The piano reductions for four hands of Stravinsky's ballets Petrushka and The Rite of Spring are not mere arrangements, but the original source out of which the orchestral scores were fashioned. Here, they are played winningly by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen.

This release is dedicated to one of the most esteemed musical practices of the Renaissance: the art of accompanying the voice with the viola da gamba. Cantare alla viola (singing with a viol) is the name for this practice, which was quite common at the time. The art of this practice lies in the ability of the “viola” player to arrange and play madrigals to accompany one single voice, as a lutenist or vihuela player commonly does. Cantar alla Viola has careful selected some of the finest pieces of the Italian Renaissance in order to illustrate the intimate and skillful musical practice of Cantare alla viola. The pieces vary from the subtle and transparent trecento 2-voice ballades of Magister Piero and Andrea da Firenze played on the viella, to the exquisite and virtuous madrigals for one soprano by Luzzascho Luzasschi, accompanied by the viola da gamba. The Renaissance villanelle and 3-voice madrigals by Luca Marenzio and Costanzo Festa, are adapted for the polyphonic playing of two different bowed vihuelas. Solo pieces have been added to the release to show the instrumental practice on a bowed vihuela through arrangements of lute and keyboard pieces by composers such as Marco Antonio Cavazzoni or Francesco da Milano.

On this release Boris Brovtsyn presents Ysaye Sonatas as well as Ysaye’s Etude Posthume which was published after the composer’s death, and is receiving here its world premiere recording. Boris Brovtsyn has established himself as one of the most profound and versatile musicians of his generation. He is in ever-increasing demand all around the world as both concerto soloist and chamber musician. His repertoire includes over fifty violin concertos and hundreds of chamber works, some of which he premiered. He is a frequent guest at "Les Grands Interpretes" chamber music series in Geneva and Spectrum Concerts Berlin, where he has appeared in every season since 2008. A fourth-generation musician, Boris started to play violin under the guidance of his grandfather, a student of Lev Tzeitlin and Abram Yampolsky. After graduating from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory where he studied with Maya Glezarova, Boris made his UK debut with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Rumon Gamba and soon relocated to London. He completed his studies with David Takeno at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and has taught there himself from 2010 until 2016. In addition to the professorship at the GSMD, he also chaired a class at the Trinity College of Music in Greenwich and has given masterclasses all around the world, including South Korea, Thailand and Brazil.

Recorded for the first time on one album, this release features Hindemith’s complete works for violin and piano and the rarely recorded Kleine Sonata for Viola D’amore and piano. Hindemith’s reputation as a master composer, viola virtuoso and dominant pedagogue- who, being able to play practically every standard instrument (and a few non-standard ones), expected the same from his students- has tended to obscure the fact that he first came to attention not as a composer or violist but as a violinist. Roman Mints has had a lifelong love of the works of Paul Hindemith, which began when he was a young violinist, studying in Moscow in the 1980s. He says “This music, written not just before I was born but closer to the time of my grandparents’ birth, felt completely contemporary, and daringly advanced in its sound- and not just to me, as it turns out: 30 years on, Hindemith is still regarded by concert programmers as too difficult for the wider public. I put Sonata in D on the stand. I was gripped by the first subject, constructed from seconds and sevenths, marked to be played ‘with stony defiance.’ I was never the same again and he became my window into contemporary music.”

Consolation

World Premiere recordings of transcriptions for unaccompanied viola by J S Bach performed by Robin Ireland, formerly viola player with the internationally celebrated Lindsay Quartet for over 20 years.

The first CD of the Ying Quartet's acclaimed Life Music series. LifeMusic is a series of commissions from established or emerging American composers and each work draws on a different aspect of American life. From the world's most prestigious stages to the rural farm towns of America, the Ying Quartet has earned recognition for both its brilliant concert performances and its enterprising promotion of chamber music's larger role in society. Now in their second decade, the Yings have brought their compelling and insightful music-making to virtually every North American city and to Europe, Asia and Australia, winning acclaim for their 'clear-eyed vision of what the music means and how best to communicate that to an audience.' (Detroit Free Press) Whether in a concert hall, a state house rotunda or a one-room school house, the Ying Quartet projects its musical ideas with exceptional energy, intelligence and passion.

Beethoven's late piano sonatas Op.109 and Op110 lead us through two different sound journeys. We experience human feelings and thoughts - optimism, tragedy, calm, anger, resignation, struggle. Mendelssohn was one of several composers including Schumann and Liszt who were asked to write a work for inclusion in an album, the proceeds of which were to be used to erect a monument to Beethoven. The work was Variations Serieuses. Olwen Morris, who studied at Royal Academy of music and with Vlado Perlemuter, has performed in major concert halls throughout the U.K. and abroad including Wigmore Hall, Fairfield Halls, Bath Guildhall and Manchester Bridgewater Hall. She has given numerous solo BBC recitals from her very wide repertoire, and also some first performances. In addition to recitals and chamber music concerts, she has recently performed the Beethoven 'Emperor' and the Grieg Concertos in Bournemouth.

Roman Mints presents the complete works for violin and piano by Alfred Schnittke.

The beautiful new ballet score by Stephen Warbeck, the Academy Award-winning composer of the filmscore for Shakespeare in Love.

This disc of pieces played by pianist Polina Osetinskaya brings together the music of Nino Rota and Leonid Desyatnikov. An odd combination? Actually, no! Rota lived entirely in the 20th century while Desyatnikov was born in 1955, but what these composers have in common is not just the century they lived in but the way their work challenges what academic music had become. Neither Rota nor Desyatnikov has ever been part of any musical movement, and they have written no theoretical tracts (as was all the rage in the 20th century), but we can still see their music as a riposte to contemporary isolationism, arrogance, and fear.

