50 American Patriotic Military Songs is presented as a four-vinyl LP set of the greatest patriotic music available! This album features over fifteen traditional favorites such as 'This Land is Your Land', 'God Bless America', 'You're a Grand Old Flag', and 'God Bless the USA', along with all the service songs, and Naval and Air Force hymns. This best-selling album also features original compositions by members of the military band including the songs 'The Flag Still Flies High', 'They Died For You, They Died for Me', and 'Honor With Dignity'. This is a great patriotic collection with over two and a half hours of marches, concert band, choral, sing-a-long, and contemporary songs for all to enjoy!

The first disc in this two-CD set contains Sardinian composer Cristiano Porqueddu’s first three sonatas for solo guitar, written between 2013 and 2019 and performed here by his compatriot Riccardo D’Alò. ‘Des couleurs sur la toile’, in three movements, pays homage to the painter Gesuino Curreli, the composer’s maternal uncle, who paints landscapes of contemporary Oliena, a town in northern Sardinia. ‘Sonata di Picerno’ – completed in 2015 and dedicated to Italian guitarist Christian Saggese – is a musical portrait of the distinctive town of Picerno in the beautiful Basilicata region of Italy. All three of its movements narrate an entirely fictional leyenda (legend). Sonata No.3, ‘Il rito del fuoco’, is based on an ancient Sardinian legend that tells of Saint Anthony and his pig stealing fire from hell to give to humanity. It is a cyclical composition, which remains anchored in the harmonic and thematic elements introduced in the first section throughout.

The recordings on disc two – performed by Lorenzo Micheli Pucci, a guitarist from Piedmont in northern Italy – were written by Porqueddu between 2011 and 2020. Díptico de la oscuridad is a homage to Pablo Neruda’s poetic atmospheres and is dedicated to Italo-Australian guitarist Ermanno Brignolo. Metamórfosis de la soledad, dedicated to Italian guitarist Alberto Mesirca, stems directly from observing the artistic solitude glimpsed by the composer in artwork by Gastone Cecconello on a personal visit to his studio. It takes the form of a series of short movements based on Angelo Gilardino’s study ‘Soledad’ from his collection Studi di Virtuosità e di Trascendenza. These movements offer a prismatic vision of the material from the introduction to the study, heavily abridged to allow it to be used as a theme for a cycle of variations. In 2019 and 2020, Porqueddu’s figurative art studies led him to discover the wonderful ancient Chinese artwork Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a set of eight parchments dating from the Song Dynasty, approximately 1150 AD. Porqueddu wrote the solo Studies from Eight Views from Xiaoxiang while studying Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 21 Greeting Cards for guitar. They are built on clearly identifiable melodic sketches, and alternate between demanding technical skill and a capacity for introspection from the performer.

New, fun-filled arrangements—with historical authenticity on their side—bring bright and breezy curtain-raisers by a once-celebrated contemporary of Mozart to life.

In a career not much longer than Mozart’s, Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) wrote an astonishing total of 64 works for the stage—as well as substantial collections of symphonies, concertos, and sonatas—that were performed across the length and breadth of Europe.

Cimarosa specialized in lighthearted comedies, for which he supplied stylishly upbeat scores, shot through with Italianate lyricism, and a kind of impetuous vigor which was all his own. This quality makes his overtures particularly suitable for transcription to the kind of plucked-ensemble chamber versions heard on this enterprising new album. During the period after unification, the mandolin became a popular instrument much as the ukulele and the balalaika did elsewhere: relatively easy to learn, highly portable, and well suited to being played in ensemble as a kind of instrumental choir.

The Anedda Quintet have devised a unique synthesis of the two approaches, adding a strong bass component to the classic quartet line-up. This collection of Cimarosa is mainly comprised of modern arrangements by the composer Michele Di Filippo, who had already collaborated with the Anedda Quintet for a previous Brilliant Classics album of Rossini arrangements (95904). In adapting these orchestral scores, Di Filippo aimed to make the melodies sing out while preserving a sense of dialogue, tension, and drama between instruments.

The apogee of the French harpsichord came in the 18th century with the publication of the musical works of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, the two leading representatives of the French harpsichord school. These were followed by numerous livres de clavecin written by a new generation of composers such as Claude Balbastre, Pancrace Royer, Jacques Duphly, and Michel Corrette.

It is within this rococo-galant context, which marked the final glory days of the harpsichord, that we encounter the music of Jean-Baptiste Parant, a composer for whom only scant biographical details are known. Parant’s Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, published in 1762, contains 16 pieces written in the light and carefree rococo style, which makes them a true reflection of the music that would have been heard at this time in the salons of aristocrats and patrons such as the Prince de Conti and Monsieur de La Pouplinière or at the literary salons of Madame du Deffand, Julie Lespinasse, and Madame Geoffrin.

