American organist James D. Hicks continues his exploration and rediscovery of pipe organ literature from Nordic nations with Volume 16 in his Nordic Journey series, sub-titled "Germanic Connections." Recorded in the Pauluskirche of Ulm, Germany.

This is an album featuring seven works for string orchestra by Philadelphia-Area composers; all are new commissions. These would be major composers, wherever they were based. This is absolutely first-rate new music for string orchestra.

Greek violinist and composer Dinos Constantinides was based at LSU in the U.S. for many years, prior to his death in 2021. He began as a violinist, but became a note composer many years ago. This album features some of his violin compositions performed on his own instrument.

2024 Centenary of his death - Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924)

Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet in C minor was one of the first of its genre in France, composed as part of the ‘Ars Gallica’ idea of strengthening French music against German cultural domination. Fauré didn’t entirely escape the influence of Brahms however, and both he and his pupil George Enescu share a spiritual closeness to German late Romanticism in the melancholy complexity of expression in these chamber masterpieces. The monumental first movement of Enescu’s First Piano Quartet contrasts with the rhythmic momentum of the last, in a work that integrates French impressionism with the unmistakable folk music characteristics of his native Romania.

Howard Skempton is recognized as one of the UK’s most renowned and respected living composers. Although particularly influenced by Benjamin Britten (with whom he worked), John Cage, and Cornelius Cardew, Skempton’s music inhabits its own unique sound world. His major new work, 50 Preludes and Fugues for Organ (written 2022-23), is given its world premiere recording by Matthew Owens on two of the finest organs in the UK, St George’s Church, Hanover Square, London, and Merton College, Oxford. Inspired by J.S. Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues, Skempton takes us on a contemporary journey in his own inimitable style and pays homage to Bach through two extra pairs of Preludes and Fugues. Additional works on this album include the composer’s earliest organ work, Wedding March (1971), and his latest, Recessional 2, written especially for this recording.

Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano bring their attention to a fascinating and highly rewarding 17th-century Italian composer, Alessandro Stradella, principally celebrated today for his oratorios and operas. This album presents five of his seventeen motets, deposited in the Bibliothèque Estense in Modena at the end of the seventeenth century. These are, for the most part, world premieres.

Rinaldo Alessandrini gathered together motets that are mainly relevant to the cult of the Virgin Mary, written for specific circumstances such as the Nativity, or the Immaculate Conception, or for more generic feasts, on texts chosen for each occasion, including one by Stradella himself (Exultate in Deo fideles).

REVIEW:

As with so much of Stradella’s extraordinarily prolific output, none of the pieces on this new album (with one exception) has been previously recorded. This judicious selection of works drawn from three manuscripts of unknown provenance demonstrates the extraordinary variety of styles and approaches of which the composer was capable at his most impressive.

— Gramophone

Widely recognised as the leading Welsh composer of his generation, Huw Watkins is an increasingly prolific writer of works for chamber ensembles, alongside his distinguished career as a pianist. Composed between 2009 and 2022, the five works featured on this disc take the listener on a fascinating journey through Watkins’s recent musical evolution. The acclaimed Leonore Piano Trio begin with the earliest of these works – the 2009 Piano Trio No. 1 – whilst conductor George Vass’s Orchestra Nova brings us the Little Symphony for strings and exquisite Concertino for violin and strings, performed here by trio violinist Benjamin Nabarro. The trio is joined by violist Rachel Roberts for Watkins’ luminous Piano Quartet, while the programme concludes with the 2022 Piano Trio No. 2 – written for the fortieth anniversary of the Presteigne Festival and premiered there by the Leonore Piano Trio.

Poulenc the miniaturist par excellence burst into public view, fully-formed in his late teens, emerging flamboyantly into the artistic swirl of 1920s Paris. His fabulously inventive, quirky and colourful approach to writing for chamber ensemble and voice comes vividly to life in this set of early works which capture all of his youthful elegance, wit, and occasionally sardonic humour. Many of these early masterpieces are now well-known in their incarnations for piano; but his sheer inventiveness and joyful revelry in a kaleidoscopic riot of instrumental colour is celebrated here in the earliest versions of such classics as Le Bestiaire and Cocardes, alongside masterpieces more cruelly treated by his contemporaries, the Quatre Poemes de Max Jacob and Le Gendarme Incompris.

