The Missa Cellensis was Haydn' first Mass setting for his new employers at EszterhAza. In common with his Stabat Mater, Haydn draws upon the wealth of musical styles and traditions associated with the Viennese Mass. Scored for strings, oboes, bassoon.

Both Black Pentecost and Stone Litany share a symphonic scale and an Orkney setting. Premièred by Simon Rattle in 1982, Black Pentecost is an impassioned plea against environmental destruction, taking its words from Orcadian author George Mackay Brown’s novel Greenvoe, and cast in the form of a vocal symphony. Chamber-like restraint is matched by tense, dark writing that embraces threnody and cataclysm. Beautifully orchestrated and featuring elaborate melismas from the vocal soloist, Stone Litany, subtitled ‘Runes from a House of the Dead’, evokes the haunted landscape of a Neolithic burial mound plundered by Vikings.

The works on this recording embrace a varied miscellany of Peter Maxwell Davies’ orchestraloutput from the early 1990s. The ‘choreographic poem’ The Beltane Fire pits the sternness of theReformation clergy against the pagan traditions of the Orkney Islands. Concerned withenvironmental pollution, The Turn of the Tide ultimately reaches “a triumphant dance of allcreation”, while the Threnody and Pavan are poignant memorial tributes for significant figuresin the composer’s life.

The works on this disc span much of Astor Piazzolla's compositional career, from the Sinfonia Buenos Aires of 1951 to the Concerto of 1979. The latter has a title, "Aconcagua", the highest peak in the Andes, but it was not given by the composer. All of this music is stunning, and it's marvelously performed here. The best-known work, naturally, is an arrangement: Las Cuatro Estaciones, here in the version for string orchestra by Leonid Desyatnikov.

I have to confess that I prefer a more varied scoring in this music, but it would be very hard to beat this performance for clarity and beauty of texture. Tianwa Yang handles the solo violin part with aplomb, digging into the "dirty" sounds--the glissandos and other effects--with relish, but without ever coarsening her tone as so many others routinely do. There's elegance here as well, and she finds it. The result is that the "Spring" fugato, for example, has amazing rhythmic definition but also a very welcome lightness and freshness.

The Bandoneón Concerto offers a perfect marriage of Piazzolla's tango-saturated melos with large-scale form. It's worth recalling that the composer spent several years studying with Alberto Ginastera, as well as Nadia Boulanger, and all of his music in whatever form betrays a very high level of compositional craft. Daniel Binelli plays the solo part extremely well, and he's perfectly balanced against the larger ensemble. He also participates (to a lesser degree) in the Sinfonía Buenos Aires, in which the influence of Ginastera is very evident (and entirely welcome).

This early work is thrilling: a blend of Latin rhythm, soulful melody, explosive percussion, and now and then a touch of Stravinsky. The finale will blow you away, and there are some haunting timbres in the slow movement featuring the combination of bandoneón and woodwinds. The Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero plays all of this music with the necessary guts and also a welcome degree of polish. The players sound completely at home in the idiom, and Guerrero delivers bold, uninhibited interpretations across the board. This is just a great disc of colorful, distinctive orchestral music, and it belongs in every collection.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This fascinating disc presents the young Georges Bizet' first composition after having won the prestigious Prix de Rome, the grandiose Te Deum, which remained unpublished until 1971, and his Prix de Rome cantata Clovis et Clotilde.

A wide cross-section of Maxwell Davies's work is represented on this programme, part of the ongoing Naxos reissues of recordings fist released by Collins Classics. The two concertos are performed by their dedicatees.

Until recently the role of women as composers and performers of both sacred and secular music during the Middle Ages has been seriously underestimated. This disc, sung by the all-female group Musica Ficta.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ ballet Caroline Mathilde premièred in 1991 and has been highly acclaimed ever since. Its story concerns the tragic marriage of Caroline to Christian VII of Denmark and is cast in a musical language that embraces expressionism, drama, parody, and overt lyricism. The two concert suites chart the young queen’s fall from grace and her eventual banishment into exile. Chat Moss is a richly textured tone poem, while by contrast the Ojai Festival Overture is a lively and extrovert concert piece reflecting Maxwell Davies’ fondness for American landscape and culture. Recorded between 1991-95 and previously released by the now defunct Collins Classics, the Naxos label has been consistently lauded in the musical press for making available once again these and many other recordings by arguably the greatest British composer of the second half of the 20th c., that, in some cases, remain the only recordings of these works.

The novelty of Franz Anton Hoffmeister' double bass quartets lies in his substitution of that husky-voiced instrument for the first violin in a regular string quartet line-up.

BRITTEN / BERKELEY: Auden Songs

Peter Maxwell Davies's Strathclyde Concertos, jointly commissioned by Strathclyde Regional Council and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in 1987, have given rise to a whole family of concertos for different and unusual instruments. The Ninth Concerto provides an opportunity for woodwind instruments to shine as soloists, the music inspired by the infinite shades of winter light reflected from the seas of Orkney. The final Tenth Concerto is "a concerto for orchestra that's as bracing as a gale on the rugged Orkney cliffs" (BBC Music Magazine), and the delightful Carol�sima is filled with dances and singable tunes.

Some of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' most imposing and important music for solo instruments can be heard in his cycle of ten Strathclyde Concertos, composed for, and premiered by the soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The ingeniously structured Seventh Concerto, for double bass, is both tense and haunting. The more conventionally laid out Eighth Concerto, for bassoon, is by turns playful and lyrical, and features an important role for timpani. A Spell for Green Corn was written to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the SCO and Maxwell Davies' 60th birthday.

Born in Austria and active in Vienna until 1938 when he emigrated to the USA before returning to Europe after the Second World War, Kurt Roger combined traditional, even archaic musical forms, with the adventurous harmonies of late Romanticism. His Clarinet Quintet, like that of Brahms, is a beautifully conceived late work, while the Variations on an Irish Air recalls his visit to Ireland in 1939. The Piano Trio displays Roger�s Classical Viennese roots and the Piano Sonata uses Baroque, Romantic and Modern elements in inventive combination.

Shortly after completing his breathtaking Fifth Symphony, Beethoven composed incidental music for Goethe' drama, Egmont.

WILLAN: Organ Works