WIDOR: Piano Trio, Op. 19 / Piano Quintet, Op. 7

Puccini once said, ‘there is more music in Perosi’s head than in mine and Mascagni’s put together’. Priest-composer Lorenzo Perosi achieved international celebrity by the late 1890s for his sacred music, and he also composed a fine selection of chamber works that are little known today. Perosi’s Piano Quintets have a fresh and spontaneous feel, even though they were written while he grieved the loss of his brother. Combining bold rhythms and solemn spiritual depth, these works along with the Second String Trio are all respectful of tradition while representing an exploration of new paths unique in Italian music of the time.

Review:

There are precedents for priest-composers and to that small list can now be added the Italian, Piedmont-born Lorenzo Perosi. Among some 4000 works thirty of his are chamber works. There are also numerous (if not a lavish number) orchestral works including symphonic pieces dedicated to Italian cities such as Roma, Venezia, Firenze, Messina, Tortona, Milano, Torino and Genova. Oratorios (which Perosi referred to as “my operas”) are there, as are a piano concerto (1916), a brace of violin concertos and a clarinet concerto (1928).

The chamber works include three string trios, sixteen string quartets and several suites. Among four piano quintets are the two we hear on this disc. Matteo Bevilacqua and Roma Tre Orchestra Ensemble give the sense that they hold nothing back. They respond spiritedly and with enthusiastic virility to his romantic chamber style and the qualities of the recording accentuate the message. Everything channels a convincingly vigorous inventive style tracing back to Schumann and as far forwards as Foulds, Catoire and Medtner.

All three works are in three movements and each spans about 20 minutes. The notes by Arturo Saccheti (in English and Italian) complement this unfamiliar music and he assures us that these three pieces were written while Perosi was afflicted with grief over the death of his brother Cardinal Carlo Perosi in 1930. Even so they are not lachrymose but speak of touching affinity and a deep dive into the vigour of life and touching romance. There is more of the latter than the former.

The First Quintet sings in sighing and glinting pearlescence with a middle movement that mediates motion and meditation. The finale is all confident flourishes and triumph. The Second Quintet smiles and chaffs with lots of scurrying action and a second movement that cradles an affecting melody before returning to the busily motoric and ever so slightly furious finale. The Second Trio (strings only) has about it a neo-Mendelssohnian melodic way that is often gentle but sometimes haughty.

Given the dates, these are old-fashioned works but not caught in the jet of pastiche. They lack nothing in a life that pushes at the boundaries and which engages the listener. They seem impatient with anything suggesting the religiose or crustily academic. Listen and you will find affinities with other Italians of the pre-Second War years.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

Frank Sinatra dubbed Robert Farnon ‘The Guv’nor’ in 1962 when the two men first came together in London to work on an album. This summed up Farnon’s reputation as being synonymous with the highest standards of craftsmanship across the widest spectrum of music-making, earning him four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada. His fame was established with BBC wartime radio broadcasts and the ubiquitous Portrait of a Flirt. Further success came with TV themes such as the stirring Colditz March and the impressionistic beauty of such gems as À la claire fontaine. The performances on this acclaimed recording are given with ‘warmth, polish and a remarkable naturalness of idiomatic feeling’ (The Penguin Guide).

Review:

These 17 short pieces are drawn from among the elite of British style light music. Their dates are mostly scattered throughout the 1940s with outliers in the 1950s and 1970s. They were written by a Toronto-born man who was a prince among light music practitioners. He never lacked for work even when the genre began to stagger.

There are plenty of familiar moments including the Westminster chimes in the slippery-gliding polished Westminster Waltz and the unaccustomed gauntness of the Colditz March written later on for BBCTV’s successful Colditz series. Manhattan Playboy has a few Gershwin twists and twirls and streetcar references among Farnon’s usual broad bow-wave melodies. For all his faculty for commercial sheen he never lost touch with his gentle high summer pastoral side, as in Lake of the Woods, How Beautiful is Night, Pictures in the Fire, À la claire Fontaine and In a Calm. Each adds some contrast in what would otherwise have been a little unremitting. The 1946 State Occasion is a foray into Sovereign pomp and circumstance, much as Haydn Wood’s contemporary marches as well as the Empire March by Montague Phillips. Gateway to the West is among the most satisfying of his pieces and reeks of a confident sunny travelogue of the 1940s cinema ‘shorts’.

