Jan Bartos is one of my most impressive and most exciting young colleagues. In Jan Bartos, virtuosity is coupled with deeply serious musicianship.'' When such appreciation is voiced by the legendary pianist Alfred Brendel, we should pick up our ears. In addition to Brendel, Bartos has been most markedly influenced by his friend and teacher, the phenomenal Czech pianist Ivan Moravec. Numerous accolades from international competiions, acclaimed performances at major concert venues all over the world and collaboration with renowned orchestras and conductors have been further milestones on Bartos's journey through th emusical landscape. With regard to the two mentors, his having opted for Mozart's music for his Supraphon debut album comes as no surprise. Although referred to by some as ''naive'' and ''overly simple'', Jan Bartos uncovers the deepest layers of the architecture of and the emotions encoded in Mozart's works. Together with the conductor, the late Jiri Belohlavek, teh pianist guides the listener through the ominous, demonc even, Concerto in D minor like through a mystery story. The more joyous nature of the Concerto in A major is further highlighted by the transparent texture of its chamber version for string quartet. The two concertos unveil the nooks and crannies of Mozart's multi-layered music, in a top-notch performance quality.

Petr Eben was one of the most distinguished Czech composers of the second half of the 20th century. His music gained recognition far beyond the Iron Curtian and his homeland. Best known for organ and sacred works, his chamber pieces have - unjustly - been somewhat overlooked. Eben's music reflects his fascinating life story. At the age of 16, he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he got to know the thin line between life and death. His harrowing experiences there resulted in an emboldening of his Christian faith, approach to people and art alike. Eben's ''programme'' is most evident in the String Quartet, written to commission for the Smetana Quartet and inspired by the allegorical work ''The Labyrinth fo the World and the Paradise of the Heart'' by the famous 17th-century Czech philosopher, educator and theologian Jan Amos Komensky, in whom he saw a model for viewing this world: ''not to be attached to it, to retain a critical view and distance, ye tto dedicate one's strengths with the aim to make it better and attain its redemption''. Both the Piano Quintet and the piano Trio clearly reveal their creator - Eben the superlativ epianist. In them, the composer did not strive to make the instruments chime, opting instead for juxtaposing the sounds of the piano and the strings. The renowned Martinu Quartet and the pianist Karel Kosarek have undertaken Eben's quintet's premiere recording and the quartet's first modern-time recording since that made by legendary Smetana Quartet.

Martina Jankova, soprano, Collegium 1704, Vaclav Luks conductor.

Classical Music

What can be encompassed in music within 60 minutes? Africa, Japan, Germany. London, Vienna, the Balkans... Four virtuoso recorder players, i Frautisti, will guide you through this one-hour odyssey. Since their getting together in 2009 at the Royal College of Music in London, the female ensemble have given premieres of a number of pieces, directly written for them. The composers who have created music for them include such celebrities as Tarik O'Regan and Nathan Theodoulou. i Flautisti have appeared at renowned festivals and led master classes in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. Their live performances have also enchanted BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4 listeners. The present recording serves to mark the ensemble's 10th anniversary, featuring ten pieces that have earned them enthusiastic responses at concert venues. The album organically blends the Middle Ages and Baroque with torrential Balkan rhythms and the contemporary world. Yet you should not approach the modern tunes with trepidation: i Flautisti present (for the most part in world premiere) music that is beautiful, comprehensive, often catchy even. The ensemble's great forte - also the common denominator of the recording - is an engrossing musicality, vivacity and passion. You will definitely want to take the hour-long trip again and again. From the Middle Ages to the present time - from Africa through Japan to the Balkans; a thrilling musical journey with a virtuoso recorder quartet.

Starring Pavel Sporcl.

In the 19th century, composers sought inspiration in poetry, and the simplicity and modesty of folk songs. Romances reflecting on loneliness, betrayed love and the misery of the abandoned occupied a special position in Russian lyric poetry in the first half of the 19th century, represented by A. S. Pushkin and other writers. Based on the Romantic poets' works, composers expressed their own intimate feelings, as well as muted defiance. One of the first to have written romances was Mikhail Glinka, the founder of the Russian nationalist music school. A whole generation of his successors, including P. I. Tchaikovsky, embraced the genre, creating numerous romances, mainly set to contemporary Russian poetry. Especially noteworthy among such works is M. P. Mussorgsky's cycle Songs and Dances of Death, made up of four pieces depicting the horror and bizarreness of death, referred to by the composer as "danse macabre". Jozef Benci is a highly esteemed opera and oratorio singer, a soloist of the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, who has worked with the Czech Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jir� Belohl�vek, performed with Edita Gruberov� and other renowned artists. Owing to his robust, yet highly sensitively led voice, a remarkable sense for songs' intimate nature, as well as an immaculate diction, he is a brilliant performer of Russian romances.