The titles of the pieces allude to persons from Parant’s circle, such as La Angôt and De la Bauve, or to places such as Passy (most probably a reference to the Château de Passy, the residence of the aforementioned important and very wealthy musical patron Alexandre de La Pouplinière) and Lyons (‘La Lionoise’). His sources of inspiration are also to be seen in such evocative titles as ‘Les Cascades’, ‘La Majestueuse’ or ‘La Pétulante’. Running throughout his music are the dances most commonly found in French suites, such as the menuet, rondeau, allemande, gavotte, and lourée.

Götterdämmerung ('Twilight of the Gods') is the final opera of Wagner’s epic tetralogy "Der Ring des Nibelungen" ('The Ring of the Nibelung') in which his visionary masterpiece reaches its cataclysmic conclusion. Betrayal and death, murder and remorse, lie at the opera’s heart, in a work that draws together every plot element in writing of blazing intensity. As the ring is restored to the Rhinemaidens, the age of the gods ends, with the opera offering the certainty of destruction but the consolation of renewal. Staged by the award-winning director Stefan Herheim, this innovative new production from Deutsche Oper Berlin features a leading international cast conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles. The release includes "Making Of" documentary featuring interviews with Stefan Herheim and Sir Donald Runnicles, and behind the scenes footage.

The Teatro La Fenice opened in 1792 and is one of the most renowned and most beautiful theaters in the world. Since nearly 20 years it has celebrated the traditional New Year‘s concert every year, which became immediately vast popularity in Italy and abroad making it one of the best-known and desired New Year's events. The orchestra of Teatro La Fenice, conducted by Daniel Harding, presents a colourful array of arias and orchestral pieces. As soloists soprano Federica Lombardi and tenor Freddie De Tommaso sing famous arias as Casta Diva and Nessun dorma among others from the operas Carmen, La traviata, La bohème, Turandot, William Tell and La clemenza di Tito. On top Jacopo Tissi, now principal of the Dutch National Ballet, is dancing a scene from Tchaikovsky´s ballet The Sleeping Beauty in this thrilling and exhilarating concert.

The three concertos featured on this album were composed together in 1782 / 83 – shortly after Mozart had left his patron and position in Salzburg to establish himself as a freelance composer and performer in Vienna. The concertos were all performed by the composer in a series of subscription concerts that he gave in the city. All share the same form – opening movement in sonata form, slow movement in ternary form, and a bright rondo finale. Despite these similarities, though, each piece has its own distinct character and identity; such was the extent of Mozart’s genius for invention. Although formally scored for strings with wind, horns, trumpets, and timpani, Mozart also offered them to his publisher to be performed ‘a quatro’ – for strings only. These would be the last concertos he wrote in which this would be possible, and it is certainly likely that it reflected a need to earn greater income as opposed to being a purely artistic decision. As in the rest of this series, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is joined by the Manchester Camerata and Gábor Takács-Nagy, who open the album with a dazzling performance of the Overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which dates from the same period.

The performers write: ‘Selecting the repertoire for our album Path to the Moon, we wanted to explore a number of possibilities for binding together a programme. To place different works alongside one another is a wonderful way of bringing out new and unusual qualities in each piece. William T. Horton’s fantastic image The Path to the Moon immediately inspired a flurry of ideas, including works on the subjects of both night and the moon, as well as pieces which invoke the exploratory nature of humankind’s voyage to the moon. Britten wrote his Sonata for Cello and Piano only two years after the first object made by humans had touched the surface of the moon, in 1959. Humans throughout history and from all cultures have been drawn to and taken inspiration from the moon and we have tried to reflect this in our eclectic choice of song repertoire: from Toru Takemitsu to Nina Simone and from Lili Boulanger to Florence Price. As we hope you will hear on this album, Walker’s Cello Sonata rings with echoes of the sound-worlds of blues and jazz and is infused with a beautiful lyricism. We really believe that Walker’s Cello Sonata deserves to become a staple of the chamber music repertoire and are absolutely thrilled to offer you a recording of it in the context of our own exploration of a path to the moon.’

From the outset of his career, Jean Sibelius was recognized as an outstanding representative of a musical language perceived as typically Finnish. In Finland, the dawn of the 20th century saw a veritable outbreak of nationally inspired artistic activities., It was a time of cultural and national self-discovery for Sibelius, too. He allowed himself be stimulated by the whole of Finland’s folklore tradition, without resorting to specific examples of folksong.

For many years, Carl Nielsen was viewed outside his native Denmark as the poor cousin of his more famous Scandinavian counterparts, Grieg and Sibelius. Yet his achievements as Denmark’s greatest symphonist of the 20th century were, if anything, even more remarkable than the successes of his geographical neighbors. Nielsen’s symphonic output is some of the most remarkable of its time.

