Goffredo Petrassi was one of the most important Italian composers of the twentieth century. Beginning with the previously unrecorded Divertimento in C, this release focuses on Petrassi's compositions of the 1930s and 40s. Employing an unusual mix of styles and idioms, as well as brief quotations from Ravel and Stravinsky, the Partita was the first work to win him renown. The eloquent Quattro inni sacri (Four Sacred Hymns), described by the composer as 'music of today for the faithful of today', were intended as an antidote 'to the unctuous and conformist style in use in our churches' but, in reality, are only ever heard in the concert hall. Soon after the start of the Second World War, Petrassi wrote his meditative madrigal, Coro di Morti (Chorus of the Dead), the composer's first setting of a non-sacred text and perhaps his finest achievement in the field of vocal music.

The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets.

Franco Ferrara' gifts were prodigious. Born in Palermo he was a fine pianist, an even better violinist, playing under Toscanini, and later a conductor whose public performances were curtailed by illness, but whose private classes were famous.

This recording presents the definitive version of Jes's Rueda' Third Symphony, a journey towards the light in which the composer revels in the dazzling textures filled with colour and dynamism that he loves.

Ian Venables is one of Britain' foremost composers of art-song, and has a significant catalogue of vocal and chamber music to his credit.

Berlioz: Nuits D'Ete (Les) / Chausson: Poeme De L'Amour Et D

Jes's Villa-Rojo is one of Spain' most impressive contemporary composers, and writes masterfully for the cello.

Award winning pianist Klara Min has been recognized for her "excellent technique, exuberance and vitality". Here she brings the unique synthesis of traditional sources and contemporary compositional techniques of five leading Korean composers.

Purity of Sound and Perfect Craftsmanship Marked Anton Webern's Journey from His Intensely Expressive Early Songs Through to the New Perspectives Cultivated in His Opp. 23 and 25 Settings. Webern 'Rehabilitated the Power of Sound' and in So Doing Broke New Ground in the Bagatelles for String Quartet and in the String Quartet, Op. 28. This Recording, Completing Mr. Craft's Second Webern Cycle, Is Rounded Off with the Powerful Cantata, Op. 29 and Webern's 1923 Arrangement of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. Throughout His Career, Robert Craft (B. 1923) Has Conducted Symphonic, Orchestral, Operatic and Large Ensemble Performances, Including World Premiere Works By Leading 20th C. Composers. His Many Recordings of Music By Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern Recordings for the Naxos Label Have Received Critical Acclaim, Up to and Including Grammy Award Nominations.

BACH, J.S.: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, BWV 1001-1

SUMMERTIME - MUSIC FOR CLARINET QUARTET

MAXWELL DAVIES Quartets: No. 7, “Metafore sul Borromini”; No. 8 • Maggini Qrt • NAXOS 8.557399 (72:35)


The music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has always given the impression that it brooks no compromise. It is meticulously organized, often by principles outside music itself. The result may strike some as arid or over-intellectual, but it is, in fact, just these self-imposed restraints that allow the composer to explore unremarked possibilities and overlooked corners in the sound world he has chosen. Maxwell Davies’s small gestures make big music.


The remarkable commission by Naxos for 10 string quartets from Maxwell Davies continues. This most recent pair is one of great contrast. No. 7, “Metafore sul Borromini,” is Maxwell Davies’s tribute to six churches by the 16th-century Roman architect, Francesco Borromini. While Maxwell Davies explicitly refuses the comparison of his seven-part quartet with Haydn’s Seven Words , the listener will sense a relationship nonetheless in the generally slow tempos and subdued character of all the movements. Maxwell Davies has two gestures with which he impels much of this music: one is a frequent use of the tritone (F? to C, for instance), an interval traditionally thought unstable, but one with which he plays as if it were completely everyday. His other habit is to compound his larger forms out of many, smaller, contrasting, blocks. Both of these techniques are in evidence here, even within the relatively short movements of this quartet. That said, this is muscular music: listen especially to the last movement. Synesthesia is a difficult experience to bring off but the almost 54 minutes of this quartet offer a kaleidoscope of color that is gripping, even in a recording.


