For his Naxos d�but recording, the internationally acclaimed Georgian baritone Lado Ataneli has selected operatic arias by Bizet, Donizetti, Leoncavallo, Verdi, Massenet, Mozart and Rossini, which showcase what the Los Angeles Times hailed as �one of the healthiest, roundest, most mellifluous voices on the planet�. A sought-after interpreter of verismo r�les, Lado Ataneli has worked with conductors including Riccardo Muti, James Conlon and James Levine, sharing the stage with Pl�cido Domingo and other leading singers. He closes his recital with an aria by Dimitri Arakishvili, one of the founders of modern Georgian music.

One of Prokofiev' best loved works today, Romeo and Juliet was initially declared 'impossible to dance to'.

BALADA: No-res / Ebony Fantasies

LES PLUS BELLE PAGES POUR FLUT

English Viola Sonatas

Adam de la Halle "the Hunchback" is justly the most famous composer of the late 13th century, and his greatest gift to posterity, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, is the first-ever opera - a pastoral romp brimming with delightful songs.

Marvellously vivid and beautifully recorded.

I see that my complimentary words regarding volume seven of Robert Barto’s Weiss series are - thankfully, anonymously - reprinted on the back of the jewel box for volume ten. I thought I recognised the phrase ‘the most eloquent of them all’ in relation to Barto’s exploration of the lute sonatas, and so it proved. This has been, indeed, a profoundly satisfying, intellectually nourishing and technically impeccable undertaking in which the baroque lute assumes so many ranges of feeling, so many timbral shades and colours that it proves impossible to resist the allure of both music and the music’s executant.

The thirteen course lute in any case adds an even greater range of timbres, a depth of sonority that draws one in. The sound-world seems endless both vertically and horizontally. The expression thus seems to grow exponentially. So it proves in the latest instalment.

The earlier sonata – it’s a feature of the series not to run chronologically; Weiss had early, middle and late periods – was written c.1719. The dance patterns are explored with mesmeric understanding by Barto. The typically rounded exploration of the bass sonorities of the ‘enlarged’ lute is one component, but so too is the warmly textured account of the Courante, say, with its buoyant rhythmicality. The gentle and reflective Sarabande is lighter than one usually finds with Weiss, certainly in relation to the late sonatas, but this lighter-textured approach suits the airy Menuet and the fluid virtuosity of the Presto finale, its resonant vitality not pressed too hard by Barto.

The C major, penned around 1728, is a mid-period work. This is a larger sonata, lasting fully thirty-eight minutes, but it’s one measure of Barto’s mediation that you are never conscious of the relative length of a work such as this. It’s something I’ve been aware of throughout this series; the ability to halt time. The measured gravity of the Entrée is enhanced by the grandly noble extended bass notes. Try the Courante where articulation is spot-on, where colour is plangent and the rhythmic underpinning moves the dance forward with inexorable but never inflexible control. Well, the superlatives could go on for ever I suppose; the ‘improvised elaboration’ of the Sarabande – long, slow and gentle – or the so-called, as per the notes, ‘concerto allegro’ of a finale. This opens with vivid thwacking and ushers in some virtuoso writing, fit for a Weiss or Prince Lobkowicz himself – a performer and composer into the bargain.

The last piece is the gravely powerful Tombeau sur le mort de M. Comte de Logy, where the sense of pathos is generated through cadences of unremitting nobility and haunting intimacy.

Marvellously vivid performances, and beautifully recorded into the bargain. Enough said.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Dedicated to his friend and pupil Archduke Rudolf, Beethoven's expansive Archduke Trio is his greatest work in the genre, though increasing deafness meant it also signaled his final appearances as a performer. The cheerful Piano Trio in E flat major is an earlier work, though only discovered amongst the composer's papers after his death, and the Kakadu Variations is another good humored work based on a popular song of the day. With the American Record Guide "impressed with every recording", Volumes 1 (8.557723), 2 (8.557724), 3 (8.570255) and 4 (8.570943) are also available.

This album from Naxos' acclaimed Wind Band Classics series presents three highly contrasting new works. David Maslanka' Concerto for Trombone and Wind Ensemble is a heartfelt memorial to the late Christine Nield Capote, flutist, teacher and friend.

Includes work(s) by M Blancafort de Rosselló. Soloist: Miquel Villalba.

The two main works on this recording are among the peaks of twentieth-century Norwegian orchestral music.

