These three quartets appeared in 1784 with a dedication to Haydn, around the same time that Mozart was completing his set similarly in homage to the father of the string quartet. Mozart evidently knew these works and enjoyed them, but they are quite different in tone and technique from either Haydn or his young friend. Each piece has three movements, and there is no set rule as to what the character of each movement will be. For example, No. 3 (in G minor) begins with a slow movement, while No. 1 ends with a minuet. Their general character is lighter in substance than Haydn's Opp. 20 or 33, and worlds apart from Mozart's six avowedly serious and large-scale "Haydn" quartets. Still, the music is tuneful, well written, and quite enjoyable. Pleyel was perhaps Haydn's most talented pupil before Beethoven, and if he often seems to be copying his model in the cut of his themes, then he certainly chose a good model and was a skillful imitator.


Naxos is, in truth, doing music lovers a real favor in making so much music of the Classical period available on disc, and not just because the label is rescuing many fine works that collectors will enjoy. What these quartets show, for example, is that the large-scale, four-movement format that we now regard as standard thanks to Haydn (from Op. 9 on in his quartets), and later Mozart, was by no means the inviolable rule at the time. It's really quite remarkable just how much larger in scale and more emotionally generous in scope the music of this first great triumvirate of classical composers was, as compared to their contemporaries. This is less of a revelation with Beethoven and Mozart, whose depth is now taken for granted, than it is with Haydn, whose achievement is still often undervalued and misunderstood.


In any case, the Enso Quartet plays with great confidence and verve, not to mention excellent rhythm and admirably accurate intonation. This is good music, and in these performances the players have you believing in its quality at every point. Their powerful attack on the highly "Sturm und Drang" G minor quartet is particularly impressive. It's perhaps the most interesting work in the set, with a curious "Grazioso" finale that remains in the minor right up to the end. The sonics are also quite warm and very present. The remaining three quartets in Op. 2 also will be recorded by these players for Naxos, and I look forward to hearing them. Strongly recommended.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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Composed in 1940, Pizzetti's Symphony in A was one of the works, which included Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, commissioned to celebrate the 2600th anniversary of the accession of the legendary first Emperor of Japan. This powerful and unsettling work, Pizzetti's only Symphony, is notable for its ominous mood, its compositional progress between February and June 1940 mirroring the unfolding European conflict and Italy's own declaration of war. Written twenty years later for Italy's leading harpist Clelia Gatti Aldrovandi, the sunny Harp Concerto is, by contrast, both lyrical and vivacious.

Ildebrando Pizzetti's Concerto dell'estate of 1928 (really a three-movement symphony) is one of the most attractive of all early 20th-century Italian orchestral works. It hasn't been recorded since Gardelli did it for Decca some 40 years ago, and this new version is most welcome. While Myron Michailidis chooses virtually identical tempos in the outer movements, the central nocturne runs a bit slower (but not duller) than the earlier version, at some gain in atmosphere. The recording balances, which place the woodwinds and harps relatively forward, also suit the work very well. It's a beautiful performance, well played and atmospheric.

I have a sentimental attachment to the Oedipus Rex Symphonic Preludes: this was the very first work that I played as a percussionist with the Johns Hopkins Symphony Orchestra in my undergraduate days, and it introduced me to Pizzetti. To be honest, the cymbal part didn't give me much to do, but it did offer me the opportunity to simply listen to a very beautiful piece that, like the Concerto dell'estate, deserves far greater currency than it enjoys. It was recorded relatively recently by Vänskä for Hyperion, quite well too, but this version is just as good, with confident horn playing and powerful climaxes.

The remaining two works receive their recording premieres. Pizzetti was basically a gentle, lyrical composer, but he could get his dander up quite effectively: witness the five-minute prelude to Clitennestra. Composed in the 1960s just before his death, you'd never know it from the harmonic style--it's just as attractive and approachable as the Oedipus Rex music of some 60 years earlier. La Feste delle Panatenee is another tryptich that, like the work just mentioned, takes ancient Greece as its inspiration. Less somber than its predecessor, it concludes with an imposing procession that could use a touch more heft from the brass and a less prominent snare drum--but as with all of these performances conductor Michailidis and the Thessaloniki State Symphony certainly do the music justice. Strongly recommended.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Indulgently romantic piano concerto performed with bravura assurance.