The collection launches with the well-practised exhilarations of Portrait of a Flirt. Farnon returns to the theme sometimes in comedic garb. Peanut Polka and Jumping Bean both recall the cinema sing-a-longs when a ball would bounce from word to word on screen to encourage the audience to sing and keep time.

This is good and true to style with a nice mix of moods.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

These works share the common key of E flat major but represent two very different stages in the composer’s life. The Piano Concerto "No. 0," WoO 4, was written when Beethoven was 13 years old and is one of his earliest works. With the orchestral score lost, this extant version for piano solo written in Beethoven’s hand includes the tutti sections reduced for piano. The radiant ‘Emperor’ Concerto shows the 38-year-old Beethoven at the peak of his creative powers, and remains a glorious example of his spirit triumphing over life’s adversities.

REVIEW:

Boris Giltburg’s recording of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto is offered with a scintillating twist, the ‘other’ E-flat concerto composed when the composer was 13. This brings Giltburg’s Beethoven concerto cycle to a close, his ebullience and physicality the reverse of plain-speaking, brilliantly partnered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Vasily Petrenko.

Given such forces this is never simply ‘another’ Emperor, but one boldly and exuberantly conceived. Giltburg makes you listen with new ears to one of the most familiar and greatly loved works in the repertoire. The Piano Concerto No 0 (played in Beethoven’s original piano reduction) may be a protracted jeu d’esprit, but Giltburg’s relish of its tonic, virtuoso aplomb sets the pulse racing. Naxos soundworld is of an exceptional clarity and focus.

-- International Piano

Excellent performances of the Emperor and the rarely heard Concerto No. 0. The sound reproduction on this Naxos CD is vivid and well balanced. Those looking for an excellent performance of the Emperor and who are attracted to its lesser coupling, will certainly find this a most rewarding disc.

-- MusicWeb International

César Guerra-Peixe was one of the most versatile Brazilian musicians of the 20th century, gaining a particular mastery of orchestration and creating his own inimitable sound through extensive work in radio, television and cinema. The toe-tapping dance rhythms and lyrical expressiveness in his two Symphonic Suites were inspired by research into Brazilian folk traditions, further enhanced by a broad range of vibrantly eloquent global influences. The light-hearted Roda de Amigos mischievously caricatures Guerra-Peixe’s musical circle of friends and their various woodwind instruments.

REVIEW:

This may be the finest release to date in Naxos’ ongoing Brazilian music series. César Guerra-Peixe (pronounce it “Gweha-Peysh,” more or less) had a relatively long and productive life–1914-93. He was a violinist, teacher, arranger, creator of music for radio, television and film, and an ethnomusicologist, among other things. In his early years, he dabbled in serial (twelve-tone) composition, and it served him well in these two colorful symphonic suites. Both works date from the 1950s, and celebrate the rhythms and percussive sonorities of Brazilian dance music–from the states of São Paulo and Pernambuco respectively–but with a combination of harmonic sophistication and crystal-clear orchestration that makes them models of their kind. Guerra-Peixe’s folk inspirations come out sounding thoroughly modern, more like Bartók, for example, than the early romantic nationalists, and so the result, with its ample use of ostinatos and repetitive gestures, gives the impression of simplicity without ever turning simplistic. They are fresh, vital, and wholly winning.

Roda de Amigos (“Circle of Friends”) is a witty suite in four movements capturing the characters of some of Guerra-Peixe’s musician colleagues: grumpy, stubborn, melancholic, and mischievous respectively. Scored for small ensemble, each movement features a difficult and brilliant woodwind solo, starting with the bassoon and working through the section with clarinet next, then oboe, then flute. The music is genuinely witty, and admirably suited to the emotional character that each movement describes. Kudos to the woodwind soloists of the Goiás Philharmonic, who sound absolutely world-class in each of their turns in the spotlight. Indeed, conductor Neil Thomson galvanizes his forces to deliver performances of all of this music that, in their clarity, vitality and drive, present this splendid music in the best possible light, and the sonics are really vivid too. If you’re looking for a new discovery that you’ll play and enjoy often, then you’ll definitely want to get this terrific disc forthwith.