We find ourselves in a crucial year, 1849. At that time, the Schumanns opted for a rural retreat due to the tension in Dresden, where they resided at that moment—a city that was the center of notable revolutionary episodes during the uprising that occurred there, with its epicenter in May of that year. Precisely in that fruitful year, Robert Schumann tackled several chamber works that seem to be written in a relaxed atmosphere, in a very short time, without excessive formal nor constructive ambition, but with the stamp of his high melodic and harmonic inspiration. There is a certain common denominator among them, which we could call a certain lack of instrumental definition - pieces for oboe and piano, or for horn and piano, or for clarinet and piano - but in which the “melodic” role, as indicated in the score, can be transferred to other instruments with similar “singable” capacity, either to the same woodwind family or even to the string family (violin, cello). In short, it’s about “singing without text”; they are authentic “songs without words.”

Yuting Liu, flute, and Qiaochu LI, piano beautifully perform three major sonatas for flute and piano: Yuko Uebayashi: Sonata for Flute and Piano, Lowell Lieberman: Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op. 23, and Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata in D Major, Op. 94.

For their fourth release with BIS, the United Strings of Europe with their director Julian Azkoul present another innovative programme, dedicated this time to the night, a source of wonder and fascination, rich with metaphorical associations. The ensemble’s varied, tailor-made programme features counterpoint, aching dissonance and chromaticism from across a range of styles spanning nearly 500 years, from the Renaissance to the present day.

The album is built around two post-romantic masterpieces: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (here in an arrangement by Éric Mouret), a work composed during the final months of the Second World War that evokes destruction, mourning, nostalgia, but also hope for progress and transformation, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, which, in a nocturnal dialogue between a man and a woman, shows the power of love that can overcome the greatest challenges. These two major works are joined by arrangements for strings of vocal pieces by Maddelena Casulana, Carlo Gesualdo and Henry Purcell, as well as a new work by Daniel Kidane, Be Still, featuring percussionist Beibei Wang, a reflection on recent years marked by lockdowns during which everyday markers, such as meeting with friends and family, travelling or attending concerts vanished.

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!

In 1914, Franz Schmidt staged his opera Notre Dame at the Vienna State Opera to great acclaim. Immediately afterwards, he was looking for new material for another project and came across the novel Fredigundis by Felix Dahn, which is loosely based on historical events from the 6th century. From 1916 to 1921, Schmidt worked on his project, which was premiered in Berlin in December 1922. Franz Schmidt's music for Fredigundis marks the end of a development that runs through the so-called “classic Romantic” period. The work is characterized by numerous chromaticisms and an expansion of the major-minor system in the music that pushes the boundaries of tonality, as well as dense counterpoint and perfect compositional artistry in the vocal parts.

The dramatic mezzo-soprano Dunja Vejzovic, who got famous for her Wagner roles in Bayreuth and Salzburg, performed on all major opera and concert stages of the world. The excellent set of singers in this performance is supported by the Austrian conductor Ernst Märzendorfer, who mastered several instruments and also composed piano concertos, incidental music and a ballet. On this recording, he conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has established itself as an opera orchestra through its continuously successful collaboration with the MusikTheater an der Wien.

The flute concertos by Jacques Ibert, Andre Jolivet and Joaquin Rodrigo together embody a distinctive musical heritage written for the flute in the twentieth century, exploring the instrument's limits. These works are now heard together for the first time on one album. Flautist Sami Junnonen is joined by the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra under the direction of conductor James S. Kahane. The album features Ibert's 'Concerto for flute and orchestra', which is now considered to be one of the most esteemed concertos in the flute repertoire; Jolivet's virtuosic and rarely-recorded 'Concerto for flute and string orchestra'; and Rodrigo's 'Concierto pastoral for flute and orchestra', which has gained a formidable reputation among flautists for it's exceptional technical requirements.

According to the thoroughly credible words of his contemporaries, Johannes Bernardus van Bree, the long-time musical director of the Felix Meritis Society of Amsterdam, was not only an extremely talented violinist and composer. He was also, to the delight of those around him, a very pleasant, flexible character who strove all his life to please others. This made him shy away from tormenting the conservative capital of the Netherlands with avant-garde provocations. However, it did not stop him from skilfully and sensitively composing unusually appealing works in the conventional vocabulary of the early Romantic years. His highly dramatic overture in the "unfinished" key of B Minor and his original Symphonic Fantasy, which is a mere stone's throw away from Robert Schumann, are particularly surprising.