Does Marco Polo still exist as a label? Created under the mantle “the label of discovery” it used to be the Naxos main outlet for music from the world’s highways and byways. Now that Naxos seems to embrace all and every style of music and at a bargain price I’m guessing Marco Polo has quietly slipped away. Over the years Naxos has reissued many earlier Marco Polo discs and this is one such – a straight reissue of the 1999 disc. I missed it first time round and I am sorry that I did – it is a CD of rare but instantly appealing music convincingly performed.

Ildebrando Pizzetti is one of a group of Italian composers – the others included Respighi, Malipiero and Casella - who sought to modernise Italian opera as well as establishing a body of non-operatic Italian music. All of the music presented here is intensely dramatic – not surprising in a composer who produced more than a dozen operas as well as incidental and film music. Even the piano concerto here Canti della stagione alta is intensely pictorial. The disc opens with the prelude to Pizzetti’s first Opera Fedra. This opens with a strangely hypnotic sinuous melody (monody really) from the violas that immediately flags up one of Pizzetti’s great interests – Gregorian Chant yet this seamlessly moves into an impassioned lyrical outburst for the full orchestra within half a minute – it is powerfully dramatic and makes one want to hear more of the full opera. If you think that Puccini had yet to write Il Trittico or Turandot at the time Fedra was first performed you can hear what a new path Pizzetti was trying to forge. It is still very romantic and lyrical but quite different from the music of his more illustrious contemporary.

The major work presented here is the piano concerto of 1930 Canti della stagione alta (Songs of the High Season). Keith Anderson’s erudite - as usual - notes capture the sound world of this piece well. The music is immediately ‘open-air’, modal in flavour and with a rhapsodic feel - the long singing lines of the strings show a composer of a naturally lyrical bent. The way the woodwinds ornament and muse over their opening material is very beautiful. It doesn’t grab your attention by the use of great arching melodies instead it creates its effects by use of texture and atmosphere – Pizzetti handles the orchestra and soloist with great confidence. Certainly if you like your piano concertos big-boned, tonal and of a romantic cut this is for you. Running at a shade under thirty minutes this is not a huge work but it feels bigger than that. Not to imply that it outstays its welcome – far from it. As the first movement develops it moves away from the pastoral to something altogether more dramatic with double octave passages in the piano tossed off with conspicuous ease. There is a heraldic quality to some of Pizzetti’s brass writing that I really enjoy. Yes it could be argued there is a cinematic element to it but it works for me! The slow second movement is altogether simpler although once again the central climax is heavily brass led but I do like the way this immediately gives way to a quietly modal string passage with some distant brass figures – sounding deliberately archaic – decorating the music. Not having seen a score it is hard to know exactly how Pizzetti achieves the effect but the metre of the work is very flexible with a strong sense of regular predictable bar-lines removed. Instead we can feel the underlying basic pulse – once again this seems to be a stylistic nod towards the melodic fluidity of plainsong. The finale is played attacca leaping straight from the final notes of the second movement. This is a true rondo which – again I agree with Keith Anderson here – has echoes of an Italianate Rachmaninov although the quirky string led fugal passage and a final exciting brass peroration are uniquely Pizzetti’s own. This proved to be a very pleasurable discovery indeed. The disc is completed by music Pizzetti wrote for a silent movie in 1914 – Cabiria. What an extraordinary event this must have been – the bulk of the music for this two and a half hour epic was assembled - as was so often the case with early silent film scores - from standard orchestral repertoire. However for a key sequence – involving the sacrifice of 100 children to the God of Carthage Moloch! – Pizzetti was commissioned to provide this ten minute sequence involving large orchestra, baritone soloist and chorus. That it is pictorial is clear from the very first bars and again benefits from a performance of great flair. To be honest it is the piece on this disc I would least often return but it is not trying to be anything but colourful and illustrative – there is none of the subtlety or emotional weight that marks out the other pieces here. Conversely I cannot think of another example of so early a dedicated film score of this originality and power. Well worth a listen in that historical context alone. Quite how it sat next to excerpts of Mozart Mendelssohn and Gluck I do not have a clue!

