The piano works on this CD date from different periods in Gian Francesco Malipiero’s creative life. From his unpublished juvenilia to the late Ricercar toccando, from the evocative Poemi asolani of 1916 to the disillusionment of the pieces written in the years following the First World War: a range of works that bear witness to the development of the composer’s conception of the piano miniature as a kind of intimate diary, between nostalgic impressions and aphoristic humour.

This sequel to the Gramophone Award-nominated Americascapes album (ODE 1396-2) by the Basque National Orchestra and Robert Trevino is a thrilling and a deeply personal journey into the music of three American composers. All three composers had very unique aesthetic worlds and with two of the composers conductor Robert Trevino also had direct artistic collaboration. Where my first 'Americascapes' album looked at lesser-known major American works that had influenced European composers (rather than the other way around), for this follow-up, I went back to a more basic thought - "What is America?". Since America is many things to millions of people, I realise that my question had to mean, "What is America to me? (...) Selecting the composers for this American Opus took well over a year. Yet I eventually refined the list to these three composers, with all of whom I feel a close kinship and all of whom are deeply meaningful to me. Two of them I even had a direct artistic relationship with. As a group, they also embody some of the diversity and the radically different aesthetics that thrive in the Americas." (Robert Trevino)

REVIEW:

The hunt for buried treasure is quite an industry these days, but coming up with gold is far from guaranteed. No problem, it appears, for Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra. American Opus is the sequel to 2021’s excellent Americascapes (Ondine ODE 1396-2) and once again the Mexican-American conductor demonstrates a gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff. With the Revueltas set beside the Crumb and the Walker, Americascapes Volume 2 is a complex, thoroughly satisfying national portrait.

— Limelight

The Barcelona Clarinet Players commissioned six prominent Latin American composers to write new works for clarinet quartet and wind band. During their 2021–2022 season; they recorded each work with a different wind band in the United States or Latin America; and the result is a captivating album of extraordinary musical richness and diversity that showcases the unique aesthetic of each composer and the artistry of the performing ensembles.

• SIGNUM saxophone quartet will release their first album on Berlin Classics
• Feat. Alexej Gerassimez (Percussion) and Eckart Runge (Cello)
• The quartet has made a name for themselves in various exciting projects (e.g. working with Alexej Gerassimez for his solo album on Berlin Classics)
• With Chameleon they show how colorful the sound of the saxophone is with a diverse selection of music from classical (Glazunov, Bloch, Haydn, and more) as well as pop and rock

As an instrument from Italy, one that was exotic and evocative of Mediterranean atmospheres, the mandolin was very much in fashion in France until the end of the Century of Enlightenment: a fact also confirmed by many iconographic and musical sources. Pizzicar Galante, an ensemble that stands today as a benchmark for the interpretation of the galant literature for mandolin and continuo, has been acclaimed for the “finesse, creativity and spirit” (Olivier Fourés, Diapason) and “communicative energy” of its performances (Sébastien Llinares, France Musique).

For its second recording with Arcana, it offers a compilation of the finest music played during the veritable “golden age” enjoyed by the mandolin in Paris from the 1760s to the Revolution. It is a rare and unexplored repertoire in which the dazzling virtuosity of Anna Schivazappa, a specialist in historical mandolins, dialogues with the beguiling and charismatic voice of Marc Mauillon.

This album contains the symphonic suite "Scheherazade" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the short composition "The Enchanted Lake" by his student Anatoly Lyadov.

In 1887-88, after the sudden death of his brilliant friend Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov composed those three orchestral works which crowned his Russian national period and has made his name a permanent part of the worldwide concert repertoire: the "Capriccio espagno"l, the symphonic suite "Scheherazade", and the concert overture "La Grande Pâque Russe". With Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov did not tell a story, he rather set individual, unconnected episodes and images to music.

Anatoly Lyadov has a reputation of being lazy – based solely on Rimsky-Korsakov’s opinion of him – yet his ambition was for every piece of music he created to be flawless. One consequence of this was that his entire œuvre consists entirely of miniatures. The "Enchanted Lake" does not tell a story but is purely impressionistic music about a Russian forest lake, on a level with Ravel and Debussy. Conductor Dmitri Kitayenko conducted various orchestras in Moscow, became chief conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic in 1976, and took over the Symphony Orchestra of the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt am Main in 1990-96. He went on to hold principal positions with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bern Symphony Orchestra, the KBS Symphony Orchestra in Seoul and finally, in addition to his worldwide activities as a guest conductor, was appointed Honorary Conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne.