To get an idea of how thoroughly Marin Alsop has studied the composer's style, check out the fourth of the Hungarian Pictures (it's title translated here as "Slightly Tipsy"). She has the orchestra playing this music with the same kind of erratic, lurch rhythm the composer used in his own piano recording, a comic effect which is difficult to reproduce in an orchestra. The performance of The Miraculous Mandarin offers the complete ballet, with it's breathtaking choral finale, not just the more commonly heard suite. Alsop gets the orchestra to play with powerful rhythmic drive (equally true in the exciting Dance Suite) and a great deal of color. Some of the power is dissipated by slightly diffuse recording, but it's still a pleasure to hear this wonderful music played with such conviction and fine style.

Although an extraordinarily active figure in his native Milan, where he served as maestro or organist at no fewer than 11 churches (according to an almanac for 1775), and long recognized as an important figure in the development of the symphony, Giovanni Battista Sammartini remains today largely ignored. In Fanfare 26:3, my colleague Barry Brenesal gave a lukewarm reception to his first opera, Memet (1732), Robert Maxham a somewhat warmer welcome to a set of six Sonate notturne (21:6), and there’s a fine Harmonia Mundi disc that includes several of his symphonies played by Ensemble 415. A few instrumental odds and ends dotted around on collections complete a picture that scarcely reflects Sammartini’s one-time Europe-wide eminence.

He was born either at the end of 1700 or early in 1701, the son of a French oboist who immigrated to Italy. Both Giovanni Battista and his brother Giuseppe initially followed their father by becoming oboists, but G. B. soon established a considerable reputation as an organist, drawing the approbation of Charles Burney, who noted that Sammartini’s playing was “truly masterful and pleasing” when he heard him in 1770. His first significant vocal works were five cantatas, now lost, composed in 1725 for the Friday evening Lenten observations of the Congregazione of SS Entierro, a prestigious brotherhood that held its meetings in the Jesuit church of S Fedele. Three years later, Sammartini was appointed maestro di capella to the Congregazione, a position he retained for most of the remainder of his life. He died early in January 1775, his remarkably active life commemorated by a large gathering at a memorial service held on January 16.

Sammartini continued to write Lenten cantatas for the Congregazione throughout the years he was maestro to the brotherhood, there seeming little room for doubt that some at least of the “Lost: 40 sacred cantatas” cited in Grove’s worklist fall into this category. Just eight survive, five of which, including both those on the present disc, date from 1751. A recording of a further 1751 cantata, Il pianto degli angeli della pace, has been announced by Naxos (8.557432), but this has yet to come my way.

Both cantatas follow a similar design, being scored for soprano, alto (originally castratos), and tenor soloists accompanied by a standard “pre-Classical” orchestra of pairs of oboes and horns, strings, and continuo. The structure, too, is identical, with an opening Sinfonia followed by a semi-dramatized alternation of secco recitative and aria, with a concluding coro or trio, neither of which, pace Naxos’s notes, is predominantly contrapuntal. In didactic purpose and in form they are what would have been termed oratorios in the previous century. The style of the writing is advanced, already very much of the pre-Classical kind that would influence the young Mozart when he visited Italy 20 years later (Sammartini was apparently friendly toward Leopold and Wolfgang when they visited Milan). In the overtures there is something of the “spirit and fire” that Burney found “peculiar to the author,” while Sammartini’s harmonies are a constant source of interest, frequently taking quite bold paths. With one exception, that of the Virgin Mary in Maria addolorata (“The sorrowing Mary”), which is cast in repeated AB form with a concluding stretto, the arias are large-scale da capo structures.

The performances, given before a quiet audience in Milan’s Santa Maria Hoè church, are little more than serviceable, but have the not inconsiderable merit of having their heart in the right place. Ferrari’s direction tends to be rigid in quicker moving music, but he finds plenty of affecting lyricism in slower pieces, although they are invariably taken too slowly, as are recitatives, which are also much too vocalized. The best and most stylish of the soloists is the fine alto, Sonia Prina, who as Mary Cleophas has the longest and most elaborate of all the arias, a 12-minute outpouring of sorrowing sympathy for the Virgin that includes an elaborate cello obbligato part, here rather over-sentimentally played. The bright-voiced, but sensitive soprano Silvia Mapelli also gives pleasure, but I fear that Mirko Guadagnini is one of those all-purpose Italian lyric tenors with little sense of style in this repertoire, the demanding coloratura of his aria in Maria addolorata being way beyond his capabilities. The modern-instrument orchestra plays with some sense of style, but ensemble problems are not infrequent. Overall, this is quite an enjoyable disc that introduces to the catalog two works worthy of investigation by anyone interested in the still-misunderstood mid-18th century.

Brian Robins, FANFARE

Handel: Gideon (Compiled and Arr. by J. C. Smith)

Ulrich Leyendecker is one of a younger generation of German composers who have turned heir back on the avant-garde and embraced past traditions. This distinguished and ought-after composer gives his compositions titles from historically defined genres.