The uniquely influential Russian musical and theatrical dynasty of the Liadov, Antipov and Pomazansky families supplied Russian culture with nearly 20 musical and theatrical performers, conductors, composers, and ballet dancers over the course of 150 years. Including numerous world première recordings, these wonderful pièces de salon are gems of Russian dance music, full of charming grace, melodic delicacy and nobility. A quote from Anatoly Liadov can stand as representative for all: ‘such is my character: do everything so that every bar gratifies.’ Olga Solovieva is a laureate of several international competitions. In May 2019 she received the Glinka Medal for her contribution to musical art. She has performed in Russia and internationally, and has collaborated with musicians and ensembles across the globe. Dmitry Korostelyov was awarded the prize for Best Accompanist at the 2005 Rimsky Korsakov Wind and Percussion Instruments Competition in Saint Petersburg. As a pianist he has performed with the Russian State Orchestra, Volgograd Philharmonic Orchestra, and more.

Florent Schmitt was a strikingly original composer whose influences were as varied as his own restless and imaginative music. A number of his solo piano works are little known and offer an important insight into his compositional development. Neuf Pièces, Op. 27, which includes a Spanish-infused Gitanella movement, was composed during his first period of travel. The expressive and vivid elements of Crépuscules, Op. 56 are infused with harmonic richness and quiet melancholy, while Ritournelle, Op. 2 No. IIbis displays an airiness and wit characteristic of French music of the Roaring Twenties. Internationally renowned pianist, Biljana Urban, presents a selection of neglected gems of French piano literature including many world première recordings.

Pre-order your copy today! This release is scheduled to ship on or about Friday, October 8.

Also available: 20th Century Foxtrots, Vol. 1 and 20th Century Foxtrots, Vol. 2

Gramophones and radios brought the voice of America, its fashion, its carelessness and joie de vivre into every corner of Europe during the Roaring Twenties, and no composer could remain immune to the hot jazz influences of the Foxtrot, Shimmy and Charleston. This third volume of jazzy piano dances features composers from nine Central and Eastern European countries, from Misha Spoliansky’s hypnotizing Valse Boston ‘Morphium’ to Leonid Polovinkin’s extremely entertaining and refreshingly futuristic approach to the genre. Gottlieb Wallisch continues his ‘most surprising and consistently charming recording project’ (The New York Times on Volume 2, GP814).

The Dover Quartet, “the young American string quartet of the moment” (The New Yorker) unveils the second installment in its critically acclaimed Beethoven quartet cycle on Cedille Records. The Dover’s three-album set of Beethoven’s “Middle Quartets” includes the three Op. 59 “Razumovsky” Quartets, infused with Russian folk tunes; the graceful “Harp,” Op. 74, named for its plucked string figures; and the intense Op. 95 “Serioso,” a forward-looking experiment that Beethoven originally intended “for a small circle of connoisseurs.” The Dover Quartet’s first Beethoven release, a traversal of the Op. 18 quartets, has garnered international praise. England’s The Strad said the ensemble exhibits “a beguiling freshness and spontaneity that creates the impression of these relatively early masterworks arriving hot off the press.” Toronto’s The Whole Note cited “performances of conviction and depth. This promises to be an outstanding set.” Utah-based CD Hotlist remarked, “The Dovers stand out from the pack by playing with utterly perfect intonation, a near-telepathic sense of ensemble, and a lovely balance of passion and clarity.” New York’s WQXR proclaimed, “It’s hard to imagine a group better suited to recording these works than the Dover Quartet.” In concert, the quartet has presented three complete Beethoven cycles, including the University at Buffalo’s famous “Slee Cycle” — which has offered annual Beethoven quartet cycles since 1955 and has featured the likes of the Budapest, Guarneri, and Cleveland Quartets. The Dover Quartet serves as the inaugural Penelope P. Watkins Ensemble in Residence at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and holds residencies with the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, among other prestigious posts.

During his lifetime Carl Stamitz, the firstborn son of Johann Stamitz, the famous founder of the Mannheim School, became a violin and viola virtuoso and successful composer. In our Carl Stamitz Edition we are now releasing four more symphonies that were regarded as a practically ideal embodiment of sensibility because his “heart full of feeling left its imprint on his music.” Stamitz’s desire to discover and explore new paths in the composition of symphonies took him to the programmatic pastoral symphony “Le jour variable” (La promenade royale) designed in Versailles in the fall of 1772. What Stamitz presents to the ears in the way of previously “unheard-of” music would completely outshine even the programmatic pieces produced at the end of the nineteenth century. Many experts, including Hugo Riemann, were very much aware of the fact that this program symphony is a particularly interesting and remarkable composition.