The price of discovery for many of the early Marco Polo discs was the dubious quality of the performances and recordings. I’m pleased to say that this is not the case here. The Robert Schumann Philharmonie play this unfamiliar repertoire with great sensitivity and technical assurance. Only a couple of brief moments of string edginess in the second movement shows that the concerto was taken from live performances but in fact the balance and sound stage is excellent and the audience is totally inaudible. The rapport between the husband and wife team of Oleg and Susanna Stefani Caetani is excellent and the liner notes make clear that the concerto is part of her active repertoire. This clearly benefits the piece with a thoroughly convincing performance in every respect. Likewise the two filler pieces which are studio recordings from the same period – powerfully performed and well recorded.

Running to less than fifty minutes this is a rather under-filled disc although we would have been happy with that in the days of LP’s and at Naxos’ bargain price given the quality on offer I don’t really feel I can complain. All in all a disc of far greater musical and technical quality than I was expecting. It makes me want to hear the recently released Concerto dell’estate (Naxos 8.572013) as well as the complete Fedra.

Indulgently romantic piano concerto performed with bravura assurance.

-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

Includes work(s) by Mario Pilati. Ensemble: Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Adrianno.

Includes symphony(-ies) by Wenzel Pichl. Ensemble: Toronto Chamber Orchestra. Conductor: Kevin Mallon.

Art & Music: Picasso - Music of His Time

Astor Piazzolla’s much-loved tangos have been arranged for all manner of instrumental line-ups, this album presenting an exuberant selection specially arranged for the acclaimed Tuscan Brass and Percussion Quintet whose members are professors of their instruments in leading Italian conservatories. The Quintet is joined by guest violinist Andrea Tacchi. The result is a thrilling new take on nuevo tango, passionate yet poised, sharp and shiny as a knife-blade. The centrepiece of this album, Piazzolla’s witty Four Seasons Suite takes Vivaldi’s famous violin concertos for a stroll through the docklands of Buenos Aires, the original home of tango itself.

PIAZZOLLA La muerte del ángel. Melodía en la menor. Tango en la menor. Milonga sin palabras. María de Buenos Aires: Fuga y misterio; Yo soy María 1. Ave María. Oblivion. 1 Aire de la zamba niña. Le Grand Tango. Libertango • Tomas Cotik, 1 Glenn Basham (vn); Tao Lin (pn) • NAXOS 8.573166 (59:35)


Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (1921–1992) was an Argentine bandoneon player and composer who revolutionized tango music. He brought it from its beginnings as a 19th- and early 20th-century dance to its zenith as modern music for the concert hall. His concept of nuevo tango combined it with elements of jazz and classical music. Fanfare readers already know violinist Thomas Cotik and pianist Tao Lin for their Centaur recording of Schubert. Of course, they take in a completely different approach to the tangos on Naxos. Whereas their Schubert was smooth and silky, their Piazzolla is edgy, sexy, and raw. Cotik and Lin take us from Piazzolla’s Tanguano of 1951 to his 1986 description of a girl performing the Zamba, a native Argentine dance. In between, they document some of the myriad changes in the composer’s musical palette. His fast and rhythmic The Death of the Angel was incidental music for a 1962 play that ended with the angel dying after his fight with a devil. In 1965 a new muse, Norma, tempted the composer who was in the process of divorcing. He thinks of Norma in his smooth Melody in A Minor, but refers to her as poison. The operetta Maria de Buenos Aires is one of Piazzolla’s best-known works. It was performed at Long Beach Opera in California in 2012. The two pieces played here accompany Maria’s wandering through the city of Buenos Aires, first as a streetwalker and later as a ghost. It is during the second stroll that we hear some of the composer’s most evocative music, played by the two violins and piano that accompany her. Glenn Basham of the University of Miami’s Frost Institute plays the second fiddle with a singing tone. Libertango is Piazzolla’s example of the new music of the 1970s. He intertwined rock and jazz influences with melodic tango and came up with a new and most viable form of concert music. By this time, the tango that had once been a dance from the wrong side of town had matured into modern classical music that would soon be played by symphony orchestras all over the world. Tango’s relative, the milonga, has come along with it, adding a bit of spice to the confection from Argentina.


