SIBELIUS: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3

"In vivid, full-ranging recordings made by German Radio, Müller-Brühl conducts lively performances with his excellent chamber orchestra of three symphonies frrom around 1774. Müller-Brühl uses modern instruments, yet reflects period practice in asking for ery limited vibrato and light articulation from the strings."

-- Penguin Guide [2003/4]

PROKOFIEV: Orchestral Suites

VIVALDI: Flute Concertos (Famous)

Gershwin, along with Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers contributed more to popular song in the 20th century than any other composer. His songs defined an era and, adopted as jazz standards and immortalized by performers.

ROSSINI: Sonatas for Wind Quartet Nos. 1-6

BOCCHERINI: Cello Sonatas

The greater part of Chopin's music was written for his own instrument, the piano. At first it seemed that works for piano and orchestra would be a necessary part of his stock-in-trade, but the position he found for himself in Paris enabled him to write principally for the piano alone, in a characteristic idiom that derives some inspiration from contemporary Italian opera, much from the music of Poland, and still more from his own adventurous approach to harmony and his own sheer technical ability as a player. Of the forms that Chopin used, the romantic Impromptu offered a particular freedom, with it's suggestion of music dashed off in some fine, careless rapture. His Fantaisie-Impromptu was written in 1835, but published posthumously. It was followed by three further works under the same generic title. The Mazurka, a Polish dance, provided Chopin with a basic rhythmic pattern, his first attempt made in childhood at the age of ten and his last in the year of his death. The form became one with which he was particularly closely associated, an expression of his patriotism. Writers had started to show an interest in the traditional ballad with the publication by Bishop Percy of his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which first appeared in the 1760s. The work of Sir Walter Scott as a collector and as a poet added to the enthusiasm. In Germany further interest was shown, with the publication of translations of ballads and the creation of new ones, first by B�rger and then by Goethe and Schiller. This literary form, reflected in ballad settings by Schubert, Loewe and others, led Chopin to a purely instrumental form, based, it has been suggested, on poems by Mickiewicz, contemporary ballads of Polish patriotic purport. The first of Chopin's four Ballades implies a narrative content, opening with the words of the story-teller and proceeding to events of greater excitement. Chopin completed his collection of Preludes in 1839, when he published a set of 24, using all major and minor keys. A number of the Preludes were written during his winter in Mallorca with George Sand and her two children. They had arrived on the island in November, their appearance arousing some suspicions in the minds of local people. Deterioration in the weather aggravated the weakness of Chopin's health and doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Forced to leave their lodgings and to pay for their fumigation, the party moved to rooms in the deserted monastery at Valldemosa, where George Sand continued to nurse him, in spite of considerable local hostility towards this woman who smoked cigars, the two long-haired boys and a girl who dressed as a man. It was with some relief that they left Mallorca in February, happy to return to France. It was in these circumstances, graphically described by George Sand in her Hiver � Majorque, that the Preludes were completed and revised, before being dispatched to Camille Pleyel for publication, each one a musical vignette. The second of Chopin's three sonatas includes, as a slow movement, his famous Funeral March, written in 1837, while the second of his four scherzos, the Scherzo in B flat minor, was written in the same key and same year. Originally a musical joke, with Beethoven a relatively jocular symphonic movement that replaced the traditional minuet as a bridge between a slow movement and a final symphonic rondo, the scherzo, for Chopin, became an extended and independent composition, here passionate in it's content. His single Berceuse, completed in 1844, makes much more than might be expected from the lullaby of the title. The Polish dance, the Polonaise, found it's way from village to ball-room and thence abroad. In Paris in 1830 Poland was in the news, with the attempted rising against Russia and it's suppression, and things Polish enjoyed considerable popularity, a fact from which Chopin benefited on his arrival in the city. As with other relatively trivial dance forms, he was able to raise the Polonaise to a new level, imparting a degree of complexity and a degree of feeling that had not always been present in the work of his elders in Warsaw. Chopin's first attempts at the form were at the age of seven and his last in 1846, three years before his death, and there is a clear element of patriotism about the two Polonaises included in the present collection, the Military and the Heroic.

TCHAIKOVSKY / DVORAK: Serenades for Strings

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2 - Schumann: Introduction and Al

Though best known today for his orchestral music and his operas, Dvorak was strongly attracted to chamber music both as performer and composer.