At last it is possible to present to the public the first monographic recording of works by Giuseppe Unia, who in the eighteen-sixties could boast the title of “court pianist-composer to His Majesty the King of Italy”, like his better-known colleague Hans von Bülow, court pianist to Ludwig ii of Bavaria and his friend Alfred Jaëll, pianist to the King of Hannover. Giuseppe Antonio Unia is one of the many Italian musicians whom history – or, should we say, time – has separated from us with the thin veil of oblivion. Yet his more than two hundred publications for publishers such as Ricordi, Canti and Vismara testify to a considerable degree of success, and the dedications of his works show that his friends were important people, both from a social point of view and from an artistic one. The pianists Massimiliano Génot and Andrea Vigna Taglianti here are proposing a careful selection of the piano works by Unia, fully reflecting the style and musical taste of Europe of his time, of which he was a profound connoisseur thanks to his numerous artistic experiences in Italy, Paris and Vienna.

In the month of what would have been his ninetieth birthday, this record comes as a tribute to Sylvano Bussotti. One of the most singular and emblematic composers on the international contemporary classical scene, Bussotti passed away in September 2021. This music comes to us thanks to Jonathan Faralli on percussion and Roberto Fabbriciani on flute, an equally emblematic performer and constant point of reference in the musical production of our century, as well as a great friend and close collaborator of Bussotti himself. A must-have for lovers of the genre as well as the curious newcomer, the album offers masterful work by the two performers as they stage Bussotti's famously theatrical scores, full of dramaturgy, poetry and scenography for both eyes and ears.

This new release features three of the greatest piano works by Schumann, superbly performed on fortepiano. DAVID HYUN-SU KIM has distinguished himself as one of the most thoughtful and distinctive musicians to emerge from the newest generation of American pianists. His concerts have been praised as “emotionally expansive” and “idiomatically perfect,” his interpretations as “spectacular,” and his Schumann playing has been singled out as “splendid and moving … His Florestan was elegantly calamitous, and his melodies representing Eusebius were like a dear friend whispering arcane truths to only you.” A sought-after pedagogue and adjudicator, David has taught at Yale and Harvard Universities. His students have gone on to win prizes in international competitions and been accepted for graduate study at Eastman, Oberlin, the University of Michigan, CCM, Indiana University, and similar institutions.

This very special release includes the legendary concert of the Original Three Tenors - José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, conducted by Zubin Mehta at the Terme di Caracalla, Rome 1990 on the eve of the Football World Cup in Italy, watched by 1.6 billion spectators worldwide. For the first time available on Blu-ray, digitally remastered! This edition includes the new documentary The Three Tenors - From Caracalla to the World featuring recent interviews with José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Zubin Mehta, Pavarotti‘s widow Nicoletta Mantovani, Lalo Shifrin, Brian Large, Mario Dradi, Paul Potts, Sir Bryn Terfel, Norman Lebrecht, Didier de Cottignies and many more. Previously unpublished backstage material shows the tenors unadorned and offers a fascinating insight into what takes place beyond the spotlight in Rome, 1990 and the sequel in Los Angeles, 1994. The film takes a completely new look at the concert legends. For the first time, they talk about José Carreras‘ struggles with leukemia, their rivalries and friendships, their spectacular contract poker and life as an opera star.

Telemann’s Wedding Serenata Georg Philipp Telemann never missed the opportunity to delight those around him with countless compositions treating the subject of love and its consequences. The origins of his enormous achievement in this field are certainly to be sought in his personal disposition: in his exuberant joy in composition, combined with an open, optimistic attitude in his dealings with his environment, which in his works not rarely revealed his roguish sense of humor. And so he above all was very much in demand as a composer of wedding pieces. The texts of the wedding serenata »Liebe, was ist schöner als die Liebe« undeniably exhibit mirthful exuberance and belong to the most original and wittiest musical creations of all by this composer. The serenata has the form of a disputatio, a dramatic dialogue in which an advocate of marriage (Ametas, soprano) and a skeptic (Crito, tenor) are in disagreement about the usefulness of the institution of marriage. The album also includes the solo cantata “Lieben will ich,” in which the imponderables of love are celebrated in witty free texts, and the cantata “Der Weiberorden,” which quite clearly was composed in conjunction with a wedding feast and in lighter tones enables to join the young bride in joyous anticipation of her future married life.

