Born in Sussex in 1877, Roger Quilter was a fellow-student of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, and H. Balfour Gardiner at the Hoch Conservatory, in Frankfurt, where he studied for almost five years under the guidance of the German professor of composition Iwan Knorr. He is best known for his contribution to English art song, having composed around 150 songs, many of which remain regular recital favourites. For this album, the tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook explore his output from early works such as 'Now sleeps the crimson petal' through to late examples such as 'The Ash Grove'. All of the songs are settings of English texts, with the exception of the Four Songs of Mirza Schaffy, which set German texts by Friedrich von Bodenstedt. The musicians have arranged their selection of twenty-seven songs into thematic groups - Shakespeare songs, songs about flowers, folksongs, songs of love etc. - which makes for a fascinating and rewarding programme.

Johann Wilhelm Hertel is one of the
lesser-known composers of the late
baroque and early classical era. Born in
Eisenach in 1727, as a young man he
travelled to the north of Germany with
his father, who was a viola da gamba
virtuoso engaged as a Kapellmeister at
the court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Already
as a young man Johann Wilhelm showed
a remarkable talent for music. He
excelled on the harpsichord and violin,
but his father wanted him to additionally
study law. However, a trip to Berlin and
contact with Berlin court musicians Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach and Franz Benda
pushed the young Johann Wilhelm to
devote his life primarily to music. In
particular he studied the harpsichord with
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the violin with
Franz Benda and composition with Karl
Heinrich Graun. He spent his life in the
service of the Mecklenburg-Strelitz and
-Schwerin courts, and he was also music
director in Stralsund. It was during this time
that he had many opportunities to meet
authorities from both the musical and
scientific worlds.
His oboes concertos are exemplary
compositions of these times. The autographs,
which are preserved in the Library of the
Royal Conservatoire of Brussels (Sig. No. B-Bc5562 and B-Bc-5563), together contain 10
oboe concertos in various keys. Nine of them
are collected (and numbered by librarians) in
Sig. No. B-Bc-5562 ,and one is separately
placed as B-Bc-5563. As there is no catalogue
of Hertel’s works, the numbers given for the
concertos are taken from the manuscript Sig.
No. B-Bc-5562. Some of the pieces are dated
1749 (Concertos Nos. 3 and 9) and others
1756 (Concerto No.2). All the concertos were
prepared for this recording by Katarzyna
Pilipiuk, copying with a focus on accuracy;
only minor mistakes were corrected so as to
give the most faithful transmission of the
composer’s ideas. The material is very clear,
with all the pieces noted by the composer in
score form. All of them have signs of stylistic
inspiration from the works of Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach, in particular Concerto No.5,
which is an excellent work in the
Empfindsamer Stil.
Other information:
● Recorded March 2023 in Kraków, Poland
● Pilipiuk plays a Baroque oboe by Randall
Cook (2019), after Jonathan Bradbury (c.1720)
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by the
artist, and biographies of her and of the
ensemble

I was less interested in God and religious ceremonies than in singing of unrivalled beauty. What Sergei Rachmaninoff later said about his early childhood contact with the Orthodox liturgy and it's rituals also applied to his later life as a composer. Singing plays a central role in the Russian Orthodox rite: almost the entire service is sung, instruments are not permitted and only the word should take centre stage. This mystical a cappella singing is characterised by it's Byzantine tonal system based on eight notes and it's strong bass foundation. In combination with the peculiar language of the special Church Slavonic, the result is an archaic, exotic and fascinating world of sound, which Rachmaninoff masterfully combines with his modern tonal language in his Ganznachtliche Vigil, written two years before his emigration to the USA.

Few works by Johann Sebastian Bach have given rise to more research and speculation than the 'Sei Solo', the sonatas and partitas for solo violin. From the search for models to dating based on stylistic features, from the identification of the paper used for the autograph from 1720 to the mysticism of numbers, no stone has been left unturned to solve the numerous riddles posed by this exorbitant work. The pieces in this collection are exorbitant in several respects. Not only does Bach go beyond what was customary at the time in terms of length, but the musical content and technical demands are also unprecedented, both in the context of contemporary violin music by other composers and within Bach's own oeuvre. As so often in Bach's oeuvre, an entire musical cosmos is explored in a single work.

