A year before his death in 1948, Richard Strauss composed his masterpiece, Four Last Songs, expressing a calm acceptance of the inevitability of his own death.

Of the British composers to have emerged immediately before Elgar, the most significant were Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Stanford. Central to Stanford' achievement are the seven symphonies covering the greater part of his career.

In April 1764 the Mozart family arrived in London on a concert tour arranged by Mozart's father Leopold which had already taken them to cities in Germany and to Paris. They were to stay until summer the following year. Received at the English court.

Nigel North' Dowland Lute Edition has gained him a garland of critical accolades: "A collector' item", "a remarkable performance of wonderful music", "North' sweet-toned playing is both unfailingly musical and highly imaginative.

Profound in spirit and monumental in scope Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are arguably the most difficult original solo works ever written for the violin. Their formidable technical challenges, especially the persistent use of multiple stops are not just virtuoso features but are the natural result of the complexity of Bach's musical ideas and his understanding of the instrument. The crowning glory of the set is the immense Chaconne from the Partita in D minor, a set of variations on a theme which makes unprecedented demands on the performer's expressive and technical abilities.

The Austrian-born Georg Tintner achieved fame as a conductor but considered himself a 'composer who conducts', with an ambition 'to write beautiful music'.

The Franco-Lebanese composer and poet Bechara El-Khoury was born in Beirut in 1957. a master of orchestration, El-Khoury draws on the rich palette of resources available to today's composers.

An eclectic musician with a compelling melodic gift, Laurent Petitgirard combines a career as a composer of orchestral and film music with that of an international conductor.

The recently discovered Guerra Manuscript is an anthology of the finest pieces heard in Madrid during the second half of the 17th Century and was probably prepared for a high-ranking noble or member of the Spanish royal family. It contains a hundred vocal pieces by leading composers including Juan Hidalgo, Jos� Mar�n, Juan de Navas, Crist�bal Gal�n, Juan Del Vado and Mat�as Ruiz, as well as others whose authors remain anonymous. Isabel Monar has been acclaimed worldwide for her concert and operatic performances. Manuel Vilas has collaborated with numerous groups, including Les Musiciens du Louvre, Al Ayre Espa�ol and Musica Ficta.

The five works that make up this recording were all inspired by Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha. Barbieri' incidental music was composed as part of the first official commemoration, in 1861, of the anniversary of Cervantes' death.

Haydn' misgivings about Beethoven' third piano trio were not entirely unfounded: symphonic in conception, it was a breakthrough work-Beethoven' first masterpiece and eventually one of his most popular chamber pieces-and retains it's power to amaze to this day. His Symphony No. 2 also broke through Classical conventions, a scherzo replacing the customary minuet. In the composer�s own arrangement for piano trio it loses none of it's impact. The youthful Allegretto in E flat is, in effect, a minuet without the expected trio section.

The cantata Della Passione di Ges� Cristo, J-C 124 (On Jesus Christ's Passion), was first performed in San Fedele on 9 March 1759, the first Friday of Lent. This title, which was published in the catalogue of Sammartini's works (Harvard University Press, 1976), does not correspond to the text found in Father Keller's manuscript. The text belongs instead to the cantata Gerusalemme sconoscente, ingrata (Jerusalem, ungrateful and disowning), which bears the number J-C 122. In the catalogue, this number belongs to the text of the cantata La perfidia giudaica (The Jewish Wickedness), which is considered lost and is catalogued as number C-49. According to the current state of research the 1760 cantata Della Passione di Ges� Cristo, Signor nostro seems to be lost. The real title of the cantata, Gerusalemme sconoscente, ingrata (Jerusalem, ungrateful and disowning), clearly shows the anti-Semitism of it's text. All too often religious texts, particularly those concerning Christ's Passion, would unfortunately express anti-Semitic feelings. In this cantata three citizens of Jerusalem, the Apostles Peter and John and Mary Magdalene, themselves certainly Jews, paradoxically express their deep disappointment that the miracles of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's honoring of the Savior should have been misunderstood by the Jews and thus contributed to his death. The cantata L'addolorata Divina Madre e Desolatissima nella Soledad, J-C 123 (The Sorrowing Divine Mother and Most Afflicted in Her Solitude), was first performed on the fifth Friday of Lent in 1759. Three pious women Mary Magdalene, Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome comment upon the Holy Virgin's destiny, each singing a recitative and an aria. Mary Magdalene emphasizes that Mary's pain at the death of her son is made more intense by the thought that he was condemned as if guilty of a crime; Mary Cleophas points to the silent presence of the Holy Mother throughout the whole of her son's life, recalling Simeon's prediction that "... a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also" (Luke, 2,35), this the image of the grieving Mother, the Mater Dolorosa; whilst, in the most heroic aria of the cantata (Non cos� d'Alpe in cima) (Not even an ancient oak on an Alpine peak), Mary Salome considers the suffering Mother's inner strength, so firm and immovable that not even an age old oak on a snowbound Alpine peak or a storm-lashed rock in a sea of shipwrecks could match it. Apparently Father Keller did not possess the original text, since we find in his score the melody of the aria with a Latin text: "Ecce panis angelorum". In this recording we have the aria complete with both it's music and it's Italian text, in the reconstruction by Daniele Ferrari from the original libretto. In the finale the three holy women move forward to a more positive attitude in spite of their sorrow: the text is a paraphrase of the Latin sequence Stabat mater dolorosa (The Mother Stood Sorrowing), whose author is probably Jacopone da Todi. Mary Magdalene's "Non bast� l'immenso affanno" (More than the immense pain) can be found in Father Keller's sources in the form of a contrafactum with the Latin text Confitebor taken from the Mass (it was common at the time to take already existing music and arrange it for different purposes).

Includes work(s) by Vittorio Giannini. Ensemble: University of Houston Wind Ensemble. Conductor: Tom Bennett.

For Robert Schumann 1842 was a year of chamber music. His compositions that year included three string quartets, written down in the space of a few weeks, after close study of the classical form.

Persichetti's band music comprises one of the most enjoyable and successful segments of his copious compositional output. In it you will find a communicative voice and range of expression often missing from his symphonies, where at times he seemed to find the seriousness of the genre inhibiting. Here, though, the challenge and discipline of creating really good music for wind ensemble has set his imagination free. Listen, for example, to the atmospheric opening of the chorale prelude O God Unseen, or to the quirky humor evident in the Divertimento and Masquerade. The largest piece here, Parable for Band, is an absolute masterpiece of the medium. The winds of the London Symphony Orchestra (and friends, presumably, unless the orchestra employs a dozen clarinets) play all of this music with appropriate aplomb under conductor David Amos. If you enjoy the symphonic band repertoire, you probably already know a lot of this music, and so you also will know that you want this well-recorded disc (originally released by Harmonia Mundi in the mid-'90s). [4/12/2006]--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com