--ClassicsToday.com (10/10, David Hurwitz)

Another exceptionally interesting and valuable release as part of Naxos’ “The Music of Brazil” series. 

Apart from the specific quality of these individual scores, a significant part of the value of this disc is to add another name to the lengthening list of Latin American/Brazilian composers of real worth and talent. For too many years Villa-Lobos alone represented his country’s music to the wider world. Certainly César Guerra-Peixe deserves to be placed alongside his compatriots such as Camargo Guarnieri, Claudio Santoro, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Edino Krieger, Alexandre Levy, Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, Francisco Mignone, Alberto Nepomuceno, and, of course Heitor Villa-Lobos.

A genuinely important and enjoyable disc.

--MusicWeb International (Nick Barnard)

Korngold’s greatest critical successes lay in the field of opera and in his film scores. The early sets of incidental music reflect these two elements, sharing the theatrical bravura of opera and anticipating his own later filmic techniques. The music for the Viennese production of Shakespeare’s much Ado About Nothing in 1920, heard here in full, is expressive and dramatic. Der Vampir, a psychological study of desire, seduction and greed, is rarely heard, but remains a potent example of Korngold’s instinct for directness of characterization.

“[It's] a pleasant surprise to be confronted with something completely unfamiliar…The Holst Sinfonietta performs these waltzes, flourishes and scarps of underscoring with considerable color and Schwung." -Gramophone

REVIEW:

This disc reaffirms – as if such proof were still necessary – just what a prodigious genius the young Erich Wolfgang Korngold was. The complete incidental music for Korngold’s score to Much Ado About Nothing runs to nearly fifty minutes of music brimming over with pointed musical characterisation, subtle scene-setting and gorgeous melody – all written before his twenty first birthday.

The playing of his Holst-Sinfonietta is uniformly excellent and the engineering manages to find a really effective balance between all the disparate instruments. Time and again I marvelled at the genius of Korngold’s lushly economical scoring.

A further attraction of this new disc for the Korngold completeist collector is the presence of the world premiere recording of his score to accompany Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten The Vampire or The Hunted). Written just three years later this is a fascinating score in the almost expressionist way the music instantly illuminates and comments on the drama.

The issue for the listener – especially the non-German speaking ones – is that the bulk of the music is underscoring dialogue. In this instance Cornelius Bauer (who also contributes the useful liner note) and conductor Klaus Simon have produced a concert version where a narrator explains the plot as well as performing a number of roles. Here Ekkehard Abele is the suitably dramatic narrator/voice. However, due to copyright issues the liner cannot reproduce any of the texts for the work. This is compounded by the fact that the liner briefly outlines the convoluted plot but gives no actual synopsis and no indication of which track/cue fits what part of the plot. Furthermore, it would appear that some of Korngold’s music has been lost. The score as it currently exists ends with an extended dream sequence but there are two more acts in the original play which include indications of further music cues. So what we have here is an attenuated arrangement of an incomplete score in an [potentially] unfamiliar language.

None of which sounds too enticing but this is where Korngold’s especial genius shines through. The instrumentation of Der Vampir is even smaller than Much Ado. Here he uses just flute, violin, cello, harp, piano and percussion as well as a Greek-style spoken chorus for the aforementioned dream-sequence. None of the music cues are anything like as extensive or self-contained either but goodness me they are effective. The playing here is every bit as skilled and apt as in the main work but this will remain very much an appendix to the main body of Korngold’s work.

The main value of this disc is the complete recording of Much Ado About Nothing which is immensely enjoyable. Der Vampir is valuable as a first recording and in the way it illustrates the range of Korngold’s skill especially at such a young age. The only real mystery is why such a valuable recording has sat in the Naxos vaults for nearly eight years.