The Norwegian conductor and composer Johann Svendsen was born in 1840 in Christiania (now Oslo). in 1867, he finished his Symphony No. 1, a work that Grieg later described as showing scintillating genius, superb national feeling and really brilliant handling of an orchestra. In 1872 Svendsen returned to Christiania beginning a fruitful period that saw the creation of his Symphony No. 2 in B flat major Op. 15.

Hugo Alfven's First Symphony (1897) has a melancholy Sturm und Drang mood that recurs at intervals in his later compositions, but there is also a life affirming side that flourished in his Second Symphony, two years later. Of his Third Symphony, he stated "it depicts neither concrete nor abstract. It is an expression of the joy of living, an expression of the sun-lit happiness that filled my whole being.”

Wilhelm Stenhammar's Symphony Op. 34  saw the light of day in 1907, dedicating it to “my dear friends, the members of the Goteborg Symphony Orchestra.” He was to remain its chief conductor until 1922. That symphony, which had its first performance under the composer’s direction in 1915, was in fact Stenhammar’s second and is today called Symphony No. 2, even if the composer himself never gave it that number.

Edvard Grieg’s Symphony in C minor, which the composer withdrew, saw scholar after scholar writing about it disparagingly, with much discussion of the its style, all too often based on the question: what are its unoriginal or unsuccessful features? But it was Grieg himself who began the tradition with his admonition that it “must never be performed”. Now, however, very few feel, on moral grounds, that the work should not be performed.

Duarte’s Partita was completed in 1974. It’s a substantial work in four movements, using all original material. As in the Variations on a Theme of Štepan Rak he adopts a four-note motif, which may be heard forwards, backwards, inverted and stretched. Variations on an Italian Folk Song Op. 139 was written in 2000. It draws on the second movement, “Canzona”, of Duarte’s prior Suite piemontese, which was based on a combination of two tunes: Il testamento dell’avvelenato and Re Gilardin. This gentle theme is characterised by simple movements of a step or a fourth. The six variations all begin with this stepwise movement but they quickly gain individual characters. Valse lyrique (2000) is one of the three short dances Duarte wrote late in his career. The second theme, clearly derived from the first, includes some hemiolas as well as combined harmonics and natural notes. The central section features the melody in the bass. Valse en rondeau was written in 1997 for the American guitarist David Starobin. Duarte stated: “I decided to make reference to my origin as a jazz musician and to my interest in early music (the Rondeau form) and to exercise my unshakeable belief in melody.” The origin of the Variations on a Theme of Štepan Rak Op. 100 is unique. In 1984, Rak was staying with Duarte when Vladimir Mikulka performed a lunchtime concert in London. At the end of the concert, Mikulka announced that he was going to perform an unusual encore – a theme, but without variations that had yet to be written. Afterwards he announced that Rak, Koshkin and Duarte should exchange themes with each other to create six new variation works, and he presented Duarte with Rak’s theme on a piece of manuscript paper. Andres Segovia, a supreme Anglophile, married his third wife in Gibraltar (“under the British flag, on Spanish soil”), and their son was born in London. Duarte’s 3 Songs without Words for Carlos Andres were a present to the happy couple. Danza eccentrica (2000) was dedicated to the Italian guitarist Domenico Lafasciano with the note, “Here is your dance. It may not be what you expected, but it’s what I’ve written – not another ‘cloned’ rumba, tango, waltz or whatever, but something with more individual character.” The unexpected aspects include dissonant harmonies, bass notes which move in ¾ against the treble in 6/8 and sections more reminiscent of a hurdy-gurdy. The Italian guitarist Angelo Gilardino wrote to Duarte about his Fantasia and Fugue on Torre Bermeja Op. 30: “…the melodic and rhythmic feeling is of the sort to easily produce the fascination of the public”. The Torre Bermeja in question is the piano piece by Isaac Albeniz, Op. 92 No. 12. Although it carries Op. 62 (1974) on its cover, the little Prelude en arpèges was written in 1954/5 and intended as the first movement of a Harp Suite Op. 18 that was never completed.

Gottlieb Muffat’s oeuvre, dedicated almost in its entirety to keyboard instruments and skilfully straddling the stile antico and stile moderno, deserves more detailed attention than it has ever been afforded. The majority of sources containing music by Muffat are unpublished, with only two collections published at the composer’s own behest during his years in the Emperor’s service in Vienna. One of these is the Componimenti Musicali per il Cembalo (Augsburg, 1739).

