Set to vernacular texts dealing mainly with the theme of love, frottole were short, improvisatory polyphonic songs with instrumental accompaniment that flourished in the Renaissance courts of Italy for some forty years between c. 1480 and 1520. Despite it's apparent simplicity, this completely new genre of song inspired some of Europe's greatest vocal and instrumental musicians. The recent invention of movable type added further to it's popularity. This recording explores a representative selection, including work published by the historically pivotal figure of Ottaviano Petrucci.

Sandro Fuga inherited a passion for art and music from a family line which includes the composer Luigi Nono. +He felt himself part of a long tradition, seeing music as the expression of emotions and refusing to join in with avant-garde “musical clownery”. +The First Sonata is unusual in form, its dramatic, agitated central movement flanked by slow movements of great emotional intensity. +The Second Sonata is more elegiac, though not without virtuoso dialogue and a spectacular conclusion. +By turns melancholy and strikingly luminous, the Third Sonata is filled with genuinely moving impressionistic meditations.

Jesus Guridi was one of a number of composers born in the last quarter of the 19th century, who also included Joaquin Turina and Manuel de Falla, driven by a desire to create and promote Spanish music with a genuinely national identity. With their authentic folk-tinged atmosphere, Guridi's two string quartets follow his foremost philosophical concern of creating beautiful works of art, with their moments of modal serenity and richly diverse sophistication. Guridi's masterpiece Ten Basque Melodies can be heard on Naxos 8.557110, his zarzuela El caserioon 8.557632, the Sinfonia pirenaica on 8.557631, and his opera Amaya on Marco Polo 8.225084-85.

This program brings together première recordings of Francis Poulenc’s own piano versions of his ‘ballet of atmosphere’ Les Biches and ‘choreographic concerto’ Aubade, as well as the first digital recording of the suite from Les Animaux modèles, inspired by the fables of La Fontaine and compiled by Grant Johannesen with the composer’s agreement. ‘Piano scores’ are an essential part of rehearsing and choreographing any ballet, but the piano was also indispensable to Poulenc’s compositional process. He owed his love of classical dance to years of working closely with Dyaghilev, and his music brims with subtlety, humor, genuine emotion, piquant harmonies and rhythmic lightness.

Inspired by Liszt, to whose memory the work is dedicated, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 is ground-breaking in its inclusion of organ and piano. For the composer this represented ‘the progress made in modern instrumentation’ and the result is a work both spectacular and grandiose. By contrast the Symphony in A, his first completed symphony, is a youthful piece, fully revealing his admiration for Mozart, whilst Le rouet d’Omphale, dating from the 1870s, is an impressively atmospheric tone poem.

Margaret Rizza sang professionally for twenty-five years before teaching at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has directed music groups making many recordings. She began composing in 1997 and has since earned huge admiration for her 'Classical Contemporary' sound world works of spiritual contemplation and great beauty. Hers is music of great spiritual depth and whether a cappella or for vocal and instrumental forces it generates a sense of lyricism and healing resolution.

Founded by Marin Alsop in 1981, String Fever was hailed for it's remarkable versatility and unique blend of pop, jazz and classical repertoire. Fever Pitch presents pieces written and arranged for String Fever by a quartet of leading composers whose origins range from 1920s vaudeville to big band, film music and American and Afro-Caribbean folk. Marin Alsop performs numerous solos in a kaleidoscopic program which follows on from the swing standards of It Don't Mean a Thing (8.572834). Much in demand by many top solo artists from Billy Joel to the late Sir Yehudi Menuhin, String Fever is featured on two of Billy Joel's albums, Nylon Curtain and Innocent Man.

Benjamin Britten was a viola player as well as a pianist and wrote a significant body of chamber music for stringed instruments. The works on this recording - which contains important world premiere recordings - were written between 1925 and 1937, with the exception of the masterpiece for viola, Lachrymae. Each reveals some characteristic aspect of Britten's voice, from the variety and wit of the Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 6 to the little-known but absorbingly imaginative Reveille and the remarkably assured 1930 Elegy, written when he was just seventeen.

Internationally renowned and award-winning composer Salvador Brotons brings classical music into the here and now, depicting our contemporary world in his Fifth Symphony. It's first three movements are musical representations of the more negative aspects of the human condition, before the slow, final section offers a positive resolution. The Oboe Concertobrings out both lyrical expressiveness and virtuoso thrills from the soloist, and the Four Pieces for String Orchestra was the prize-winning work which brought acclaim and recognition to Brotons at the age of seventeen.

Camilleri: Piano Concerto No. 1 "Mediterranean", Accordion C

Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of today’s leading Chinese composers. The Macau Bride a colourful and evocative ballet based on a story from the 17th century in which Chinese sailor Chon Kou and Portuguese captain’s daughter Maria do Mar fall in love following a chance encounter in Belém. They set sail for Macau, survive a storm and an attack by pirates, and are finally reunited and married in Macau. The Four Poems of Lingnan from the classical literature of ancient Chinese dynasties.

Widely performed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Benet Casablancas is regarded as one of the leading Spanish composers of his generation. His music engages profoundly with the legacy of the first half of the 20th c., combining a refined and personal harmonic palette with sharp attention to textural detail and a strong sense of dramatic and narrative form. The works in this world première recording span almost forty years of Casablancas’s output, from an early tribute to Mompou in Dos Apunts to his recent musical expression of Japanese verse in the two sets of Tres Haikus.

Though the origin of Bach's sonatas for flute and harpsichord is uncertain there has also been considerable debate about their genre. The first three are often called "Sonaten auf Concertenart" - sonatas in concerto style - a hybrid genre that became popular between 1720 and 1740, so Bach may have been deliberately experimenting with form in these works. The Sonata in E-Flat Major, BWV 1031, with its lovely Siciliano, is perhaps the most popular of the flute sonatas, holding a special place in the repertory, but all offer a fascinating insight into Bach's use of the sonata genre and a wealth of inventive music.

"• Volume 1 of Mompou's complete songs, ranging from his very first, written in 1914 and 1915, to the 1973 Cinq mélodies sur des textes de Paul Valéry, arguably his greatest vocal work. • Spanish soprano Marta Mathéu is here accompanied on piano by Jordi Masó."

Wilhelm Friedmann Bach was significant in developing the relatively new keyboard sonata form between the baroque and classical periods. Combining stylistic elements from his father's generation and his own, the ambitious Sonata in D major was admired as "the most significant before Beethoven". The scale of the substantial Sonata in F for two keyboard instruments, one of WF Bach's best-known compositions, is such that it is sometimes referred to as a Concerto. Julia Brown's recordings give WF Bach's keyboard works "a liberty and sense of fun and engagement that make the music come alive".