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards!

Counter-tenor Iestyn Davies and and the viol consort Fretwork present a new recording of works for viol consort and voice drawn from 17th-century Germany, following their critically-praised 2019 album of works by Michael Nyman and Henry Purcell. Featuring performances from organist Silas Wollston and counter-tenor Hugh Cutting, the recital ranges widely over the 17th century – from the early years with three curiously similar sounding friends: Schein, Scheidt and Schütz, to the most significant member of the Bach family before Johann Sebastian, Johann Christoph Bach. From their they travel down North Sea to the foothills of the Alps, including Buxtehude’s predecessor at the Marienkirche in Lübeck – Franz Tunder (whose daughter Buxtehude was to marry) and another north German composer who worked in Copenhagen, Christian Geist. Giovanni Felice Sances is an outlier here: he was born in Rome, but spent the second part of his life working for three successive Emperors in Vienna, where viol playing was still very much in vogue. In 2021, Fretwork celebrates its 35th anniversary. In the past three and a half decades they have explored the core repertory of great English consort music, from Taverner to Purcell, and made classic recordings against which others are judged. In addition to this, Fretwork have become known as pioneers of contemporary music for viols, having commissioned over 40 new works. Iestyn Davies is a British countertenor widely recognised as one of the world’s finest singers celebrated for the beauty and technical dexterity of his voice and intelligent musicianship. Critical recognition of Iestyn’s work can be seen in two Gramophone Awards, a Grammy Award, a RPS Award for Young Singer of the Year, the Critics’ Circle Award and recently an Olivier Award Nomination. He was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List 2017 for services to music.

Lawrence Golan's Fantasia for Solo Violin, written in 1993, was inspired by Ysaye's sonatas of 1924, which, in turn, were inspired by the unaccompanied violin works of J.S. Bach, dated 1720. Hence this recording represents the inspirational lineage of a composition spanning almost three centuries. Acclaimed for his vibrant, inspired performances, imaginative programming and evocative command of different styles and composers, American conductor Lawrence Golan has developed a reputation as a dynamic, charismatic communicator. He has conducted throughout the United States and in Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, El Salvador, England, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, and continues to develop relationships with orchestras nationally and abroad.

The premiere of Franz Lachner’s Symphony No. 6 was held in Munich on 19 April 1837 with the composer as the conductor. The Munich press termed it a “magnificent work” and an “outstanding masterpiece,” and in this truly extraordinary work Lachner refrains from the confrontational juxtaposition of large-format thematic blocks (above all occurring in his third and fifth symphonies), instead presenting a “more organic” compositional style in which motivic-thematic developments are realized step by step. Lachner’s Concertino for Bassoon and Orchestra is a work from 1824, composed during his Vienna years. He dedicated it to Theobald Hürth, who was then the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra’s principal bassoonist. It is not known whether or not Hürth ever performed this work in public, and performances of it are not documented. It is one of the earliest extant compositions by Lachner and possibly his first work with orchestra. Here Chia-Hua Hsu, the solo bassoonist of Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, interprets its recording premiere.

At long last our successful Reger Edition continues on its way. The critics have been more than enthusiastic about the previous releases, and Musik & Theater even stated: “These recordings number among the best currently available in the field of Reger’s organ music.” This month we are releasing Vol. 7, again with two albums in the best SS, and this time featuring Reger’s five easy-to-play Preludes and Fugues op. 56. Although the composer termed this composition “an organ work of small caliber” in a letter to the publisher Lauterbach & Kuhn, the critics reacted positively, and the organist and composer Robert Frenzel numbered its pieces, which form anything but a secondary work, “among the most poetic phenomena in the most recent organ literature.” And we absolutely have to agree with him. The generic combination of “Prelude and Fugue” is frequently assigned to the realm of so-called absolute music, but Reger’s op. 56 does not seem to belong to this world in which only the musical structure is of significance; instead, particularly the preludes, which mostly practice dynamic moderation – like many of the “pieces” from op. 59 and other works – are distinguished by a pronounced poetic character.