This collection contains 6 Suites and a Ciacona with 38 variations for solo harpsichord. The composer describes these seven works as capricci or galanterie to be performed in the stile moderno and to suit modern tastes. Although arranged in the conventional order of Allemande–Courante–Sarabande–Gigue, Muffat also added various optional dances, displaying no shortage of innovation. The first movements are introductory in nature, often fugal in form and varying in style and pace: Ouverture (Suites 1 and 5), Prelude (Suite 2) and Fantaisie (Suites 3, 4 and 6). The seventh piece in the collection, the Ciacona con 38 Variazioni, is a special case. As Christopher Hogwood suggests in his introduction to the modern edition (Orpheus, 2009), the Ciacona could be another tribute to the imperial family, as the number of variations matches the age Charles VI’s niece, Maria Amalia, would have been on 22 October 1739.

Muffat’s interest in contemporary harpsichord composition is most clearly evident in his transcription and reinterpretation of works by George Frideric Handel, based on a manuscript copy of the Suites des pièces pour le clavecin he held in his library. Muffat reworked the suites in Handel’s collection, suggesting new ornamentation, distributing the notes differently between the hands, changing the clefs and sometimes note values, and adding slurs and cadenzas. He then applied everything he had observed while rewriting Handel’s suites to his own Componimenti musicali: including a table of ornaments, which the composer asks be played with ‘art and discretion’; he considers the positioning of the player’s hands on the keyboard in his writing and avoids using multiple clefs on one line to prevent confusion; he describes the optimum way to use the thumb for accidentals; and he provides the correct technical interpretation of trills and slurs.

Study of the Componimenti reveals what could be defined as a pedagogical intent, as well as a clear desire to make the score unambiguous and accessible by means of his introductory instructions. The collection contributed greatly to setting a new benchmark for keyboard writing in the lands of the Viennese Empire.

The legendary pianist and conductor joins his clarinettist son and Italian musicians in music by one of Italy’s most powerfully individual living composers. Born in 1971, Francesco Antonioni studied in Rome with Azio Corghi and then in London with Julian Anderson and George Benjamin: a formidable pedigree of teachers testifying to the strength of both his technique and his creative voice, which became internationally known in 2001 with a string quartet written for the Venice Biennale. Since then, Antonioni has gone on to assemble a substantial catalogue of fastidiously crafted works for both the stage and the concert hall.

This collection features two pieces for string orchestra, Ballata and Sull’ombra, alongside his concerto for clarinet and viola, Lights after the Thaw. Premiered in 2009, Ballata arose from a commission of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, to be conducted by Benjamin, and takes its initial inspiration from an anonymous lullaby, and a ballad by the 14th-century composer Francesco Landini. These are songs about love, seen from two opposite points, near the beginning and the end of life, and their meeting-point in this modern Ballata is bittersweet and charged with tension.

The origins of Sull’Ombra are no less distinguished. Yuri Bashmet conducted the Moscow Soloists in the premiere in 2014. Antonioni found himself moved to write it by lines of John Donne, which themselves reminded him of poetry by Eugenio Montale. The shadows here are dark indeed, though always lit with imagination, and harmony that leads the listener on, just as the concertante Lights after the Thaw draws out the intrinsically songful character of both solo instruments, in search of a point of reference amid a pervasive melancholia. There is a refined ear for harmony and texture evident in all three works, which reward attentive listening by anyone interested in the music of today.

There is still much we do not know about the veritable mandolin-mania of late 18th-century Europe, particularly Vienna, which in that period was home to the three greatest musicians of the Classical period: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The instrument certainly enjoyed dazzling success in Viennese musical circles, embraced by the cultured aristocrats who resided in the Habsburg capital, and its meteoric rise was supported by some extraordinary virtuosos who helped promote its high-quality and fast-growing repertoire.
Giovanni Hoffmann’s refined chamber music featuring the mandolin was warmly received among the Viennese elite, making him one of the foremost figures behind the burgeoning mandolin repertoire of late 18th-century Vienna. Very little is known about his life; the Italianate first name alongside a clearly central-European surname adds to the mystery shrouding his birthplace and sphere of education.
Hoffmann was both a mandolin virtuoso and an esteemed composer. In 1799, the music merchant Johann Traeg advertised a list of the mandolin scores available to purchase from his shop on Vienna’s Singerstraße. It included a Trio for mandolin & bass by Hoffmann, and that same year, the composer released a further number of manuscript works through Traeg including his Quartets for mandolin, violin, viola & cello and
Serenatas for mandolin & viola. Hoffmann’s work is recorded again in Austria in the early decades of the 19th century, but – like his birth – the place and date of his death have not yet come to light. His music, however, lives on, a testament to his talent for composing delightful music in a Classical style evoking the fascinating gatherings of the Viennese literati.

Georges Migot (1891–1976) authored a vast oeuvre founded on two principles that in various ways pervade all of his work: a nationalist aesthetic and a link to the past. This emerges and is reinforced in repeated references to the French lutenists of old, as well as troubadours and trouveÌres, folk song and ancient monodic forms, particularly plainchant. Rather than limit himself to copying their external structure, however, Migot sought to extract the spirit, sensitivity, grace and sense of freedom from these historic forms, which he believed better suited the infinite nature of human sensitivity. Despite strong and professed ties to his contemporaries Faureì and Debussy, Migot cannot be placed in any school or branch of 20th-century music.