For all its traditional ties, Stravinsky's music continues to have a shockingly modern effect on many listeners even today. In his music, praise of God is formulated in tones entirely different from those expected by music lovers schooled in the romantic tradition. Stravinsky did not compose "emotional" or "expressive" religious music but sought objectivity, archaic prototypes, and traditions of timeless value, presenting these elements as if under microscopic enlargement.

Twelfth title of our series entirely dedicated to the solo cello in the XVIIIth century, combined with the precedents with the sonatas by Lanzetti, Janson, Duport and Spourni, this collection investigates the fascinating path of the Neapolitan cello school in France and, in parallel, the developments of the musical styles towards the birth of new European music in Classicism. From the bewitching, hypnotic atmospheres of the French Arias to the lively theatricality of the Italian musical imagination, throughout the sixty years preceding the Revolution the cello was certainly one of the most authentic protagonists.

Classical Electronic

Misattributed in the past to composers such as Pergolesi, the enduring success of Pietro Auletta's L'Orazio saw it staged and adapted so many times over the centuries that it's original 1737 structure is now lost. This is the opera's first revival in modern times. The style of L'Orazio reflects the end of the Baroque period at a time in which refined galant and pre-Classical inflections were taking hold. The work's comic narrative of romantic complications and rivalries take place amidst scenarios in which the music lessons of maestro Lamberto alternate with dubious theatrical engagements and carnival masquerades.

We recorded this album live at Jazzklubb Syd in Ladan, Farsta, on a cold winter's night in January 2024, but it didn't take long for the temperature to rise in that small wooden barn. There, the warmth of the connection between the musicians, the music and the audience was palpable. A love of jazz - the fantastic melodies and harmonies, the meaningful lyrics and the swinging rhythms - brought us together in time for a while, and this album is the result. The title "A Heart Full of Rhythm" is of course taken from the Louis Armstrong song. But it also refers perfectly to our drummer, Ronnie Gardiner, and the important work he does with The Ronnie Gardiner Method, a multi-sensory rehabilitation method used to help those aff ected by, for example, brain injuries, stroke, MS or Parkinson's. His accredited method is used all over the world. Dedicated to all music lovers, and most of all our dear friends and families. Enjoy!

Mozart: Piano Concertos, Vol. 10

This in the second Album of the collection dedicated to Balsassare Galuppi Hapsichord Sonatas by Alvise de piero. About the first releases, it has been said: � As for the performance, harpsichordist Alvise de Piero does these works proud. His pace is always appropriate for the music, and his touch on the instrument can vary from decisive to delicate. His registral variations on this two manual instrument work very well for the music and give a nice expression to Galuppi's often lyrical voice �. (Bertil van Boer, Fanfare Magazine)

Shura Cherkassky (1909-1995) was a Russian-American concert pianist known for his performances of the romantic repertoire. He was one of the last pianists to come from the Golden Age of Pianism, whose playing was characterised by a virtuoso technique and singing piano tone. Cherkassky early on in his career earned a reputation for spontaneity, creativity, and technical perfection in his playing. His sound was unique and became almost instantly recognisable and was famous for never playing the same piece the same way. In addition to the standard virtuoso repertoire, especially that of Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, Cherkassky also performed works by Hofmann, Hindemith, Morton Gould, Britten, Luciano Berio, Alban Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez and other 20th century/contemporary composers. The stimulus of a live audience always produced a more compelling performance from Cherkassky than he would give in a recording studio. Presented here are all the recital performances, totalling over five hours, which he gave at the Ambassador Auditorium between 1981 and 1989, published for the first time.

Goran Filipec is renowned for his exceptional interpretations of the works of Franz Liszt. His four previous recordings can be heard on 8.573705,8.573794,8.573866 and 8.574095. With this new album he presents a selection of the composer's most popular pieces featuring several of his own arrangements and adaptations.