The Athens State Orchestra, the oldest symphonic ensemble in Greece, pays tribute on it's new GENUIN release to one of the country's most significant 20th-century composers: Yorgo Sicilianos. The program presents large-scale, dramatically charged orchestral works spanning three decades: Sicilianos' Symphony No. 2, dedicated to the memory of the great Dmitri Mitropoulos; "Antiphona" for brass, strings, and timpani; and the symphonic poem "Daimon", inspired by Thomas Mann's seminal novel Dr. Faustus. With Ilias Voudouris - a central figure in Greek musical life - on the podium, the orchestra brings Sicilianos' colourful and intricately crafted sound world vividly to life, with passion and striking attention to detail.

This album features major works by Mozart, Clementi, and Haydn, arranged for and played by virtuoso accordionist William Popp.

The Rautio Piano Trio returns to Resonus with this second volume of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, recorded on period instruments. The album features his Op. 11 trio – ‘Gassenhauer’ – together with his Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 3, showcasing the young composer’s early mastery of the genre; and his virtuosic Variations for Piano Trio Op. 44. This is the culmination of the Trio’s wider project charting the evolution of the piano trio from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century, with the music of J.C. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, through to Beethoven’s complex and mature realization of the genre.

Two years after her recording of Mozart's piano concertos KV 271 and KV 459, Olga Pashchenko returns to the Il Gardellino ensemble for the concertos KV 466 and KV 488. KV 466 is in D minor, a key that Mozart often uses to express the anger of his female characters in his operas. KV 488 was composed a year later in 1786 and is in the luminous key of A major, although without losing any of the theatrical dynamism of KV 466. They represent an almost dramatic, pre-Romantic theatricality for Nicolas Derny, who sees these concertos as the precursors of two of Mozart's greatest masterpieces: the Requiem and Le nozze di Figaro. Olga Pashchenko here plays a replica of an Anton Walter fortepiano (ca. 1792) built by Paul McNulty.

Richard Strauss is considered to be both the last 'Classical' composer and a champion of modernity. His wide-ranging output stands as a monument to one of the most successful and influential composers of the 20th century. His spirited and compact First Horn Concerto was the product of his teenage years, while the Second Horn Concerto came six decades later, echoing the expressively lyrical and dynamic character of it's youthful predecessor. Both of these concertos share the chamber orchestra character of the Four Last Songs in it's arrangement by Eberhard Klokes. The Andante in C major and Alphorn in E flat major, originally composed with piano accompaniment, are heard here in arrangements with chamber orchestra by Lars Opfermann.