Pour un Hommage aÌ Claude Debussy (composed May 1924) coincided with the Paris debut of Andreìs Segovia and is dedicated to him. Migot composes lines with a modal flavour supported by rich and resonant arpeggiated chords, with densely packed notes providing a thorough exploration of all the instrument’s colours.

His four-movement Sonate pour guitare, two PreÌludes pour 2 guitares dedicated to the Argentinian Duo Pomponio-ZaÌrate, and a substantial and tricky Sonate pour 2 guitares date to the early 1960s. These pieces have a more clearly defined and linear style, and feature a profound musical idiom, brimming with emotion.

The three movements of the Sonate pour flu^te et guitare – dedicated to Brazilian guitarist Turíbio Santos – are stylistically similar to the above compositions. Migot gives both instruments various solo opportunities, and the two accompany each other, both during the more evanescent passages, where the writing is extremely sparse, and in more densely notated sections.

The 3 Chansons de joye et de souci originate in a cycle of 6 PoeÌmes setting Pierre Moussarie for voice and piano. They were arranged for voice and guitar in 1969 by the composer himself. In these, his final works for guitar, Migot provides us with a sample of his highly refined aesthetic, obtaining sounds not commonly heard on the instrument.

A beloved trio of Romantic violin sonatas in the passionate and assured hands of an exciting Italian violinist near the start of her career: an auspicious debut on Brilliant Classics.

Germana Porcu Morano has produced a gripping account of the three violin sonatas by Edvard Grieg in partnership with one of the great Italian musicians of his generation, Bruno Canino. The pianist brings decades of experience to bear on parts which, especially in the testing Third Sonata, demand a virtuosity beyond anything in the Lyric Pieces. Meanwhile Porcu Morano’s urgently communicative musicianship is well suited to works which exemplify the fascinating tension between Grieg’s musical nationalism and his cosmopolitan outlook as a composer with colleagues and friends across Europe.

There are Norwegian elements to all three sonatas – Grieg’s teacher, Niels W Gade, even pronounced his verdict on the Second as ‘too Norwegian’ – but in counterbalance to the folk-like melodies which especially bring a rustic character to both slow movements and finales, there is a breadth of form and broad current of German romanticism to be appreciated in the first movements. Grieg himself took particular pride in the Third, a work of full maturity written in 1886 unlike the student efforts of the first two sonatas, and Porcu Morano’s performance captures the composer’s sense of its ‘broader horizons’.

Winner of the 30th edition of Michelangelo Abbado violin competition held in Milan in 2009, Germana Porcu Morano studied in Bergamo, and has gone on to win several other national and international prizes. She has performed as a soloist and in chamber ensembles across Europe and in China. She is a member of the Paganini String Quartet, with plans afoot to record the complete quartets by Paganini.

This disc is a double tribute. The first work, Pictured Within, is a collective effort conceived as a major project to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins, whose reputation in new music and British music is beyond reproach.

Following the pattern of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Pictured Within is a series of 14 variations on a theme, each of which takes up the character of the equivalent variation in Elgar’s work, the difference being that here 14 different composers have each contributed a variation in tribute to Brabbins.

Also on the SACD is Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony, a fitting tribute to the composer, conductor, and violinist who passed away in 2022. Illness left Jaakko no time to complete his work, so it fell to his brother Pekka – who conducts here – and Jari Eskola to finish it. The result is a powerful piece, full of familiar themes and melodies derived from Jaakko’s existing compositions, to which are added autobiographical extra-musical elements. The moving conclusion is a collage of fragmented phrases inspired by the signals emitted by lighthouses and ships, as if Kuusisto’s spirit had been sent out to sea.

Robert Müller-Hartmann was born in Hamburg, in 1884, the son of the piano teacher and clarinettist Josef Müller and his wife, Jenny. He studied in Berlin for four years, but then returned to Hamburg where he pursued a successful career combining teaching, composing, and writing. His works were widely performed by conductors such as Karl Muck, Carl Schuricht, Richard Strauss, Otto Klemperer, and Fritz Busch, and regularly played on German Radio. With the advent of National Socialism, in 1933, Müller-Hartmann was forced to resign from his teaching posts at the University and Conservatory. He continued to teach at Hamburg’s Jewish girls’ school, and was an active contributor to the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Federation).

In the mid 1930s, Eugenia and Jacob (Yanya) Hornstein, Hamburg friends of the Müller-Hartmanns, moved to the town of Dorking, some twenty-five miles south of London, and in 1937 the Müller-Hartmanns followed them. The thirteen years Robert spent in England saw the country scarred by the losses, destruction, and privations of war. There was very little time or opportunity for him to secure a place in his adoptive country’s musical life, and despite his considerable success in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, his reputation had failed to cross the English Channel. A general antipathy to the inclusion of German musical exiles and his modest, rather retiring personality ensured that he would soon be forgotten.