The present release synthesizes some stages characterizing the composition path of Pier Paolo Scattolin: from a cappella vocality to instrumentalism with stylistic dynamics sometimes distant but all having in common the research on sound, from the linguistic phoneme to the eclectic and sometimes experimental use of instrumental emission. The path winds through almost forty years of continuous investigation and dissection of both choral and instrumental sound, the latter of a chamber/soloistic character and in some cases concerted and intersected with the voice. In the a cappella choral repertoire a varied anthology collects poetic and literary texts by Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alda Merini, Umberto Saba, Emily Dickinson, Alessandro Striggio, Agnolo Poliziano, Alceo, Saffo, Ipponatte, Enzo Iacchetti, Agnese Troilo and the composer himself. Some choral pieces are concerted with the Ensemble of ancient instruments Circe from Bologna, whose presence stems from the search for a sound language proceeding towards the stripping and essentiality of a music and a sound coherent with the setting of the poetic texts in order to transfer their instrumental characteristics to contemporary musical expression. In some pieces the solo voices are added as an almost instrumental colour, a timbre enrichment of the sonorities of the organ, the recorders, and the trumpets.

Bill Ives has enjoyed a rich and varied career as both performer and composer (Grayston Ives). These experiences, culminating in nearly two decades as Informator Choristarum (Director of Music) at Magdalen College, Oxford, are reflected in a compositional style which is complex yet accessible, rich and colourful. His choral music comes from the heart, and this deeply personal reaction to the texts enables the performer or listener to engage with and enjoy the music to its full extent. This recording represents two ‘firsts’ for the choirs of Jesus College, Cambridge: The first time the choir have collaborated on a recording with the Britten Sinfonia, as well as is the first time both chapel and college choirs they have joined forces for an entire album. Bill (Grayston) Ives writes: “In the Requiem many influences are thrown into the musical melting pot and will be apparent to the discerning listener. Ultimately, the piece is firmly rooted in the Anglican choral tradition (written specifically for liturgical performance), the distillation of a lifetime in music ... The delicate, sweet sound of a pair of tiny hand-held cymbals is heard at the opening and at intervals throughout. They were bought at Snape Maltings from a group of Tibetan monks who were resident there during the summer of 2008 when ideas for the piece were forming.”

On a new double-album of solo organ works by Leo Sowerby (1895–1968) and another prominent Chicago composer, Frank Ferko (b. 1950), versatile keyboard virtuoso David Schrader plays four of Sowerby’s “greatest hits” for organ, including the monumental Symphony in G major, plus the rarely heard “March” from Suite for Organ, on the 68-rank Wicks Opus 2918 at St. Ita’s Catholic Church, Chicago. The world-premiere recording of Sowerby’s late Two Sketches is available on the album’s digital editions. Schrader plays a diverse program of eight Ferko compositions, all world-premiere recordings, including several based on music by 12th-century composer and Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Schrader performs on three noteworthy manual-action organs at the House of Hope Presbyterian Church, St. Paul, Minnesota, including the instrument for which one of the works was specially written.

The award winning Aeolus Quartet offers the second installment in their Many-Sided Music Project, Ariel and Other Poems. This ongoing project collects distinctive voices of American composers, combining the classic with the modern. Ariel and Other Poems takes its name from the original title of Sylvia Plath's last manuscript. The poems contained therein include the work that inspired Christopher Theofanidis' Ariel Ascending, and joined by the rich expansive tones of the Copland, the buzzing electricity of the Mazzoli, and the deep catharsis of the Barber, the album Ariel and Other Poems seeks to offer a small sampling of the multi-faceted collection of American chamber music.

Music clearly fascinated the great Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516); his sketches and paintings are peppered with closely observed depictions of music-making and musical instruments. Bosch, a native of ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Duchy of Brabant, was a life-long brother of the city’s Brotherhood of Our Illustrious Lady, a large and prestigious organization for which sacred music was an essential and highly-valued part of its devotional life. Every Wednesday Bosch could gather with his Confraternity brothers in their opulent chapel in the church of St. John the Evangelist to celebrate a votive Mass in honor of the Blessed Virgin. This recording aims to capture a sense of the devotional soundscape that Bosch experienced throughout his life as a member of this music-loving Marian brotherhood. Instead of the frightening cacophony conjured by the artist’s vision of Hell, we encounter here the joy and serenity of the weekly Marian votive Mass liturgy. We have chosen the Missa Cum jocunditate by Pierre de la Rue(c.1452-1518), who was not only the most renowned composer of the Habsburg-Burgundian court but also an external member of the brotherhood from the early 1490s until his death in 1518. Indeed, La Rue may well have had occasion to meet Bosch during these years. Cappella Pratensis sings from the original notation, reading from scale copies of the confraternity’s manuscripts of plainsong and polyphony, and adopts the Brabant pronunciation of Latin those singers surely employed. They also read together from one large music book, like the men portrayed in the Singers in the Egg sketch attributed to Bosch.