Of the Eight Intermezzi, the composer writes: “The inspiration for these pieces stems from the late piano intermezzi of Brahms. Some of the textures deliberately correspond. For example, the arpeggiated flow of No 2 mimics a comparable feel in Brahms's Op 117 No 2. The repeated upper notes of No 3, with the melody in the middle of the chords, nod towards a similar, if faster, manner in Op 119 No 3 [likewise the earlier same-key middle section of Chopin's first Nocturne from Op 48]. Pianistically and emotionally, No 8 is intentionally larger scaled.” Of the Suite the composer writes: “This is a collection of miniatures with differing inspirations but designed to be played as a continuous set. One or two (No 1 particularly) were meant to be of interest to my younger sister, Lucy, who at the time of their composition, in the mid-80s, was working towards her Grade 7. Others are intended to be descriptive. For example No 6, which recalls listening to the bells of Romsey Abbey in Hampshire from a few miles away in the Test Valley; and No 5, which imagines a spot along the Jurassic coastline between Swanage and Weymouth. Nos 3 and 7, the Studies in Fifths and Sevenths, were born out of a curiosity as to why Debussy didn't include these intervals in his piano Études.” Samantha Ward puts a virtuosic spin on these compositions.

Mesmerising playing from a young pianist who captures the essence of Grieg’s genius

Let me put my cards on the table and say that Katya Apekisheva is a young pianist who has already achieved artistic greatness. Not even Gilels, in his legendary DG Grieg recital, played more magically or, astonishingly, with greater finesse. How thrilled Irina Zaritskaya, Apekisheva’s teacher and my much-missed jury colleague, would have been if she had lived to hear the fruit of her work with this profoundly gifted artist. A sonority of beguiling warmth and refinement and a rare poetic empathy quickly make you abandon paper and pencil and listen mesmerised as Apekisheva captures the very essence of Grieg’s genius. Here, in her mixed programme, she tells you with an often painfully beautiful and unforced eloquence of how Grieg’s romantic temperament was easily clouded by depression and unease, of the way, for example in “Homesickness” and “Vanished Days”, a heartbreaking state of mind is only temporarily modified by memories of happier times. In the Aria from the Holberg Suite she is deeply sensitive to the way Grieg’s love and respect for the 18th century is coloured by a near-Franckian chromaticism and dark introspection. These works and everything else on this beautifully recorded album suggest an artistic fervour and commitment given to very few in any generation.

The sense of the Lyric Pieces as Grieg’s confessional diary is everywhere in Apekisheva’s recital, an inwardness and vision less evident in Daniel Propper’s bracing recording of four books of the Lyric Pieces. Nimble-fingered and musicianly, this Swedish-Viennese pianist, who now makes his home in Paris, shows Grieg’s art evolving from simple beginnings into a world of increasing complexity and harmonic richness. His “Little Bird” (from Op 43) blithely chirrups in a manner far removed from Messiaen’s more spiritual feathered friends, and his way with “Erotic” from the same book achieves a fine sense of how outward contentment abruptly changes to emotional instability. In “Butterfly” he hardly matches Eileen Joyce’s incomparable nuance and vivacity (Testament), yet these finely recorded performances are an admirable antidote to all possible sentimentality.

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [9/2008]

His phenomenal CD sales and ability to sell out major concert halls worldwide are confirmation that Ludovico Einaudi is one of classical music's biggest success stories of recent years. This double album collects 22 of his best-selling works and features the hugely popular Le Onde.

NAZARETH Brejeiro. Pássaros em Festa. Tenebroso. Apanhei-te Cavaquinho. Confidêcias. Sarambeque. Travesso. Coração que Sente. Odeon. Epônina. Cubanos. Crê e Espera. Fon Fon. Vesper. Faceira. Batuque. Ameno Resedá • Marcelo Bratke (pn) • QUARTZ 2066 (64:00)


One cannot overestimate Ernesto Nazareth’s influence on the development of Brazilian music. An enormously gifted child pianist who published his first work, a polka, at age 14, his first ambition was to be a proper Eurocentric composer. Chopin was one of his first heroes, and remained a musical ideal throughout his career. But then he was born into Rio de Janeiro’s ethnically diverse musical culture with its ubiquitous choro street musicians and their African and American ragtime influences. In his subsequent music he presented a synthesis of European salon music (many of his pieces are titled as gallops, quadrilles, Schottisches, fox-trots, and romances) and those colorfully indigenous musics. Historic hindsight implies that he was a seminal influence upon such younger Brazilian composers as the Afro-Brasilian Pixinguinha, and, ultimately, Heitor Villa-Lobos, who strove to pull those bifurcated influences from the streets and salons and into the concert hall. Similarly he also inspired such diverse composers as the quite classically acceptable Camargo Guarnieri and Antonio Carlos Jobim of bossa nova fame.


In Nazareth’s time, Rio de Janeiro was an extremely class- and race-conscious place. Street musicians were universally held in low esteem. Many of them, however, were actually gainfully employed members of the staunchly upright middle class who, when they took to the streets after work, assumed new identities via colorfully fictitious names. I bring this up because it has great bearing on these performances by Marcello Bratke. Ernesto Nazareth, first and foremost, wanted to be regarded as a socially acceptable Eurocentric composer who would ultimately find his way into the legitimate concert hall. Nazareth’s performing venues were, alas, theaters, hotels, and upscale cinemas where he improvised accompaniments to silent movies much as Dmitri Shostakovich would later do in his youth in a more far flung part of the world. Nazareth’s music, at its best, displays an almost Chopinesque elegance and polish. And that is quite eloquently reflected in these performances by Marcelo Bratke.


FANFARE: William Zagorski