-- MusicWeb International (Nick Bernard)

Sigismond Thalberg was a virtuoso pianist whose training included studies with Mozart’s pupil Johann Hummel, and whose rivalry with Franz Liszt became the talk of Paris in the 1830s. Thalberg excelled in the fashionable solo piano genre of operatic paraphrase but, while drawing on themes by the ever-popular Rossini, Les Soirées de Pausilippe avoids ostentatious excess. Instead Thalberg preferred an elegant simplicity in which the piano is allowed to sing in emulation of the operatic originals. With rhythmic dances, expressive arias and more, this is a collection that embraces moods that range from Mendelssohnian charm to Chopinesque pianism.

Edith Sitwell’s invitation to William Walton to collaborate on an innovative, revolutionary new work came at a critical moment in the young composer’s career, and Façade proved to be his first great success. The peerless combination of a peculiarly English dry wit, genuine pathos and superlative technical skill remains an extraordinary achievement. Sitwell’s verses conjure a satirical and poignant world of bourgeois late-Victorian England, while Walton’s settings unfailingly enhance and enrich the texts in a work in which words and music are unquestionably of equal importance. This release includes the first recording of Small Talk (1922) and three numbers first performed in 1977 but subsequently rejected by the composer.

REVIEW:

JoAnn Falletta is to be congratulated for bringing us Walton’s revisit of the piece in 1978 when he was 76, featuring eight more poems (the work’s original subtitle, “An Entertainment,” became “A Further Entertainment:). Falletta also includes some additional material, beginning with “Small Talk” from 1922 and three numbers from 1977, “Daphne,” “The White Owl,” and “The Last Galop”—the late ones have never been recorded before.

The special charm of this release is to be found in the acting skills of the narrators, now expanded from two to three. Falletta realized that Sitwell’s poems contain actual characters who could be brought vividly to life, and she has chosen her cast well. Hila Plitman is extremely versatile, sounding at times Russian or German in her delivery (she is actually Israeli). Fred Child is a vocally nimble PBS narrator, and well-regarded bass-baritone Kevin Deas comes across richly with an arch demeanor suggestive of the childlike nature of some of the poems. The result is extremely satisfying. Of course, the performance necessarily emerges sounding less British, less reserved and less formal, but we Americans have our own silly Ogden Nash tradition, and Façade is none the worse for a more extroverted American approach. Jo Ann Falletta and her Virginians play with sass and spark.

-- Fanfare

Medieval England exerted a strong influence on Johann Simon Mayr, especially during his final proto-Romantic period. Alfredo il Grande was to be one of his last operas, with a narrative that takes us to a land under threat of war with the Vikings. Escaping capture, Alfred the Great travels incognito, ultimately defeating the enemy and rescuing his beloved Alsvita. With its grandiose choruses and sensuous melodies, this opera was conceived on a monumental scale and proved both impressive at its premiere and influential on the next generation of bel canto composers, making a substantial contribution to the development of the melodramma romantico.

The four American composers onthis album have all won recognition for their diverse approaches to contemporary art song. Both Emmy-nominated Craig Brandwein, in his beautiful Three Rilke Songs and Jonathan Santore in Two Letters of Sulpicia use computer generated electronics to enhance the vocal line, while Edie Hill's setting of poems by Amy Lowell exemplifies why her music has been described as 'full of mystery' (Stereophile). The common thread running throughout Jessica Rudman's works is expressivity, and These Distances Between Us charts a cycle that recognizes the precarious nature of personal connections.

The four cellist-composers in this recital share a common background: from musical families they played as soloists in outstanding orchestras, taught many students, and wrote music for the instrument that continues to challenge players of our own time with its virtuosity and intensity. In his 12 Caprices Alfredo Piatti fused dazzling technical demands with operatic drama, whilst David Popper’s Suite remains an admired piece for two cellists. Wilhelm Fitzenhagen’s Concert Waltzes for four cellos makes prolonged use of the upper register, and in contrast Julius Klengel’s Hymnus is a sonorously beautiful elegy for twelve cellists.

Sigismond Thalberg was one of the most distinguished pianists of his time, embarking on a solo career in the 1830s and touring as far as the Americas. Thalberg was considered a rival to Liszt though their supposed animosity was largely a journalistic invention. The creation of transcriptions of popular operatic melodies and their transformation into virtuoso concert pieces was hugely fashionable, but Thalberg’s treatments were also admired by Schumann for their Classical transparency, and for stylish technical innovations that saw him imitated throughout Europe. These fantasies on themes by Donizetti are full of the lyrical charm and drama of the original operas, combined with pianistic fireworks that delighted audiences worldwide.

