GUDMUNDSEN-HOLMGREEN: Chamber Music

As well as being internationally recognized as a leading interpreter of music new and old, Peter Sheppard Sk�rved is the only violinist to have performed on the personal violins of Viotti, Paganini, Joachim, Kreisler and Ole Bull. In this new series, he plays music on these and many more instruments, many of which only he has access to. This double album contains 96 (short) pieces which are all of the works for solo instrument contained in the Klagenfurt Manuscript, a substantial folio dated circa 1685 and which the violinist believes may have been composed by a nun - we will probably never know. He plays these works which mainly consist of individual movements of a style typically found in the baroque Dance Suite; some seem to 'fit' into multi-movement suites, others clearly do not. For the purposes of this recording each movement is listed and tracked separately. This is the world premiere recording. Peter plays a wonderful Stradivari instrument of 1685 (thus exactly contemporary with the music). In those days violins were made in several sizes and this one measures 328mm (the modern standard being 350mm). It's design and construction is clearly influenced by Nicola Amati. Though 'modernized; in the 19th century, it is hear played with a period-design bow and gut strings for authenticity. The violin is from the historic instruments collection of the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, England.

Sergey Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was completed after the composer's final repatriation to Soviet Russia after a period abroad. It was written for the Kirov Ballet but early productions faltered, and Prokofiev soon adapted his music to the concert hall. The Suites avoid narrative sequence, selecting crucial moments such as the famous "balcony scene", and dramatic climaxes such as the Death of Tybalt. Composed to celebrate the famous author's 150th anniversary, the Pushkin Waltzes are relaxed, easygoing, and with a typically witty edge.

BALADA: Hangman! Hangman! / The Town of Greed

The English composer Edmund Rubbra described the string quartet as 'the purest and most lucid texture available to a composer', his essays in the form enlivened by Beethovenian vigour and song-like beauty.

.Following a period of soul-searching during the mid-1920s, and as his music gained success outside France during the 1930s, Albert Roussel took the rhythmic dynamism, thematic integration and formal lucidity of his Third Symphony to new heights.

Both Black Pentecost and Stone Litany share a symphonic scale and an Orkney setting. Premièred by Simon Rattle in 1982, Black Pentecost is an impassioned plea against environmental destruction, taking its words from Orcadian author George Mackay Brown’s novel Greenvoe, and cast in the form of a vocal symphony. Chamber-like restraint is matched by tense, dark writing that embraces threnody and cataclysm. Beautifully orchestrated and featuring elaborate melismas from the vocal soloist, Stone Litany, subtitled ‘Runes from a House of the Dead’, evokes the haunted landscape of a Neolithic burial mound plundered by Vikings.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' Strathclyde Concertos are amongst his most imposing contributions to the genre. The solo pairing of his Concerto No. 5 was inspired by Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, the soloists appearing in dialogue over intricate harmonies and dense string textures. Illuminated by Peter Bruegel's painting Children's Games, the distinctively scored Concerto No. 6 has an uninhibited lightness and transparency. Strathclyde Concerto No. 2 can be heard on Naxos 8.573017, Nos. 3 and 4 on 8.572353.

A unique coupling of chamber works from the German Romantic composer Eduard Franck currently undergoing a small revival after decades of neglect. This is finely crafted music inspired by Mendelssohn and Schumann.

Xavier Montsalvatge's music enriched Catalan culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and he remained one of Spain's leading composers. This overview of his orchestral music begins with excerpts from his ballet Manfred, which reveal the important influence of Stravinsky. The ingenious Bric � brac is his last orchestral work, written when he was eighty-one and premi�red by the forces who perform it on this recording. The mainly orchestral Simfonia de R�quiem is one of Montsalvatge's most important and well-known works.

Boris Tchaikovsky is revered in Russian musical circles as one of the most original and innovative composers of the post-Shostakovich generation. A work of great depth and beauty, the Piano Quintet is considered his finest chamber work and a stylistic milestone which would influence aspects of the later Piano Concerto (8.557727). Based on a the score for the 1964 film While the Front is in Defence, The War Suite is an evocative portrayal of the horrors of battle, but also of heroism, friendship and lost love, at the Volkhov Front, south east of Leningrad, during the winter of 1942.

Ira Hearshen is one of America's most popular and successful orchestrators and arrangers. He has written for many Hollywood films, such as Toy Story and The Scorpion King. He has also written for the concert stage, especially wind band, notably his Pulitzer Prize-nominated Symphony on Themes of John Philip Sousa, which is adventurously constructed, richly melodic and colorfully scored. His unique takes on Strike Up The Band and There's No Business Like Show Business provide moments of rich humor whilst the Divertimento for Band mines the American Jazz vernacular with true rhythmic verve.

This program brings together première recordings of Francis Poulenc’s own piano versions of his ‘ballet of atmosphere’ Les Biches and ‘choreographic concerto’ Aubade, as well as the first digital recording of the suite from Les Animaux modèles, inspired by the fables of La Fontaine and compiled by Grant Johannesen with the composer’s agreement. ‘Piano scores’ are an essential part of rehearsing and choreographing any ballet, but the piano was also indispensable to Poulenc’s compositional process. He owed his love of classical dance to years of working closely with Dyaghilev, and his music brims with subtlety, humor, genuine emotion, piquant harmonies and rhythmic lightness.

Although for many, Antonio Vivaldi's contemporary renown may rest primarily with The Four Seasons, his legacy is steadily achieving greater and richly deserved recognition today with the help of collections such as this one abetted by the Aradia Ensemble, a fine period instrumental ensemble with an impressively robust discography. Vivaldi was astoundingly prolific composing hundreds sonatas, sinfonias and concertos, as well as more than forty operas, numerous sacred choral works and around forty cantatas. The works on this recording dedicated to his sacred music range from the virtuosic to the simple, but Vivaldi's vivid musical imagination is in full force throughout. Though his sacred music has generally received less attention than his instrumental works, they are equal to them in their originality and power.

Three very varied works make up this latest disc in the Naxos series of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s orchestral works, including two world premiere recordings. Malipiero claimed, extremely improbably, to have created his Fantasie di ogni giorno – ‘Everyday Fantasies’ – simply by stringing together musical ideas he had scribbled down from day to day, ‘and it was not even necessary to change their order’. In the Passacaglie, by contrast, Malipiero deliberately set out to use far stricter structural devices, while Concerti, composed two decades earlier, is a highly imaginative and diverse suite of miniature concertos for different instrumental sections of the orchestra.