As a winner of numerous national and international youth competitions, Robert Neumann (born 2001) was awarded with the International Classic Music Discovery Award 2017. In 2018, the Jury of the SWR (radio broadcasting corporation in Southwest Germany) chose Robert as the"SWR New Talent". For his debut CD at SWRmusic, Robert was awarded the OPUS KLASSIK Young Artist of the Year 2021. The young pianist made his orchestral debut with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra when he was eight, and since then he has appeared with other orchestras, including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, German State Philharmonic Ludwigshafen, Stuttgart Philharmonic, Liechtenstein Symphony Orchestra, SWR Symphonieorchestra, Praga Philharmonic Camerata and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. For his second album, Robert Neumann chose two works which can easily be placed side by side and that are both close to the pianist’s heart. Robert Schumann‘s Kreisleriana is about a character from several tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition describes walking from one work of art to the next. Both are programme music pieces with somewhat comparable ideas but, as Neumann puts it: „One idea deals with a real character, the other one doesn’t […]. And I think both show in an exemplary manner how flawlessly and also in different ways a great Romantic cycle can be structured, formed.

The first recording of another monumental work for piano by the composer of Opus clavicembalisticum and Sequentia cyclica.

Kaikhosru Sorabji tended to discourage performances of his music, feeling that most musicians not only lacked the technical equipment and dedication to conquer his vast scores, but also that they would not satisfactorily grasp their spiritual content. Born in a London suburb of Parsee origin, living for much of his life on a remote Scottish island, Sorabji died in 1988, and only in the last two decades have advances in digital publishing enabled his many unperformed and intimidatingly large pieces to be transferred from manuscript, and then taken on by dedicated performers such as the British pianist Jonathan Powell, whose first recording of the eight-hour Sequentia Cyclica won widespread praise on its release by Piano Classics: Sorabji’s ‘most inclusive and revealing major statement’ according to Gramophone, ‘a wilful yet engrossing challenge that, in Powell, has met its match.’ Composed in the mid-1950s, the Toccata terza had been thought lost until the score turned up in 2019, and Abel Sánchez-Aguilera has produced his own critical edition in order to make this first recording: a monumental labour of love and skill. The Toccata is cast in ten sections, including a 50-minute Passacaglia – one of Sorabji’s favourite forms – and the kind of thorny counterpoint and mountainous climaxes which will be familiar to followers of his music. There are four extant Toccatas: ‘They seem to look back to the examples of Bach and Busoni,’ as Sánchez-Aguilera remarks in his booklet introduction, ‘reinvented in Sorabji’s personal language and expanded to monumental proportions. Notwithstanding their complexity, several features make them particularly effective and accessible to the listener. They make use of familiar procedures – such as the variation and the fugue – and thus establishing clear links with tradition.’

No Sorabji collector will ignore this major new release of his music, and searchers for rarities in the hyper-virtuoso piano repertoire will discover a new treasure.

Founded in 1841 under the participation of Constanze Mozart, the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg today enjoys the highest reputation worldwide for its lively and style-conscious Mozart interpretations. In numerous ways it connects the Viennese Classical period to the music of the 19th/20th and 21st centuries. The orchestras constant preoccupation with his core repertoire also shapes its approach to the music of later periods. Thus chamber-musical transparency, articulatory clarity and nuanced sonority are a trademark that makes the Mozarteum Orchestra special and recognizable, also when playing the music of other composers. The Mozarteumorchester Salzburg proves once again its unrivaled position as interpreters of the Mozart stylistic and uses the organ sonatas as a departure into other stylistic periods. It Includes two world premiere recordings of Henze‘s "Konzertmusik" and "Three Mozart Organ Sonatas".

Miklós Rózsa feared that success as a film composer might overshadow his reputation as a composer of classical concert fare. He was right. Three Oscars and 17 Academy Award nominations tends to do that. The two worlds were strangely incompatible and forced Rózsa into what he called his “Double Life” – the title of both a film for which he won an Oscar and that of his autobiography. The three orchestral works presented here, from his early, middle and late phases, provide a charming introduction to his alternative side.

REVIEW:

Works like the ones on this album ought to appeal to lovers of any of Rosza’s many film scores; the musical language is not that far off. The orchestra, an underrated regional group, gives crisp performances under conductor Gregor Bühl on a release that should appeal to both film buffs and fans of 20th century music generally.

— AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

Mary Elizabeth Bowden, praised for her “splendid, brilliant” artistry (Gramophone), celebrates the narrative power of the trumpet with "Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet." Bowden is joined by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Allen Tinkham in a collection of new concertos that redefine the trumpet’s voice in modern classical music. This recording, a testament to Bowden’s commitment to expanding the trumpet repertoire, features world premiere recordings of works by James M. Stephenson, Clarice V. Assad, Vivian Fung, Tyson Gholston Davis, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Reena Esmail, showcasing the richness and versatility of contemporary classical trumpet music.