Arthur Sullivan is best remembered today for his Savoy Operas with W.S. Gilbert, but during his lifetime Sullivan was also famed for his church, concert hall and stage works. These three sets of incidental music show his versatility in the genre. The music for The Merry Wives of Windsor has a joviality and lightness that matches it's pantomime mood, while the concert suite for MacBeth weaves together nervous tension and impending tragedy. By contrast, King Arthur required one of Sullivan's specialties, a sequence of choruses, edited after his death into this evocative suite.

Haydn worked during a period that witnessed a great deal of stylistic change, including the evolution of keyboard instruments from the harpsichord to the pianoforte with its hammer action and greater dynamic flexibility. These rarely heard but influential early Piano Trios include music originally conceived for piano solo or baryton trio. The Trio in F minor is unusual for its elaborate ornamentation and darker key,and is highly at-tractive in its youthful freshness. The acclaimed Aquinas Piano Trio brings these un-justly neglected works vividly to life.

Allied to his melodic gifts, early experiences as a sound and balance engineer equipped Trevor Duncan with a profound understanding of instrumental color. During the 1950s he composed music that became instantly recognizable in the light music tradition. The Girl from Corsica was heard almost daily on British radio and the theme tune for the BBC TV series Dr Finlay’s Casebook remains one of his most celebrated works (it’s part of A Little Suite, heard here in full). Duncan was an inspiration for other composers, and was capable of sensuous romance, breezy scene setting, delicate tone poems and irresistible glamour.

Review:

The meticulous craft and polish that characterizes the composer’s music is on ample display in this collection, to say nothing of his ability to produce high-quality music according to very specific demands and timeframes.

The essence of what makes Duncan’s music so loveable can be heard in his tripartite scores Children in the Park from 1954 and A Little Suite from 1959. Their external breeziness belies their sophistication of orchestration and form. The central “Lullaby” movement of the latter work, for example, is a masterclass in miniature on how to subtly play with instrumental color: harp and celesta (with the latter instrument enjoying a brief, but gorgeous solo) limn a winsomely pastoral melody to telling effect as it is passed from plummy clarinets to sleek strings and back. What sounds straightforward on paper is utterly magical in performance.

Similar exquisite calibrations of instrumental color are heard in the well-known “20th Century Express,” “High Heels,” and “The Girl From Corsica,” each of the latter two also carrying beguiling hints of David Rose’s “Holiday for Strings” and Hugo Winterhalter’s hit version of “Song of the Barefoot Contessa” respectively. Duncan’s personal touches in harmony and instrumental color, however, ensure that neither sound derivative.

As the popularity of light music withered against the rise of rock in the 1960s, Duncan turned increasingly to works that were more introspective and serious, yet no less touched by his unique sparkle. A preview of this stylistic turn is heard in his St. Boniface Down (An Idyll) from 1956, the longest single work on this album. It opens with chant-like figure on horns and cellos, followed by a descending five-note response in the woodwinds (based on a verse by Paul Verlaine) that is repeated a number of times, which then leads into an eerie passage for solo horn and celesta that almost sounds as if it were right out of Shostakovich. The atmosphere sketched is one of endless grays, an evocative aural depiction of resignation. Little surprise, then, that Duncan was inspired by his unhappiness that resulted from an unrequited infatuation.

The latest work on this collection is the “Serenade (In the Style of Schubert),” one of the movements from his 1967 Maestro Variations. Although the accompaniment somewhat recalls the Austrian composer’s “An die Musik,” it does not really sound much like him otherwise. (In fact, the music reminded me more of Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse!) It is, nevertheless, an enjoyable and tuneful movement that makes one eager to hear the rest of the work it is extracted from.

While the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra sometimes sound a trifle flat-footed in their other recordings in this series (e.g. the Ronald Binge volume), here they sound relaxed, playing with dapper phrasing and timing under the direction of Andrew Penny. The production by Murray Khouri and Hubert Geschwandtner is satisfyingly full and deep. The excellent liner notes are by David Ades, whose death in 2015 robbed the world of a veritable walking encyclopedia of light and easy-listening music.