Ida Presti was a remarkable musician whose extraordinary talent and virtuosity on the guitar left an indelible mark on the world of classical music. Her untimely death at 43 in 1967 left a void in the world of classical guitar and robbed the music community of a true virtuoso. However, her legacy lives on through her recordings, compositions and the inspiration she continues to provide to aspiring guitarists. Today, Ida Presti is celebrated as one of the most influential and accomplished guitarists of the 20th century. Her profound musicality, technical brilliance, and innovative interpretations continue to captivate audiences and inspire guitarists worldwide. She pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible on the instrument, leaving an indelible mark on the history of classical guitar.

This substantial set dedicated to the vocal music of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) features the great cycle undertaken (to date) by Krijn Koetsveld and the singers of Le Nuove Musiche: all nine books of madrigals, the music in Monteverdi collections such as the Selva Morale e Spirituale (1641), the posthumous Messa a quattro voci ed salmi (1650), and the individual works by Monteverdi compiled in the collections of others, the so-called Fragments. To this is joined the cycle of operas directed by Sergio Vartolo and sung by casts of Italian early music specialists, including the first recording of the five-act version of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.

These thoroughly researched, historically informed interpretations demonstrate Monteverdi’s pioneering and transformative role in the emergence and development of staged, dramatic vocal music. Also featured are the grand Vespers – sacred music in the Gregorian plainchant tradition but on an operatic scale – in a fantastic recording with fine Italian soloists and authentic period instruments including the early brass of La Pifarescha. Federico Bardazzi and Ensemble Felice make scrupulous interpretative decisions about the order of movements, interpolating the choral motets within the prescribed sequence of psalms to great effect. Finally, there are Monteverdi’s youthful three-part canzonettas, written when the composer was 17. They are rather simpler than the madrigals, both to sing and to appreciate, but their musical worth is amply demonstrated by the largely female voices of Armoniosoincanto joined by a mixed period-instrument ensemble of flutes, violas, theorbo and harpsichord. They impart just the right light-hearted mood and dramatic impact to the playful, folkloric secular strophic poetry.

CONTENTS:

• Monteverdi: Il primo libro de madrigali, 1587
• Monteverdi: Il secondo libro de madrigali, 1590
• Monteverdi: Il terzo libro de madrigali, 1592
• Monteverdi: Il quarto libro de madrigali, 1603
• Monteverdi: Il quinto libro de madrigali, 1605
• Monteverdi: Il sesto libro de madrigali, 1614
• Monteverdi: Il settimo libro de madrigali, 1619 'Concerto'
• Monteverdi: Il ottavo libro de madrigali, 1638 'Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi'
• Monteverdi: Il nono libro de madrigali, 1651
• Monteverdi: O ciechi il tanto affaticar, SV 252
• Monteverdi: Voi ch'ascoltate
• Monteverdi: È questa vita un lampo
• Monteverdi: Spuntava il dì, SV 255
• Monteverdi: Chi vol che m’innamori
• Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi III alla francese, SV267
• Monteverdi: Gloria a 7, SV 258
• Monteverdi: Crucifixus, SV 259
• Monteverdi: Pianto della Madonna 'Iam moriar, mi fili' (sopra il Lamento dell'Arianna), SV 288
• Monteverdi: Et resurrexit, a quattro
• Monteverdi: Et iterum
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum in sancta Eius
• Monteverdi: Salve Regina, SV 285
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum
• Monteverdi: Beatus vir (from Selva Morale e Spirituali)
• Monteverdi: Sanctorum meritis (Primo)
• Monteverdi: Dixit [Dominus] Primo
• Monteverdi: Ab aeternum, SV 262
• Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi Domine, SV266
• Monteverdi: Memento Domine David
• Monteverdi: Laudate pueri Primo
• Monteverdi: Salve Regina, SV 284
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum omnes gentes II
• Monteverdi: Magnificat Primo
• Monteverdi: Gloria (1641)
• Monteverdi: Dixit Dominus secondo a8 SV 192
• Monteverdi: Deus tuorum militum sors et corona
• Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi, Domine
• Monteverdi: Iste confessor
• Monteverdi: Beatus vir (second setting)
• Monteverdi: Ut queant laxis, hymnus sancti Joannis
• Monteverdi: Laudate pueri (Secondo)
• Monteverdi: Deus tuorum militum sors et corona
• Monteverdi: Credidi propter quod locutus sum, SV 275
• Monteverdi: Jubilet a voce sola in dialogo
• Monteverdi: Magnificat (Secondo)
• Monteverdi: Salve Regina
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum
• Monteverdi: Canzonette
• Monteverdi: Vespro della beata Vergine (1610)
• Monteverdi: Cantate Domino
• Monteverdi: O beatae viae
• Monteverdi: Currite populi
• Monteverdi: Ego flos campi
• Monteverdi: Venite, venite
• Monteverdi: Christe, adoramus te
• Monteverdi: O quam pulchra es
• Monteverdi: Salve Regina
• Monteverdi: Fuge, anima mea
• Monteverdi: Sancta Maria
• Monteverdi: Domine, ne il furore
• Monteverdi: Ego dormio
• Monteverdi: Ecce sacrum paratum
• Monteverdi: Salve Regina
• Monteverdi: O bone Jesu, o piissime Jesu
• Monteverdi: En gratulemur hodie, SV 302
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum omnes gentes
• Monteverdi: Adoramus te, Christe
• Monteverdi: Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)
• Monteverdi: Dixit [Dominus] Primo
• Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi, Domine
• Monteverdi: Nisi Dominus a 6, SV201
• Monteverdi: Laudate pueri
• Monteverdi: Laetatus sum
• Monteverdi: Lauda Jerusalem a 3, SV202
• Monteverdi: Beatus vir (from Selva Morale e Spirituali)
• Monteverdi: Magnificat Primo
• Monteverdi: Missa 'In illo tempore' (1610)
• Monteverdi: Dixit Dominus II
• Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi Domine II, SV194
• Monteverdi: Nisi Dominus a 6, SV201
• Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum, SV197a
• Monteverdi: Laetatus sum
• Monteverdi: Laetaniae della Beata Vergine a 6 voci
• Monteverdi: Lauda Jerusalem a 5, SV203
• Monteverdi: L'Orfeo
• Monteverdi: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
• Monteverdi: L'incoronazione di Poppea