With this latest volume in their ongoing cycle, recorded in 2023, the Quartetto Nous passes the halfway mark of Shostakovich's 15 quartets. The previous instalments have been recognised and praised for their full-blooded intensity and uncompromising address to the detail of these absorbing scores. The present album returns almost to the start of Shostakovich's quartet cycle, with a piece which he claimed (perhaps as a joke) he had originally written as his Second Quartet, before adding a piano part to make it a Piano Quintet with which he could tour and earn much-needed income. At any rate, the Piano Quintet took shape in 1940 and soon became one of his most popular pieces of chamber music: less radical in form and harmony than most of his quartet writing, more extrovert in mood, and more approachable. The Second Quartet proper was composed in 1944, soon after the Leningrad Symphony which had won the composer international celebrity. Yet the two works exemplify the contrast in style between Shostakovich's 'public' and 'private' works. The Waltz of the Second Quartet is one of the most extraordinary examples of his ability to transform instrumental writing into a kind of nightmare factory. Having begun in a determined A major, the Quartet closes in a much more equivocal minor. The Fourth Quartet of 1949 likewise sets out in an almost folksy D major, working in elements of Yiddish melodies, and it's skies gradually cloud over during the four movements, until the sadness of the second movement and the vitality of the third fuse to produce the violent, wailing and screaming tones of a danse macabre in the complex finale. By the time of the Sixth Quartet, written in 1955, Shostakovich had become a practised exponent of double-edged rhetoric, of music which wears a happy face while twisting it's hands in anxiety or even agony. The serene light of G major bathes the initial Allegretto, but there are signs of grief, perhaps occasioned by the recent death of his wife Nina, scattered throughout the composition. The Quartetto Nous (from the Greek: intellect, mind, but also inspiration, creative capacity), has established itself among the most interesting musical Italian ensembles of it's generation, giving captivating interpretations in which the Italian tradition of string-playing merges with other significant European schools such as the Musik Akademie in Basel (where they studied with Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartett), and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena (Gunter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartett). Winner, among other awards, of the Farulli Prize in the Abbiati competition, the most prestigious award of Italian music criticism, the Quartetto Nous demonstrate their individual approach to music spanning the quartet repertoire, and in ambitious contexts such as playing from memory and totally in the dark. - The new installment of the complete String Quartets by Shostakovich played by Quartetto Nous brings together the quartets 2, 4 and 6, as well as the impressive and moving piano quintet. - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is without doubt one of the most famous and influential composers of 20th century Russia. He lived in a time of Soviet repression and, though outwardly a loyal communist, he resented the restrictions imposed by the regime on his creativity. This led to a fascinating duality between conformism and the expression of his most innermost feelings, fears and anger. - Shostakovich's 15 String Quartets form an impressive body which follows the development of his style throughout his life. They are the testimony of a tortured soul struggling to remain true to himself, expressed in anguish and bleakness, but also in serenity and bliss. - Quartetto Nous, formed in 2011, has established itself in a short time as one of the most interesting chamber music ensembles of it's generation. It's immersive performances are the result of a professional training where the Italian tradition and the most influential European schools are combined. The quartet studied with the Quartetto di Cremona at the Accademia Walter Stauffer in Cremona, at the Basel Musik Akademie with Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartet), at the Escuela Superior de M�sica 'Reina Sofia' in Madrid and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena with Gunter Pichler (Alban Berg Quartet) and at the Lubeck Musikhochschule with Heime Muller (Artemis Quartet). - The first volume of the Shostakovich Quartets by Quartetto Nous for Brilliant Classics was hailed enthusiastically by the press. Musicweb writes:" This is one of the best as it left me in awe of the breadth as well as the intensity of Shostakovich's genius, RECORDING OF THE MONTH".

Following the first volume in this series, which charted Franz Schreker's developmental path up to the success of his dance-pantomime�Der Geburtstag der Infantin�(The Birthday of the Infanta; 777 702-2), this second album focuses primarily on the triumphant years that followed the premiere of his opera�Der ferne Klang�(The Distant Sound) in 1912. The�Vorspiel zu einem Drama (Prelude to a Drama) from 1914 and the�Chamber Symphony, composed in 1916, are among the gems of musical Jugendstil (Art Nouveau). Originating as offshoots of contemporary stage projects, these two captivating works display a mastery of sound, harmony, and melody that was unparalleled at the time. The�Four Small Pieces for Large Orchestra�(1931), which separate these older "siblings" on this recording, speak in a new language. These abstract contributions to film music, presented as a compact and multifaceted concert suite, hint at powerful new directions - plans that, sadly, Franz Schreker could never fully realize.

The Athens State Orchestra is the oldest symphony orchestra in Greece. On the occasion of Mikis Theodorakis' 100th birthday, GENUIN evokes the spirits of his homeland and of classical antiquity in three symphonic works by Greece's most famous composer-works that played an important role toward the end of his life: from the early "Sinfonietta" in a new version, through the folk-inspired "Rhapsody for Guitar and Orchestra," to the equally moving nine-part "Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra," Theodorakis's last orchestral work. The young, rising Kornilios Michailidis leads Greece's premier orchestra with verve, while the album's soloists contribute at the highest standard of playing to these remarkable recordings!

This is another in the series of recordings of the works of contemporary American composer David Loeb. Like many of his compositions, the works here include both the usual instruments, as well as, in this case, shinobue and Khaen.

In 1907, Florent Schmitt composed music to accompany a ‘mimodrame’ danced by Loïe Fuller, La Tragédie de Salomé. His score is bursting with colour, energy, and voluptuousness – and also with oriental influences stemming from his travels to Morocco and Constantinople, where he discovered the howling dervishes. The final scene features the heart-rending ‘Chant d’Aïça’, an oriental melody sung by a soprano. This music, though bold and modern for the listeners of 1907, nonetheless aroused the admiration of another composer, Igor Stravinsky, to whom Schmitt dedicated the Symphonic Suite he subsequently derived from the work. However, Alain Altinoglu, at the helm of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra of which he has been Music Director since 2021, has chosen to record the original version of this landmark of early twentieth-century French music. The beautiful Chant élégiaque, in its 1911 version for cello and large orchestra, completes this programme.