At the Naxos price, this collection of Duncan’s music is too good to pass up.

--MusicWeb International (Néstor Castiglione)

The Hiawatha trilogy, with its stirring overture, established Coleridge-Taylor as one of Britain’s leading young composers and stimulated commissions in a wide variety of music. The Othello Suite was written for a stage production of the play, its powerful and contrasting themes illustrating the composer’s prowess in characterization. Redolent of popular ballads and romances, the Petite Suite de Concert is a masterpiece of light music, while the charming Romance of the Prairie Lilies shows Coleridge-Taylor’s lasting influence on future generations of British composers.

The composers of these 20th-century Italian works were all associated with the cello from a young age. Their deep understanding of the instrument reveals itself in three contrasting concertante pieces where soloist and orchestra collaborate to explore a wide range of colors and moods, and whose slow movements are among the most beautiful each composer ever wrote. Malipiero viewed the soloist in his concertos as a voice rising in a crowd; the mysterious and autumnal L’Olmeneta is the largest and most individual of Ghedini’s cello works; and Casella’s Notturno e tarantella is a sunny piece, expertly orchestrated.

Darko Nikčević and Srdjan Bulatović, the internationally renowned guitar duo from Montenegro, are acclaimed for their virtuosity and for exciting performances that blend influences from the Mediterranean and Middle East. This program captures the spontaneous nature of their musical creativity and documents the strange period in which the world first stood still under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a shared Balkan heritage and using eloquently transparent melodies, these pieces express uncertainty and isolation as well as the deepest and most beautiful of emotions, from inner peace and contentment to a cheerful appreciation of life itself.

Much of Joseph Haydn’s musical life was spent in service at the palace of Eszterháza on the Hungarian plains, a complex of buildings to rival Versailles in magnificence. Haydn’s reputation abroad was, however, already considerable by 1790, and he was invited to travel to London where the delightfully lively and at times brilliantly virtuosic trios Hob.XV:16and 19were published. Further trios from the 1760s express music of sheer joy, all performed here by the acclaimed Oberlin Trio.

Universally famous for his glorious overtures Light Cavalry and Poet and Peasant (Naxos 8.553935),Franz von Suppé was one of the greatest exponents of the golden Age of Viennese Operetta. But he was also a master of incidental music for popular plays, one of which is Mozart– an example of Künstler-Lebensbild (‘life portrait of an artist’). Suppé’s music subtly accompanies the stage action as the story of the composition of Mozart’s music unfolds, offering a potpourri of Mozart’s works served up with Suppé’s trademark flair. Die Afrikareise presents a piquant and brilliant travelogue.

In the last decade of the 18th century, the Moravian composer Paul Wranitzky was Vienna’s leading symphonist. As orchestral director of the court theatre he also composed many works for the stage. The ballet-pantomime Das Waldmädchen (‘The Forest Maiden’) proved one of his greatest successes, enchanting the Viennese public with its tuneful score and the charming story of a feral girl found in the forest by a Polish prince out hunting. Its enduring popularity sparked numerous productions across Europe and inspired works by Beethoven and Weber. The delightfully rustic Pastorale and Allemande was written for Empress Marie Therese, an important musical patron who favored Wranitzky as composer and concertmaster.

The emergence of the cello as a solo instrument at the beginning of the 19th century encouraged composers to explore its melodic and sonorous potential, with compositions for two or more cellos becoming increasingly popular. Bernhard Romberg, and Anton Kraft both had personal connections to Beethoven – their works offer inventive timbres, intimacy and substantial virtuosity. The world premiere recording of the sparkling Concertino by Kraft’s son Nikolaus completes an album of unique gems, influenced by Beethoven and Haydn, which helped to usher in the golden age of the cello.