In 1982, Piazzolla wrote his elegant Grand Tango and sent it to the great Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich. The cellist did not recognize his name and set it aside. When he did eventually look at it, he was astonished at the composer’s talent, but it was not until eight years later that he premiered the work. Sofia Gubaidulina arranged the version heard here. The instrumental Ave Maria and the pleasant milonga Oblivion are pieces that Piazzolla wrote for the 1984 Italian film Henry V . The next year he began to write pieces detailing the history of tango from bordello dance music to international concert specialty. He follows its rise to the café, the nightclub, and the 1980s concert hall. Some of the music is sultry while other works are fast, rhythmic, and ornamented to show the exquisite virtuosity of Cotik and Lin. They finish with a rousing dance called Libertango . It is a perfect finale for this CD of catchy, toe-tapping music. Many other artists have recorded Piazzolla’s works, but not with violin and piano. The sound on this disc is clear and the performances precise. I think that lovers of tango music will definitely want this fascinating disc.


FANFARE: Maria Nockin

Legendary tango performer and composer Astor Piazzolla gained experience of jazz in New York and classical form and technique through studies with Alberto Ginastera. His work lends itself perfectly to arrangement for all kinds of ensemble, and this is the first recording with solo trombone. These popular pieces showcase the stunning playing of multi-award winning soloist Achilles Liarmakopoulos in a variety of moods, including the famous Oblivion, and Le Grand Tango, a virtuoso show-stopper originally written for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

'I haven't sat right through a CD of tangos until this one. Greek trombonist Achilles Liarmakopoulos, who plays with Canadian Brass, is an astonishing player, a musician of extraordinary subtlety and understatement. With the sweetest, most seductive tone imaginable, he glides through the Piazzolla classics, including the full Histoire du Tango, all three movements of the beautiful Serie del Angel, Michelangelo, Oblivion and a heart-wrenching, soulful rendition of Soledad. His group, including the great bandoneon player Hector del Curto, is superlative. An outstanding disc.' (Herald Scotland)

In the year of the 25th anniversary of Piazzolla’s death, Argentinean-born violinist Tomas Cotik and Chinese-American pianist Tao Lin follow their critically acclaimed Tango Nuevo with more of Piazzolla’s richest and most exciting compositions. These fresh adaptations for mostly two or three musicians preserve and celebrate the Nuevo tango master’s legacy. ‘I think that lovers of tango music will definitelyw ant this fascinating disc,’ wrote Fanfare of Tango Nuevo.

The seductive sound and renewed interest in the Tango has brought the music of the Argentinian composer, Astor Piazzolla, into the world of the popular classics. His large catalogue of works is unique in using the Tango as the basis for all of his compositions, though he developed the art to the point where it is difficult to detect the dance in his complex and strictly classical music. Of his many works for chamber groups, the Histoire de Tango, composed in 1986, is one of his most popular and frequently performed works. Scored for flute and guitar, it is typical of the composer's interest in the guitar, the Five Pieces now being established in the concert programmes.

