Japanese musicians have often taken the connection between man and nature as their theme and award-winning composer Toshio Hosokawa stands strongly in that artistic lineage. His Horn Concerto ‘Moment of Blossoming’ imagines the solo instrument as a lotus flower and the orchestra as the cosmos. The theme of the blossoming lotus continues in the piano concerto Lotus under the moonlight and in the songful Chant for cello and orchestra, influenced by Shômyô singing (the ceremonial music of Japanese Buddhism). The Horn Concerto was co-commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam and London’s Barbican Centre.

Through the centuries composers have brought colour and panache to bear in their depictions of animals in music. For some, such as Sibelius, animals become the central focus in their tone poems, whilst for others a symphonic unity is sought, as Beethoven showed in his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Poetic imagery, through song, offers another avenue. The rich variety of the animal kingdom—from bees to birds, from fleas to fish (and much else)—offers memorable opportunities for sonic richness.

Rossini’s operas have remained amongst the most popular in the repertoire but over the last decade of his life he turned largely to piano music. The Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) occupy thirteen volumes, and the deliciously informal and comic fourth is called Quatre hors d’oeuvres et quatre mendiants. Its theme is food, and Rossini lavishes all his abundant abilities of characterisation in his descriptive passages, not least the introduction of a parakeet.

This program includes some of the least known masterpieces from Ernest Bloch’s nearly 30 works for orchestra. Macbeth: Two Symphonic Interludes is an intoxicating and passionate distillation of Shakespeare’s powerful drama. In Memoriam is a brief elegy dedicated to the pianist Ada Clement, while the Three Jewish Poems were written when Bloch was mourning the death of his father. Originally conceived as a third concerto grosso, Bloch’s last Symphony, in E flat major, is at times emotionally turbulent and deeply spiritual work containing passages of harmonic acerbity.

Few composers have achieved greater success with their first published composition than Erno? ? Dohna?nyi with his Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 1. Written in 1895 and praised highly by Brahms, who is believed to have organized a Viennese performance shortly afterwards, it heralded the emergence of a major new talent. The harmonic ambiguity of the 1914 Piano Quintet in E flat minor points to the composer’s awareness of ongoing developments in European music. Still underestimated, it ranks among the most important works of Dohna?nyi’s ‘middle period’.

The A–Z of Opera 2nd edition has been expanded to include even more composers, operas, and 130 bonus tracks. The 1,096-page book details the lives of hundreds of opera composers, and like the range of Naxos recordings itself, this set highlights the extraordinary breadth of opera and its composers across the centuries in a rich and inspiring resource.