Classical Music

Classical Music

In the latest volume of the complete works for harpsichord, the seven Toccatas (BWV 910-916) and teh large Fantasias, Preludes and Fugues (BWV 903-904, 894, 944) are presented as the culmination of the 17th century Stylus Phantasticus tradition. In this installment the pedal harpsichord is explored as a rich medium for Bach's harpsichord and organ works, its clarity and power bridging the gap between the two instruments. With its rich bass sonority and clarity, the pedal harpsichord comes into its own as an ideal performance medium for many of Bach's greatest works for keyboard. This album marks the first performance of all these works on a pedal harpsichord in over 60 years.

- Robert Schumann's three sonatas for violin and piano embody the 19th c. German Romantic perspective. - Entering Schumann's unique sound world, violinist Nicholas DiEugenio and pianist Chi-Chen Wu draw further inspiration from the builder Rodney Regier's unique creation of a fortepiano that embodies the ideal characteristics of instruments by Vienna's greatest early 19th c. builders, Conrad Graf and Ignaz B�sendorfer. - The release of this disc ushers in the first such recording to feature performances of all three sonatas on a fortepiano.

This is the première recording of Alessandro Grandi’s complete arias for solo voice from his third volume of 1626, performed here by tenor Bud Roach as they would have been commonly heard at the time of their publication: with the singer accompanying himself on the baroque guitar. A contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi, Grandi found his greatest success with cantatas and arias for solo voice. These secular songs were among the most popular in Venice throughout the third decade of the 17th century, and are considered to represent the apogee of the genre. Like many of the song collections published by Vincenti, this volume includes “alfabeto” notation for the strummed Spanish guitar. - Musica Omnia

Performances by distinguished Australian Baroque violinist, Stanley Ritchie. Complete performances of Bach's three Sonatas and Three Partitas for solo violin, part of the violinist's core repertoire, presented by an expert in Bach performance. Performed on an original Baroque violin in it's original condition by Jacob Stainer, c. 1670, one of whose instruments was in Bach's own collection. Booklet text and essay by Stanley Ritchie presented in English, German, French and Italian.

Penelope Crawford presents a program of four of Beethoven's most important transitional sonatas, bridging the gap between his "middle" and "late" periods. Composed against the backdrop of Napoleonic Europe and Metternich's Congress of Vienna, these four works chart Beethoven's growth as a composer in a rapidly changing world. As with her first Beethoven sonata recording (opp. 109-11), Musica Omnia MO 0308), a splendid fortepiano by the great Viennese builder, Conrad Graf, is used here, similar to one of the last pianos owned by Beethoven, also by Conrad Graf.

Selection includes "Beyond the Notes" - Salmi bizarri: Cozzolani and the music of Milanese convents.

Johann Sebastian Bach trained his many sons to be the finest organists of their time, yet hardly any organ music survives from them. Through transcription, improvisation, and other acts of imaginative re-creation this recording reunites Bach and his boys for a program that recaptures the virtuosic panache, commanding counterpoint, impressive poise, and exuberant excess of this first family on the organ. Played by award-winning Bach scholar and organist David Yearsley on Cornell University's reconstruction of a Berlin organ from 1706, known to at least one of the Bach sons, this program explores new dimensions not only of Johann Sebastian's towering achievement but also of the kinds of now-lost contributions the next Bach generation might have made to their family instrument's long and glorious history.

Complete recording of all 24 of Haydn's German songs. World premiere recording. Performed by experts in 18th century performance practice, including the art of ornamenting Haydn's vocal music. Accompaniments are performed on replicas of Haydn's fortepiano from around 1790. Booklet essay by distinguished Haydn scholar, Professor James Webster from Cornell University. A note on performance by forte pianist Tom Beghin is also included, along with English translations of all the song texts.

Classical Music

A large measure of Mozart's increasing fascination with the clarinet from the later 1780s was due to his interaction with one of the cutting-edge virtuosi of the day, Anton Stadler, for whom both of the works on this CD were composed as well as the Clarinet Concerto, K. 662. Both works are played here by Australian virtuoso, Owen Watkins on reproductions of period clarinets, including a basset instrument, with extended lower range, for the Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581. Jaap Schr�der, an expert in the violin repertoire of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, founded the Sk�lholt Quartet and lead the Quartetto Esterhazy and Smithson String Quartet, performing and recording classical quartet repertoire for the first time on period instruments. Oboist Owen Watkins has performed and recorded with many premier ensembles in the USA, Europe and Australia, including Boston Baroque, the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston Camerata, Washington Bach Consort, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Pinchgut Opera and Orchestra of the Antipodes, Orchestra 1788 and the Cambini Quintet. A faculty member of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute for twenty-five years, Penelope Crawford is internationally acclaimed as one of America's master performers on historical keyboard instruments. From 1975 to 1990, she was harpsichordist and fortepianist with the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra, one of the first period instrument ensembles in North America.