He took up the lute when he was young and became such a virtuoso that he was unrivalled in France or Italy. Music historian Gottfried Johann Dlabac�'s testimony describes the lutenist and composer, Count Jan Antonin Losy of Losinthal, whose family came from Lombardy. He was born in Bohemia, where he spent most of his life, but his fame spread throughout Europe. After he died, he was honoured by his younger colleague, Sylvius Leopold Weiss, who memorialised him with his famous Tombeau. Nowadays, the name of the Count and virtuoso musician (besides the lute, he played the harpsichord and violin superbly) is known especially to lute players. However, even they may be surprised to learn that this album contains compositions with harpsichord, flute and violin. In fact, Losy's oeuvre is far more varied. According to period sources, many of his compositions were played by chamber ensembles including instruments, such as the violin and a bowed bass instrument. The main performer, Jan Ci�mar, reconstructed some of them, using manuscripts scattered all over Europe, and invited his colleagues from the Polish ensemble, Orkiestra historyczna, to take part in the recording. The result is a revealing album that presents Losy's lute pieces in an unusual sound version for the first time. Count Losy - a Prince among lutenists

Classical Music

Janácek was one of the most distinguished composers of the 20th century, with his operas enjoying particular renown all over the world. Yet he has bequeathed us precious few pieces for independent symphony orchestra. Hence, a number of conductors have striven to expand this limited repertoire by creating suites from his operas. This album features such treatments of his three major musical dramas. Jenufa was the first opera to be set to a prose text. The globally celebrated piece reflected the sorrow Janácek felt after the death of his two beloved children and gave rise to a deep person crisis. Similarly to Jenufa, it too met with rejection and would only be premiered thirty years after the composer's death. Katya Kabanova is one of the greatest Janácek works and one of the most beautiful lyric operas of the twentieth century and beyond.

The present album marks the 10th anniversary of the PhilHarmonia Octet. The ensemble is made up of superlative soloists, laureates of major international competitions, and members of globally renowned orchestras (the Berliner Philharmoniker, WDR Köln, Czech Philharmonic, etc.). The recording features works by both Czech and foreign composers. The Serenade in C minor is one of the first pieces signalling the change in Mozart’s music, with the hitherto enthralling playful abandon being replaced by serious, dramatic tones. Although formally an entertainment piece, Die kleine Nachtmusik possesses an intellectual profundity. On the other hand, the Wind Octet in E flat major (originally denominated Partita), written by Beethoven at the age of 22, fully corresponded to the piece’s being designated to be performed at banquets - most likely those held by his employer, Maximilian Franz, the Elector and Archbishop of Cologne. Technically challenging, it is conceived as a concert piece, with the parts possessing a virtuoso stylisation. The extraordinarily gifted Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein (1919-1945) wrote his Divertimento when he was twenty years of age, when he only had less than six years of life ahead of him, before dying at the Fürstengrube concentration camp. One of the most mature of his works, the piece reveals the artist’s having been affected by Janácek and Schönberg, yet palpable too is the influence of Neo-Classicism and the Moravian folk song. The album presents three totally different facets of the wind octet, encompassing music that spans almost two centuries, as performed by a brilliant ensemble.

On their previous Supraphon recordings, harpist Katerina Englichova and oboist Vilem Veverka sufficiently proved their outstanding performance qualities as well as informed interest in such mutually remote music worlds as the Baroque and the 20th century modernism. The present recording - their first made in dues - reflects more than twelve years of their performing together in concerts. The not-so-common combination of oboe and harp provides an endless scale of timres and the resulting impression is marked both by frailness and confident virtuosity. Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin" is the crucial piece on the album and represents the composer's memories of his friends lost in the First World War. Little musical gems written by Ravel and Debussy resound here in sensitive arrangements which have enriched the compositions by new timbre qualities. "Primavera" composed by Lubos Sluka was composed explicitly for the Englichova - Veverka duo and appears here in premiere recording.