French music specialist Jean-Luc Tingaud conducts the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland in this album of favourites and rarities by Faure. Includes the first movement of the unfinished Violin Concerto, the prelude to the opera Penelope, Henri Rabaud's orchestration of the popular Dolly suite, and more.

Continuing their project to record all the Shostakovich String Quartets, award winning artists the Carducci Quartet return to Signum Classics for their third album of string quartets: String Quartet No. 9 in E flat major and String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor, Op. 144.

Praise for SIGCD559 Shostakovich: String Quartets Nos. 1, 2 & 7
4 Star Performance, 4 Star Recording, "Beautiful honed" – BBC Music Magazine

Heino Eller (1887–1970) is the founding father of Estonian professional instrumental music, both as a masterful and original composer, and as a teacher of composition over half a century. His output of around 300 titles is almost exclusively dedicated to instrumental music. Though Eller wrote three symphonies, around a dozen symphonic poems, six string quartets and four piano sonatas, he is nevertheless essentially a master of the small form. Eller’s music is characterized by a bright pantheistic lyricism and a Nordic restraint in expression, whilst retaining a philosophically charged, at times epic undercurrent. This magnificent album is the first ever devoted to Eller’s music for violin, about half of which is represented here — including the demanding second of his two sonatas for violin and piano, the remarkable, hyper-expressionist Fantasy for solo violin, and the most popular, emblematic work in Estonian repertoire for the instrument, Pines.

Intermedial, occasionally multimedia, filmic, (photo-)graphic, electro-acoustic, radiophonic, instrumental, improvisational, notated, installative and often collaborative. This is how Nikolaus Heyduck, born in Kassel in 1957, can be described. He is not just an artist and composer, he is a performing musician, a sound artist, an equally active player in the various aesthetic metiers. The CD Horizons features seven of his works that have been created in recent years as joint projects with artists and composers who are also predominantly polyaesthetically active.

By the time of the ‘Ottocento’ (19th century), opera was the dominant force in Italian musical culture, with bel canto composers such as Rossini and Donizetti creating a public appetite for opera that eclipsed achievements by Italy’s musical sons in other genres. Some of these composers who focused their energies instead on instrumental music, swimming against the operatic tide, remained in their native land, while others found a home (or were forced to find one) abroad.

Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) is one who stayed. A gifted pianist, he bypassed the operatic path and wrote music with a kind of fluent synthesis of Italian lyricism and German, dialectic approach to form that reached an early peak in his Cello Sonata of 1880. Yet Martucci, as a teacher of composition in Bologna and then Naples, urged the teenaged Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) to study abroad.

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is among the few composers in this set whose entire career centered in Italy, and he wrote a substantial body of instrumental music.

Before the war and eventual exile, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) succeeded in reinventing an essentially Romantic model (of both form and harmony) for his own time with his Cello Sonata Op. 50 of 1928.

From seven years earlier, Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Sonata of 1921 is a more gloomy, even tortured affair. The Cello Sonata of Francesco Cilea (1866-1950), while unmistakably cast as an ‘operatic’ work from its opening solo, features a protagonist scarcely burdened by the existential angst to be found in comparable works from northern Europe.

Like Cilea, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948) is known for his operas but unlike Cilea’s cello sonata, Wolf-Ferrari’s Op. 30 dates from the final three years of his life and belongs to a mature output of instrumental music.

Virtuoso cellists Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) produced many trifles and showpieces to display his artistry to his adoring public in London. He was most proud of the set of six sonatas included in this set. In 1844 he made his first appearance in the English capital and soon settled there, playing both as a soloist and in one of the first celebrity string quartets.

The Cello Sonata by Mario Pilati (1903-1938) is another product of the fast-moving 1920s, formed in a Romantic tradition but inflected – like the music of Casella, Pizzetti, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco – by contemporary trends in impressionism and futurism.

From the next generation of composers, the Cello Sonata composed in 1948 by Eliodoro Sollim (1926-2000) fluently incorporates the kind of modal harmonies and cross-rhythms adopted by the likes of Bartók and Janáček from the folk traditions of their own cultures.

