 32 concertos to date. Less well-known is the fact that he has also written chamber music, as well as an ever-expanding series of solo pieces – starting with Solo I for violin from 1975, the most recent in the series, for clavichord, is the 17th. Some of these pieces has originated as part of Aho’s preparations when composing a concerto for the instrument in question, while others have been written for competitions, including Solo III for flute and Solo IV for cello on the present release. This first volume of Solos gathers seven pieces in all, four of which have previously appeared as part of separate discs. Aho’s Solos share the characteristic that they pose great technical, interpretative and often also physical challenges to the performer. Most of those heard here are performed by the musicians for whom they were written, including Hiyoli Togawa (Solo XII), Piet Van Bockstal (Solo IX), Simon Reitmaier (Solo XIV) and Marie-Luise Neunecker (Solo X).

Encores are works with strong expressive power. Here original music and own arrangements. At the age of 48, Hervé Joulain has already performed concerts of Haydn, Saint-Saëns, Strauss, Britten... In the year 2000 he made his debut in America and Canada with Strauss and Mozart with 110 different orchestras. The French hornist performed with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (1987–1997), with the Orchestre National de France (1997), and with the Orchestre de Paris under the direction of renowned conductors like Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Metha, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Maazel, Seiji Ozawa, Eliahu Inbal, Kurt Mazur, Charles Dutoit, Riccardo Muti, Bernard Haitink, Claudio Abbado. Since December 2002 he has been the solo French hornist in the Symphonica Toscanini (Italy).

During his short life Don Banks (1923–80) enjoyed a reputation as the leading modernist among Australian composers. Studies with Mátyás Seiber, Milton Babbitt and, especially, Luigi Dallapiccola helped refine his serial technique, but his music never retreated into academic abstraction, as this recital of chamber and vocal works demonstrates: it retained a keen sense of drama, an ear for atmosphere, a rather angular lyricism and, occasionally, a touch of humor. The works are performed by Ole Bohn, Robert Johnson, Geoffrey Gartner, Rowan Phemister, Daniel Herscovitch, Francesco Celata, Jenny Duck-Chong, Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, and Joshua Hill.

Friedrich Lux (1820–95) was one of those musicians who formed the fabric of musical life in nineteenth-century Germany: though he worked away from the major cities, as conductor, teacher, organist, organiser and composer, he was an indispensable element of the communities in which he worked. His large body of organ music, as good as unknown before now, brings together elements of the musical language of Bach, Mendelssohn and Schumann, in works that range from the intimate to the grandiose. This second volume brings some of his many transcriptions to the fore.

Although the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is best known as a symphonist, his constantly expanding catalogue includes numerous concertos as well as countless chamber works and arrangements of works by other composers. This disc brings together works from these three genres.

The Guitar Concerto, dedicated to Ismo Eskelinen, posed many challenges for Aho, who is not a guitarist himself. It is a seven-movement work exploring the different ways the guitar can be used – sometimes with far from traditional techniques – and exploring its sonic possibilities.

The Quintet for Horn and String Quartet was commissioned by Ilkka Puputti, who had previously premièred Aho’s Solo X for horn. Particularly demanding for the soloist, the quintet explores various atmospheres, in turns mysterious, whimsical, dramatic and dance-like.

Contrapunctus XIV from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of the Fugue was left unfinished owing to the composer’s declining health. As he was dissatisfied with previous attempts to complete it, Aho decided to write his own, aiming to remain true to Bach’s style. This completion exists in several versions, including the one for string orchestra heard here, expertly performed by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds.

Widely regarded as one of today's most important composers of orchestral music, Kalevi Aho has written fifteen symphonies to date, but also twenty concertos. Indeed, he himself describes his on-going series of concertos for each of the main instruments in the Romantic symphony orchestra as 'one of the most important and most ambitious of my composition projects'.

One of the latest additions to this series is the Horn Concerto, composed for the Finnish horn-player Annu Salminen who also performs it on the present recording. The one-movement work differs from Aho's other concertos in that it includes what the composer describes as a 'ritualistic' element: the horn’s first entries are heard from backstage, after which the soloist enters the stage, moving gradually from left to right before leaving the stage again towards the end.

In the Concerto for Theremin, there is also a theatrical element, this time springing from the nature of the instrument itself. Invented in 1920, the theremin is the world's first electronic instrument, and consists of two antennae, both of which respond to the movements of the player's hand in the air. The instrument is played without being touched, and Aho describes the experience of hearing it as 'magical – the soloist is like a magician, a weaver of spells, producing music just by moving his hands without touching the instrument at all.' After having been introduced to the theremin by Carolina Eyck, and deciding to write a work for her and the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, this 'shamanistic aspect' led Aho to conceive of 'Eight Seasons': a concerto in eight movements, played without a break, and based on the traditional division of the year by the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland. The wide range of sounds and effects available on the theremin are used by Aho to depict seasonal events such as the first frost, the melting of the ice and the midnight sun, and his score also exploits Carolina Eyck's unusual ability to simultaneously sing and play the theremin.

This disc also includes a video clip, playable on your computer, with Carolina Eyck’s introduction to the theremin and to Kalevi Aho’s concerto.

The 19th century saw huge developments in the design of many musical instruments. In some cases changes were adopted more or less universally: the fortepiano that Mozart knew, a five-octave instrument constructed entirely of wood, had by around 1900 grown into the modern grand piano with over seven octaves and a castiron frame. With other instruments, progress was less streamlined. As late as 1865, the natural, valveless horn of Beethoven's time remained the instrument of choice for Brahms when he wrote his famous Horn Trio, and when valves began to be introduced, makers and musicians in Germany, France and Vienna favoured different solutions, offering different results in terms of sound and requiring different playing techniques. The present release is a unique combination of recital and history lesson, with a young British team performing music from between 1800 and 1942 on no less than eight different historic instruments: four horns and four pianos. This gives us the opportunity to hear the works on instruments that the different composers would have recognized, whether Beethoven's Sonata in F major (a natural horn from 1800 and a fortepiano from 1815) or the Villanelle by Paul Dukas from 1906 (an early 20thcentury cor à pistons and a Bechstein from 1898). Both notable performers on modern instruments, Alec FrankGemmill and Alasdair Beatson here revel in the sonic possibilities offered by the historic instruments with results that are as delighting as they are enlightening.