Pavans and galliards by the Elizabethan master of melancholy, complemented by a new recording of Benjamin Britten’s magnificent Nocturnal inspired by both Dowland’s music and by the playing of Julian Bream. After the success of ‘The Golden Age of the Guitar in Europe’ (2CD, 96157), Brilliant Classics releases a second album by the French guitarist Pascal Boëls, a unique collection of music by 17th and 20th-century English masters. In a booklet introduction, the guitarist explains how he sees Dowland as ‘a universal genius, eternal wanderer who – already! – knew how to rub shoulders with all facets of the human soul.’ Pascal Boëls plays a personal selection of Dowland’s piece originally written for solo lute, pieces which embody a spirit of introversion such as the ‘Forlorn Hope’ Fancy and the ‘Lachrymae’ Pavan which became famous across Europe, much imitated and adapted by other composers of the day.

Lightening the mood are also the kind of courtly dances and romances which delighted the composer’s aristocratic patrons such as the Earl of Essex and King Christian of Denmark. The English guitarist Julian Bream played Dowland’s pieces on the guitar from an early stage of his career, and made a best-selling album of them for RCA. It was this antique palette of gentle, musing expression that inspired Benjamin Britten to write a Nocturnal for guitar which builds as a sequence of eight variations towards (rather than away from) the Dowland song on which they are based. The resulting work, according to Bream, was the greatest solo work ever written for guitar, exploring a slippage between wakeful and dream states with a subtle ambiguity between major and minor harmonies and a language that bridges the divide between the 17th and 20th centuries.

Paganini was the first great ‘star’ of instrumental music, the precursor of the rock stars of today, able to induce collective hysteria as well as to dictate fashion and to influence the behaviour of entire generations. He did this by transforming the violin into an orchestra of multiple voices and timbral experimentation, in other words, stretching the very limits of what a single instrument could do.

This programme is particularly interesting, both for the quality of the performances as well as the new chamber-string versions created by Francesco Fiore and Salvatore Lombardo. It also juxtaposes extremely popular Paganini works alongside compositions not very often heard in the concert hall but which help flesh out our understanding of the artistry of a composer too often misjudged as merely an acrobat of the violin. In four of Paganini’s best-known compositions – the ‘Campanella’ (Bell) movement from the Violin Concerto No.2, the Moses Fantasy, the Witches’ Dance and the Cantabile – the solo violin is here accompanied by a string quintet. In the first three, the string quintet stands in for the orchestra with a consequent lightening of accompaniment. In the Cantabile, the original of which was for violin and piano (Paganini’s only piece to be accompanied by keyboard rather than guitar), the ‘heavier’ quintet accompaniment still manages to retain a discreet sense of enjoyable sophistication.