Appropriately, No. 8 is dedicated, by the master of the Queen’s music, to Queen Elizabeth II on her 80th birthday. To comply with the requirement that each pair fill one CD, this quartet, in one movement, lasts about 19 minutes. In his extensive notes to this disc, Maxwell Davies avers: “After the intense and brooding nature . . . of No. 7, something brighter and more airy was in order.” While I am not sure these are quite the terms with which I would characterize this quartet at first hearing, in the context of No. 7, it is more open, if not more airy. The organizing material comes out of John Dowland’s Queen Elizabeth’s Galliard , partly in tribute to the Queen, of course, but also as a remembrance for Maxwell Davies of the importance of the music of this period for him as a composer. Maxwell Davies uses here a technique that was especially common in his early music of taking a theme and using it in bits, but not letting it be completely heard until the end of the piece. Here, Dowland’s full tune does not emerge until 15 minutes into the quartet.


These quartets are not mere intellectual exercises; least of all No. 7 (though one could get that impression from his program notes). They will take any serious listener, and not just those of the “contemporary music” crowd, on an inveigling sound journey, not by their novelty, but by their conviction. For, in the end, this is sensuous music, as all music must be.


All the Naxos quartets have been composed for the Maggini Quartet and Maxwell Davies knows their strengths intimately by now, and writes to them. The Seventh Quartet especially is a fine addition to the repertoire and bears repeated listening. This music is convincingly played and well recorded.


FANFARE: Alan Swanson

Peter Cornelius composed under the spell of Wagner and Liszt, but his songs reveal a remarkable artistic independence. Volume 2 of this complete edition, a collection of songs set to texts by a variety of poets, not least Heine and Holderlin, includes several gems and rarities. They range from Cornelius' time as a student in Berlin to his final years in Vienna and Munich. Volume 1 can be heard on Naxos 8.572556.

Liszt wrote his A Faust Symphony; Three Character Pictures, Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, after Goethe, in 1854, adding a choral finale three years later, when it was first performed in Weimar. Further revisions took place, with changes introduced even as late as 1880. He transcribed the second Gretchen movement for solo piano, completing it eventually in 1874, and in 1862 published his version of the work for two pianos, revising it in 1870. The subject of Faust, the scholar who sold his soul to the Devil in return for youth and power, had a particular attraction to artists in the nineteenth century, when Faust might appear as a human hero, an opponent of ancient tyrannies, political and religious, and the Devil himself might seem to have similar attractions. Where the Elizabethan version of the story by Christopher Marlowe brought Faust to a medieval Hell, Goethe's monumental and influential poetic treatment of the subject ended in the final redemption of Faust through the power of love and of the woman he had wronged, Gretchen. Liszt based his symphony on the literary work of his great predecessor in Weimar, Goethe, and returned to the subject of Faust in later compositions based on Lenau's Faust, including the Mephisto Waltzes. The second movement, Gretchen, generally lightly scored, starts with a gentle passage, scored originally for flutes and clarinets, followed by the main theme, played by oboe accompanied by solo viola, the two piano version marked Innocente. There is a short passage that represents the scene in the garden when Gretchen plucks the petals of a flower, seeking to know whether Faust loves her or not. A second Gretchen theme is heard, and in the central section of the movement Faust's theme of love appears, and a descending melody associated with Faust's yearning. The agitated theme of Faust's struggle re-appears, now mollified in a gentler mood. This leads to a re-appearance of the Gretchen themes, with the theme of Faust's heroism utterly transformed in conclusion, as the sound dies away. The third part of the Faust Symphony is devoted to the devil, Mephistopheles. Marked Allegro vivace, ironico, it transforms the thematic material of the earlier pictures, in a remarkable scherzo of great power, twisting the material associated with Faust, but allowing Gretchen to overcome the power of evil, when her theme appears in all it's simple purity, after the violence of a fugue, based on a version of the theme associated with the emotions of Faust. The complexities of the movement and the transformation of earlier thematic material defy succinct explanation in a picture that includes only one extraneous thematic element, the 'pride' theme from Liszt's Mal�diction for piano and orchestra.

TadeA Salva was one of the foremost Slovakian composers of his generation.