Chopin: Nocturnes

The music of Spain retains it's exotic attraction, with it's individual blend of regional and national elements, influenced by the colorful traditions of the country and of it's former colonies. It was in the nineteenth century, with the growth of nationalism, politically and culturally, that Spanish musical identity became established internationally as something apart from the main European cultural traditions of which Spain had for centuries formed apart. It was natural that something of this fascination with things Spanish should make an early appearance in neighboring France. The French composer Emmanuel Chabrier had spent the early part of his career as a civil servant, resigning his position only in 1880 in order to devote himself to music. Chabrier lacked the thorough training of the Conservatoire, but had been able to study music with some assiduity as a private pupil of a number of teachers of distinction, while mixing socially with a circle of well known musicians, painters and writers. In 1881 Charles Lamoureux made him chorus director and organizing secretary for the new concerts that he was promoting in Paris, his first professional musical employment. It was a journey to Spain in 1882 that aroused Chabrier's interest in the music of that country. Returning to Paris, he composed a fantasia for piano, based on the melodies he had collected, and played it through to Lamoureux, who encouraged him to orchestrate it. The result was the orchestral rhapsody Espa�a, first performed under Lamoureux on 6th November 1883. Chabrier won immediate fame, although his continuing operatic ambitions never brought him the success that he wanted. Espa�a, a vivid evocation of Spain, uses the contrasting elements of the jota and the malague�a in a colorfully orchestrated work. Manuel de Falla, born in C�diz in 1876, was the leading Spanish composer of his generation, writing music that captured the essence of all that was Spanish, while proving acceptable internationally. His ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, originally a pantomime under the title El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife), is based on a story by Pedro Antonio de Alarc�n. The plot concerns the jealousy of the miller, whose attractive wife has been subjected to the attentions of the elderly Corregidor. The ballet was first staged in London in 1919 by Dyagilev's Ballets russes, with d�cor by Picasso and choreography by Leonid Massin. The excerpts included here start with the Fandango for the miller's wife, followed by a Segnidillas for the neighbors, a Farruca for the miller and a final Jota. Manuel de Falla's opera La vida breve ('Short Life') was completed in 1905, before the composer left Spain for Paris, and was first staged in Nice in 1913, a year before de Falla's return to Spain. It's plot concerns the betrayal of the gypsy girl Salud by her lover Paco, who marries a girl of richer background. Salud, appearing with a companion to dance for Paco and Carmela's wedding-guests, falls down dead, as she moves forward to accuse Paco. An Interlude marks night-fall, leading to the well known Spanish Dance of the wedding-guests, familiar from arrangement after arrangement. El amor brujo ('Love the Magician'), staged in Madrid in 1915, made full use of the traditions Spanish gypsy music. It tells the story of a gypsy girl Candelas, haunted by the spirit of her dead lover, which she summons up in her ritual fire dance, in the original version the Dance of the End of the Day. A dominant figure in French opera towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jules Massenet based his opera Le Cid on the play on the subject of the Spanish hero by Corneille. The opera was first staged at the Paris Op�ra in 1885. The Spanish dances on which much of the present reputation of Massenet's opera depends come in the first scene of the second act, a contrast to the tragic events that have taken place. At the heart of the drama is the conflict in the heart of Chim�ne, whose lover Don Rodrigue, El Cid, has killed her father. Massenet offers, in his ballet scene, a series of characteristic dances. Composers in the newly developed Russian nationalist tradition also had recourse, as Glinka had done, to the exotic, whether to bordering countries, to the ethnic minorities of the Russian Empire or to remoter Spain. Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Capriccio Espagnol began as a Fantasia on Spanish Themes, for violin and orchestra, and was eventually completed in it's present form in 1887. The work won immediate acclaim, above all for the brilliance of it's orchestration, an achievement from which the composer drew great satisfaction. The French composer Maurice Ravel was the son of a Swiss father and of a mother from the Basque country. He was familiar from childhood with Spanish culture and language and had occasion to make use of this element in his background in a number of compositions. Bol�ro, which he himself described as an orchestrated crescendo, was written for Ida Rubinstein, whose ballet troupe staged it in 1928, with choreography by Nijinska. It's two thematic elements are linked by the continuing percussion rhythm that gives the work it's hypnotic fascination.

DUPRE: Works for Organ, Vol. 5

Piano Recital: Ashley Wass