The next two works, Nos. 6 and 3 of the 6 Sonatas Op.3 for violin and guitar, are presented here in transcriptions for two or three violins. These two sonatas, written in the salon style typical of the age, delight the listener with the conversational nature of the violin writing. Finally come three compositions in their original versions, providing an excursion into a lesser-known, but still very interesting, area of Paganini’s chamber output. The three Duetti concertanti for violin and cello were written for the enjoyment of amateur players, each comprising two movements

This album features Christmas music for the piano in a timeless journey through the decades and centuries. These songs have been through a remarkable evolution over the course of several centuries, with the changes they have undergone reflecting the shifting musical styles and cultural influences that prevailed in various times.

Guido Santorsóla (1904–1994) began his musical studies at the age of five, taught by his father, a sculptor, trumpeter and double bassist who moved from Southern Italy to São Paulo, Brazil in 1909, with the rest of the family joining him the following year. He enrolled at the São Paulo Conservatory of Music, then travelled to Naples to hone his violin technique and later London, where he studied at the Trinity College of Music under Alfred Mistowsky. His eventual return to Brazil coincided with a visit from Pietro Mascagni.

At a concert in the great composer’s honour Santorsóla, accompanied at the piano by Mascagni himself, performed his own compositions for violin and piano for the first time. Santórsola’s final compositional period began at the age of 58, in 1962. He devised a very personal 12-tone technique free from conventional rules, and not to be confused with Schoenberg’s. His language is rooted in the golden age of Florentine counterpoint through to Bach. The novel instrument used on this recording – the gran violino a 5 corde (great five-string violin) – originated from an idea by violinist Mauro Tortorelli, who commissioned the luthiers Vincenzo and Marco Corrado – based in Montegiordano, in southern Italy – to build a special instrument covering both the violin and viola registers by adding the viola’s low C string to the usual four of the violin. This ingenious solution allows the performer to switch between violin and viola repertoire on the same instrument.

The Sonata for violin and piano, composed in São Paulo in 1928, undoubtedly belongs to Santórsola’s early compositional period. Divided into three movements – Con sofferenza, Andante espressivo, Deciso – it is based on classical sonata form but with typically post-romantic expressive, passionate themes, enriched with original South America-inspired harmonies. Saudade, a nostalgic piece for violin and piano dedicated to Santórsola’s mother, was composed in 1931. The violin has a binary rhythm in 2/2, while the piano plays groups of five notes in 10/8, the two overlapping to create a sort of atmosphere of unresolved suspense, evoking a feeling of pleasant melancholy in the listener.

Choro No.2 for violin and piano, composed in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1952, is a bright and highly rhythmic piece in Brazilian style that belongs to Santórsola’s middle compositional period. The Danza brasileira and Canção triste, both composed in 1934, written in an ABA lieder form and scored for violin or viola and piano, also belong to the composer’s middle period. Valsa chorosa for piano, written in Montevideo in 1971, and therefore dating from Santórsola’s final compositional period, clearly recalls his first period in the nostalgic way it is written.

The Amsterdam-based recorder quintet has done it again: an original concept, featuring several first recordings, and superb performances which confirm them among the top-tier of today’s early-music chamber ensembles. The present album arises from a concert devised in 2018 for a festival in Bruges celebrating notable female figures from history.

Seldom Sene chose to focus on Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), who was governor of the Habsburg Netherlands for almost 20 years. Margaret had grown up with the benefits of a first-class education afforded to very few of her female peers: she was adept in all the humanities, and her library of books was reckoned one of the most extensive and learned at the time, a fit place to welcome distinguished guests such as Albrecht Dürer. From around 1515, one of the volumes in Margaret’s library was her newly commissioned personal songbook: a collection of 55 chansons and motets, richly decorated with high-quality miniatures and initials.

Many of the song texts speak of loss, sorrow and loneliness, perhaps reflecting her status at the time as a noble widow, following the death of her second husband, Philibert II of Savoy, in 1504. Margaret herself seems to have written several of them, and may also have been involved in their musical setting. Marian devotion is another theme of the songbook reflected in this selection made and transcribed and recorded by Seldom Sene. Sacred hymns are balanced out by secular laments, but also lighter and more cheerful numbers such as ‘Brunette m’amiette‘ and ‘La jonne dame’. Many of the composers are now lost to us and effectively anonymous, but the names that survive are worthy of Margaret’s elevated status, including Josquin and Pierre de la Rue.

‘Like Margaret,’ concludes María Martínez Ayerza in her booklet note, ‘like her courtiers and visitors, we see and hear the music and texts in this songbook and we are moved, stirred. These artworks make us change, as we relate the texts, even the titles, and the rather abstract beauty of the music to ourselves.’ Ayerza and her colleagues in Seldom Sene bring this music and Margaret’s world back to life with intense sympathy. The album is sure to receive the glowing reviews accorded to the group’s discography on Brilliant Classics. ‘Commitment, technical versatility, unanimity of ensemble and near-immaculate tuning on display.’ (Gramophone) ‘An excellent release from an ensemble I hope we’ll hear a lot more from in the future.’ (Fanfare)