In her third Mozart recording for Musica Omnia, the distinguished fortepianist, Trudelies Leonhardt, presents a programme of three of the composer's finest solo sonatas from the early 1780s, as well as the haunting and mysterious Rondo in A minor, K. 511, composed in 1789. Trudelies Leonhardt is of Dutch-Austrian parentage and comes from a family of musicians, her brother being the well-known harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt. She studied in Amsterdam with Johannes R�ntgen and Nelly Wagenaar and was awarded the Soloist-diploma cum laude and the Elisabeth Everts-prijs. She also worked in Paris with Yves Nat and Marguerite Long. Numerous orchestras have engaged Trudelies Leonhardt as soloist, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, The Tonhalle-Orchester of Zurich, The Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and The London Mozart Players among them. She has long been especially interested in fortepianos of the late 18th and early 19th century and nowadays she devotes her musical activity entirely to these. She has recorded about thirty albums, the majority of which feature works of Schubert and Beethoven. This is the third release of works by Mozart for Musica Omnia.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 form the final part of his monumental ClavierÜbung (Keyboard Practices) series and appeared in print in 1741. The work exploits the full technical and musical resources of the two-manual harpsichord and its player. Within the framework of its thirty elaborate variations on a 32-bar ground bass, the work presents a dazzling compendium of keyboard styles, from learned counterpoint through to the most audacious and modern abstract writing for an instrument with two independent keyboards. The present recording is one the final volumes of Peter Watchorn’s complete survey of Bach’s entire harpsichord output.

The Lenten season of 1679 was a cold, rainy, and dreary affair. The new Pope, Innocent XI, was no supporter of the increasingly permissive nature of Roman aristocracy, and he took measures to enforce edicts prohibiting staged performances before a paying public, as well as a general ban on the appearance of women on the stage. Reluctantly granted, however, was permission for private performances, and this concession led to the fortuitous circumstances that made the premiere of Scarlatti’s first opera possible—the ingenuity of the Bernini brothers who produced the work; a liberal interpretation of “private performance”; the support and attendance of Queen Christina of Sweden; and, certainly not least, the fact that Pope Innocent had left the city during the carnival, leaving the enforcement of his conservatism to some of the very cardinals who most enjoyed and supported public theatre! Founded in 2008 and led by tenor Bud Roach, the vocal quartet Capella Intima presents unique programming of mainly seventeenth-century repertoire, serving as the ensemble in residence for the HAMMER BAROQUE concert series in Hamilton, Ontario. Programmes such as The Poor Man’s Vespers(a hypothetical collection of small-scale psalm settings for churches of modest means), The Paradise of Travellers (Italian repertoire interspersed with the recollections of English travelers on the Grand Tour), and concert performances of Marco Da Gagliano’s La Dafne, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Scarlatti’s youthful masterpiece presented here, have established the ensemble as a driving force on the Canadian early music scene.

Collectors familiar with Trudelies Leonhardt’s previous Beethoven releases on the Globe and Meridian labels will know what to expect here. As before, she uses a Viennese Benignus Seidner model fortepiano dating from 1815. Its low notes have a warm, slightly nasal timbre, with an attractive singing quality to the middle and high registers that contrasts to the jangly sonorities we sometimes hear from other instruments from that period, such as the Graf fortepiano. Leonhardt’s genial performing style evokes the intimacy and spontaneous inflections typical of Wilhelm Kempff and Wilhelm Backhaus in their later years.

She takes the two Op. 49 sonatas’ modest dimensions on their own terms, projecting the melodies in natural, conversational arcs. Leonhardt’s tempo for the G major Op. 14 No. 1 first movement is more of a Moderato than the Allegro that Beethoven specifies, and we might wish for more rhythmic backbone in the development section, or a brusquer attack to the Andante’s soft staccato chords. By contrast, Leonhardt brings out the Allegro assai finale’s sense of surprise in her sophisticated timing of the ascending scales and rests.

Also note the uncommonly clear left-hand passagework in Leonhardt’s expansive and well-proportioned Op. 110 sonata opening movement. Her little luftpauses at phrase ends disrupt the rhythmic flow of the Allegro molto movement’s main theme. The expressive eloquence informing the third movement’s ”Klagender Gesang” best illustrates Leonhardt’s seasoned musicianship, although she doesn’t match Peter Serkin and Ronald Brautigam for virtuosic momentum in the fugue’s climax. The booklet includes an extensive essay about the Seidner fortepiano and excellent musical annotations.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

First release in a new four-CD series devoted to Schubert's late and greatest chamber music. Performances use period instruments, reconstructing the sound Schubert's own time. Quartet is led by Jaap Schroder, one of the legends of historical performance practice, and one of the greatest violinists of our day. Schubert's G major Quartet, D. 887, represents the high point of quartet-writing of the first three decades of the 19th century. Booklet text in English and Icelandic.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was famous from an early age as a pianist, utilizing the sophisticated Viennese instruments that were developed from the 1770's by builders such as Anton Walter and Andreas Stein. On this companion album to MO0409, distinguished fortepianist, Trudelies Leonhardt, presents another programme of Mozart's solo sonatas from Salzburg, Mannheim and Vienna, as well as the Rondo in D major, K. 485 and the sublime Adagio in B minor, K. 540. Leonhardt performs ona fortepiano built by Paul McNulty, a replica of an instrument by Mozart's favorite maker, Anton Walter.

Franz Schubert was described by his contemporaries as a thoughtful, sensitive and highly competent pianist, if not a virtuoso, like Mozart and Beethoven. The distinguished fortepianist, Trudelies Leonhardt, presents here a miscellany of shorter piano works, both sonata and dance movements, mainly from the years 1815-1818, along with the mysterious and beautiful Hungarian Melody, from 1824. She performs on an exactly contemporaneous fortepiano by Benignus Seidner, Vienna, c. 1815. Trudelies Leonhardt is a member of one of Europe's most famous musical families, she's a leading exponent of the fortepiano and has a wide international following.

Sacred motets for 1-6 voices published in Venice before, during, and after the plague of 1630, featuring Capella Intima and the Gallery Players of Niagara.