Kristina Fialová’s Supraphon debut will undoubtedly be a welcome treat for lovers of the velvety dark timbre of the viola. A gauntlet thrown down to previous recordings can be deemed her singular account of Bohuslav Martinu’s wistful Sonata for Viola and Piano (1955), one of the pieces in which, towards the end of his life, the composer, aware that he would never return to his homeland, ever more frequently reflected his nostalgia for his native Czech-Moravian Highlands region. The other three works featured on the album are virtually unknown (two of them have been recorded for the very first time) yet nevertheless worthy of attention. Karel Husa wrote his Suite for Viola and Piano (1945) prior to leaving his country for good. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1969), today Husa’s is perhaps the most frequently performed music by a contemporary Czech composer worldwide. The featured works by two of his contemporaries too are newly discovered viola gems. The Sonata by Jindrich Feld is connected with that of Martinu’s in terms of the year of its origin (1955), as well as its nostalgia, while Viktor Kalabis created his piece almost half a century later (1997). A rising viola star, Kristina Fialová has won several international competitions, debuted at the Tonhalle Zürich and performed at prestigious festivals. Her vigorous approach has found an ideal partner in the seasoned pianist Igor Ardašev, a laureate of the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and other contests.

A four-clarinet ensemble with a history spanning over a quarter of a century, since the very beginnings Clarinet Factory have transcended genres and explored the potentialities of the clarinet and it's sound, all the deep-rooted conventions notwithstanding. Speaking volumes are their joint projects with Bobby McFerrin, Alan Vitou�, Lenka Dusilov� and Iva Bittov�, leading Czech rock bands, including Tata Bojs and Blue Effect, as well as world-renowned orchestras, among them the Prague Philharmonia and the Brno Philharmonic, and the VerTeDance theatre company. Attesting even further to Clarinet Factory's singularity is their own creation, which may be defined as a fascinating adventure-filled journey through music's remote nooks and broad avenues, bringing to bear bold imagination and exceptional invention. In the wake of the most recent, internationally acclaimed albums Worx and Reworx and Meadows, the ensemble have come up with a new album, titled Pipers, recorded almost live at the prestigious SONO Studio. Representing another chapter in their exciting musical odyssey, it highlights Clarinet Factory's intimacy and compactness. Featuring the authenticity and ruggedness characteristic of their live performances in combination with making use of innovative electronic and acoustic instruments, ranging from loopers, through effect devices to the electronic clarinet, the ensemble have succeeded in attaining a truly unique sound! A sound blending elements of classical, jazz and world music with audacious sonic experiment and the traditional song form, overarched by cosmopolitan lyrics in English, Czech and Spanish. Ludek Boura, Vojtech N�dl, Jindrich Pavli� and Petr Val�ek, who have presented their work to great acclaim at Mundial Montr�al, Classical: NEXT, WOMEX and other international festivals, have conceived an astonishing album, by means of which they have shifted the perception of the term "crossover" and the sound of the clarinet itself into previously unthought-of levels. A fascinating musical odyssey bound by neither genre nor convention!

The road between Vienna and Prague, taken in 1787 by the 31-year-old Mozart so as to attend the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni, was familiar to a number of other musicians. It was a journey they made in both directions, often with the vision of attaining a better life at the other end. The Czech songs dating from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, which form the axis of the present album, may be a revelation for many a listener – as may be the fact that Czech composers mainly set to music German and Italian texts. This could in part have been down to the boom of the German song for home music-making (and the associated publishing business), as well as the mass distribution of keyboard instruments in the 1780s. According to J. W. Goethe, the ability to play the piano was one of the qualities of well-bred young women that increased their chances of finding a good match ... Leopold Koželuch was one of Vienna’s most successful song composers, and, owing to, among other things, his diplomatic skills, he even eclipsed the bright star of Mozart. The Prague-based composer F. A. Rösler, whose songs are often indistinguishable from those of Mozart’s, did his utmost to preserve Mozart’s legacy following his death. And similarly to Rösler, V. J. Tomášek, who too remained faithful to Prague, possessed a refined literary taste, as duly reflected in his selection of the texts for his songs. The recording captures Martina Janková’s engrossing voice, replete with vitality, innocence, vigour and lightness, which so becomes the Mozart repertoire. Under the hands of Barbara Maria Willi, the bright and colourful sound of the one and only preserved fortepiano built by F. J. Baumeister (1797) will be for many yet another surprise and discovery on this musical odyssey. The previously untraced journeys of Czech songs between Mozart’s Prague and Vienna.