The Accademia Arcadia was flourishing in Rome at the time Andrea Stefano Fiore, one of Italy's true child prodigies, was there. The wide variety of stylistic influences and superlative quality of his cantatas, from lyrical simplicity to daring harmonic experiment, are confirmation of Fiore's uniquely poetic talent. Giovanni Antonio Giay succeeded Fiore in service at the royal court in Turin, and these world premiere recordings together reveal musical treasure of great value, sublimely documenting the extraordinary musical sensitivity of these rarely heard composers.

Piano Quintets Jascha Nemtsov's academic work focuses on Jewish music and Jewish composers in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as topics such as "nationalism and music", "religion and music" and "totalitarianism and music". Numerous international award-winning CD releases bear witness to this. With his latest CD, he brings - together with the critically acclaimend Asasello Quartet - two Jewish-Ukrainian composers out of the shadows: Leo Ornstein and Boris Tishchenko.

In 1984 Frank Zappa released an album titled Francesco Zappa, unknowingly becoming the first contemporary interpreter of the work of this unknown Milanese author, and effectively marking the beginning of his rediscovery. It was an incredible fate that of Francesco Zappa who, after a long life of success and honors in the Dutch and German courts, died in poverty and even experienced a kind of "damnatio memoriae" due to the contempt shown to him by Leopold Mozart.

What unites two opera composers, Mayr and Donizetti, with an organist, Father Davide (born Felice Moretti, perhaps the most representative Italian organ composer of the first half of the 19th century)? It’s all about the piano, whether played with two or four hands, with this proposal of largely unpublished pieces by composers who surprise us as chamber music creators, yet never fail to betray a love for romantic melodrama.

The nineteenth-century French opera overture was for many years looked down on by certain music critics (and musicians) - largely as the genre turned its back on the historical adherence to strict musical form (fugue, sonata form, etc.). Percy Scholes, in the 1955 Oxford Companion to Music, had the following to say: 'a cheap but not always ineffective type of opera overture is that of the pot-pourri or medley - little more than a string of tunes from the work to follow.' These overtures were incredibly popular in their time, and the revival of this repertoire is long overdue.

Daniel Auber composed more than fifty operas, some for the Paris Opera and some for the Opera Comique. His Grand Opera La Muette de Portici famously sparked the Belgian revolution in 1830, which led to the country's independence in 1839. Les Cloches de Corneville was by far the most successful of Planquette's twenty-four operas, receiving some 400 consecutive performances. Alexandre Lecocq's La Fille de Madame Angot was premiered in Brussels in 1872 and is set in post-revolutionary Paris. The Overture is followed here by numbers put together by Gordon Jacob, in his re-orchestration of material taken mainly from the opera, for Leonide Massine's ballet Mam'zelle Angot, which closely follows the action of the opera.

The three Italian choral works on this album cast new light on pre-existing musical material. Corrado Margutti's Missa Lorca fuses the words of Federico Garcia Lorca with an evocation of Monteverdi's polyphonic textures to create fascinating sounds, as the two movements from the Mass reveal. Pizzetti's Messa di Requiem, the first of his great choral compositions, offers a wealth of expressive detail notably the use of Gregorian chant in music of huge range and richness. Lorenzo Donati's Sicut Cervus fittingly concludes this selection as it threads music from Palestrina into his piece illuminating the past with vivid new colours.

In the early 1670s, soon after Venetian opera became established in Naples, a series of comic figures began to inhabit secular but also sacred operas. These stock characters included the Neapolitan, the Calabrian and the Boy, and all three plus a fourth, 'The Spaniard', appear in a comic intermezzo inserted in the 1673 opera Il disperato innocente by the little-known Francesco Antonio Boero. This is the oldest surviving Neapolitan comic intermezzo, and, along with it's Prologue, seems to have been written by other authors. This video preserves a historically informed performance given by Antonio Florio with Pino de Vittorio that explores the tradition of the intermezzo in 17th century plots.