Schubert was known in his time primarily as a composer of songs, but he was also a master of the dance form and wrote prolifically for a middle-class society eager for domestic entertainment. He loved Ländler (triple time country dances), the Écossaises (supposedly Scottish), and the rich variety of genial German dances. Viennese pianos of the day produced a sound that was clear and transparent, very different from modern instruments, and in this recording Yang Liu plays on a Steinway grand and a copy of a mid-1820s fortepiano by Conrad Graf, a maker well known to Schubert.

Tan Dun’s originality has been reflected in worldwide recognition of his music, which draws on both Chinese and Western musical languages. The Eight Memories in Watercolor are deft painterly reflections, while in Trace she balances sound with silence in this evocation of nature. The vibrant drama of Blue Orchid incorporates the opening motif of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. In Film Music Sonata, which here receives its first recording on general release, Tan Dun draws on his score for the film The Banquet. The kaleidoscopic C-A-G-E-, strikingly Chinese in sound, is a tribute to his teacher and spiritual compass, John Cage. The Fire, written for Ralph van Raat, contains some of Tan Dun’s most virtuosic and dramatic piano writing.

For this programme, Duo Diversitas has selected or created sophisticated arrangements that embody virtuosity and musical expression. In focusing on great composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Marisa Minder and Evgeniya Spalinger explore the artistic refinement, lyrical grace and technical sophistication of the guitar and flute. The one original work for this combination is Hans Haug's Capriccio, a modern classic that alludes to Baroque procedure but within the context of exciting contemporary harmonies.

Like many Catalan musicians of his time, Antonio Soler received initial training as a chorister before his excellence as an organist ensured high appointment at the Escorial, Spain’s royal palace. Here he absorbed the influence of Domenico Scarlatti, and the keyboard sonatas Soler composed remain his most lasting contribution to musical history. The three sonatas in this volume reflect his awareness of trends in Viennese music and are notable for their vivid pastoral elements, refined delicacy and sizzling virtuosic demands.

Xiaogang Ye is one of China’s best-known contemporary composers whose work is acclaimed both in East Asia and the West for its colorful sonorities and lyrical expressiveness. Demonstrating Ye’s deep love for ancient Chinese poetry, Seven Episodes for Lin’an is a large-scale symphonic canvas that sets famous texts for the first time in contemporary history, weaving their eloquent imagery with intricate and timeless melodies. Twilight in Tibet evokes the landscape of the Himalayas, while the Tianjin Suite reflects the diversity of Tianjin, a city with a profound historical and cultural heritage, expressed through Ye’s signature combination of traditional and modern musical textures. This release features rising vocal stars Yuanming Song, Yijie Shi, and Songhu Liu alongside horn soloist Cong Gu.

This album of contemporary organ repertoire features fascinating works that display a wide array of influences. Barry Jordan’s Praise Song, heard here its 2018 revision, draws on modern worship songs and African drumming rhythms, an element that also suffuses part of Thierry Escaich’s Évocation II, a work of electrifying intensity and vibrant color. Arvo Pärt’s starkly beautiful Annum per annum is featured alongside Theo Brandmüller’s last work Sternenklänge. Dialogue vers les étoiles by Christian von Blohn – a student of Brandmüller – acts as a moving posthumous dialogue with his teacher.

Sandro Fuga became a leading figure in Turin’s musical life in the mid-20th century. His passion for art and music was inherited from his eminent Venetian family which included grandfather Luigi Nono among its members. Few Italian composers of Fuga’s generation broached the sonata genre, but these three works represent the summit of his piano music, together forming a triptych of considerable significance. Fuga considered himself a ‘Romantic survivor’, believing music to represent the expression of emotions. Thanks to his rejection of avant-garde ephemera and a profound faith in humanity, his piano sonatas are expressive, eloquent and emotionally compelling.

Ferdinand Ries was a friend and pupil of Beethoven and was praised by Robert Schumann for his ‘remarkable originality.’ He was also one of the great piano virtuosos of his age and perfectly placed to compose works for his instrument that honor the Classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart while foreshadowing the Romanticism of Schubert and Chopin.

In Susan Kagan, an acknowledged authority on the composer, these works have found an interpreter of sympathy and eloquence who brings the composer’s fluency, poignancy, and drama fully to life: “Ries could not have asked for a better pianist and proponent than he has found in Susan Kagan.” (Fanfare)