Peter Philips was brought up by Sebastian Westcote, the catholic layman who from 1547 was master of the choristers at St. Paul’s and who, apart from his musical duties, organised the performance of plays at court by the ‘Children of Paul’s’ from 1557 until his death in 1582. Perhaps the young Philips acted in some of these plays – plays which were important in the evolution of Elizabethan drama? Several future composers were youthful choristers under Westcote’s tuition – their number included Robert Knight and William Fox, Thomas Morley, William Byrd – and Peter Philips. Perhaps it was also from Westcote that Philips learned his Catholicism? Certainly he was a beneficiary of Westcote’s death in 1582. It was surely not coincidental that it was in that same year that Philips left England for good; he was in Rome by October of 1582. He was admitted to the English Jesuit College and also entered the service of Cardinal Farnese.

He spent three years in Rome – at a time when great composers such as Palestrina, Marenzio and Victoria were at work in the city. The influence of Palestrina and Victoria (and Lassus) is audible in Philips’s choral works and that of Marenzio in his madrigals; nor need we be surprised that he chose to transcribe madrigals by Marenzio for the keyboard. Philips worked as organist at the English College, before meeting the English catholic Thomas Paget, third Baron Paget, and entering his service as a musician. He travelled with Paget to Spain and to Paris. On Paget’s death in 1590, Philips moved to Antwerp, where he made his living as a music teacher and as a music editor for the publisher Pierre Phalèse. Most of his works for harpsichord – which seem more ‘English’ and less ‘Italian’ in style than his vocal works, both sacred and secular – probably belong to the first part of his career.

While still in London in 1580 he wrote a Pavan in G major, recorded here, which became popular both in England and in Europe, though it was never published in his lifetime. It is an attractive piece, played here with dignified grace by Elizabeth Farr on a fine instrument. It was built in Rome in 1658, probably by Jerome de Zentis, and recently restored by Keith Hill - see a fascinating account of the instrument and its restoration. It exudes both charm and dignity, as played by Elizabeth Farr and proves eminently suitable for the music of Philips, with a rich bass and a sweet, clear upper register.

Elizabeth Farr plays – and plays very well – a bout half of Philips’s surviving keyboard works on this CD; one only regrets that we don’t have a second CD on which the rest might have appeared. She makes a very good case for Philips’s intabulations of vocal works, bringing out the powerfully expressive nature of much of Philips’s writing, without ever going ‘over the top’, as it were. Her booklet notes confirm her perceptiveness, being full of brief but suggestive observations on the music, especially on the elements of word-painting in these intabulations – such as those in “Le rossignol” and Striggio’s “Chi farà fed’al cielo”.

Every single one of the works recorded here is of interest and all are intelligently (and adroitly) performed. The skillful variations in the Passamezzo Pavan and Galliard, or the poignancy of the Paget Pavan and Galliard in C minor (surely written on the occasion of Paget’s death, as Elizabeth Farr suggests) would each be sufficient on their own to make a case for Philips. And that case has a persuasive advocate in the well judged playing of Elizabeth Farr. I particularly like her refusal to rush, allowing Philips’s expressive writing full scope. There are other recordings of Philips’s work for harpsichord, such as those by Anneke Uittenbosch (Etcetera 1022), Emer Buckley (Harmonia Mundi HMC901263), Colin Booth (Soundboard SBCD 992 - see review) and Paul Nicholson (Hyperion CDA 66734). Elizabeth Farr’s recording is on a par with the best of them and, in any case, this isn’t music of which a single recording can ever be ‘definitive’ to the exclusion of other recordings, if only because of the great variety of possibilities, of different perspectives on the music, created by the use of different instruments.

A lovely instrument, well-played, at the service of music which should be far better known than it is.

-- Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb International

Peter Philips was the most famous English composer of his time, and only Byrd, a generation older, had more compositions published. Much of Philips’s life was spent on the Continent, where he wrote music of intricate, text-conscious colour, both deeply expressive and architecturally powerful. His motets and anthems, whether celebratory, meditative or dramatic, embrace the widest range of feeling and texture. The much-admired Sarum Consort’s disc All the Queen’s Men (8.572582) was praised for its ‘energy and aplomb’. (American Record Guide)