Nowadays, the work of François Couperin is commonly associated with harpsichord music of the turn of the Baroque and Classicism. His elaborate miniatures and suites, plenty of brilliant ornaments, are now almost inextricably linked to the canonical harpsichord repertoire. The album by Dorota Cybulska-Amsler makes us aware, however, that François was not the only composer in the Couperin family. As the artist points out, names of members of the Couperin family, originating from the Chaumes-en-Brie region, are already in documents from the 16th century. In 1586, Mathurin Couperin (ca. 1569–ca. 1640), is still making a living mainly from farming, but he obtains the right to practice music for remuneration. His son, Charles I (1595–1654) is going to be the founder of a musical dynasty.

Paul Dessau composed more than 450 works from all the genres, but scarcely a single one of them continues to meet with recognition and representation in today’s concert world. The go-getters of the Ensemble Avantgarde put an end to this unfortunate state of affairs with an impressive overview of the chamber oeuvre of this composer whose vicissitudinous career vividly reflects the dramatic upheavals and achievements of the twentieth century.

The young Dessau celebrated great successes with his Concertino in the unusual instrumentation for solo violin with flute, clarinet, and horn already in 1925 and even won a composition prize for it. Dessau himself actually wanted to become a violinist, and Gewandhaus concertmaster Andreas Seidel masters with bravura what at times is a wildly virtuosic solo part. The young composer’s very own combination of the linear style of a Hindemith and the expressive and complex harmony of the early Schönberg is the hallmark of his individual musical language. Dessau first discovered his Jewish roots during his forced exile in the 1930s. It was during this time that he also began to regard himself as a “political composer.” The Jewish Dances and Guernica after Picasso’s famous painting both resulted from this development, and in the Suite for Saxophone and Piano his excited emotional state after his uprooting has also left behind clear traces in what is quite literally a breathless compositional texture.

When Dessau returned to Germany’s supposed better half in the East after World War II, he repeatedly got caught in the bind between political conformity and artistic freedom. He increasingly turned to the performance of music with children; the “Variations” and “Grasmückenstücke für Mücke Gras” are particularly fine examples of just how attractive good music with educational goals can be.

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Complete Contents:

Concertino for Solo Violin, Flute, Clarinet & Horn / Guernica / Klavierstück Uber B-A-C-H / Intermezzo Breve / Jewish Dances (11) / Suite for Alto Saxophone & Piano / Jewish Dance / Fantasietta Nr. 2 / Variations on an American Folksong / Fantasietta Nr. 3 / Grasmuckenstucke for Mucke Gras / Pieces (3) for Violin & Piano

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REVIEWS:

The music may occasionally be hard to love, but these vibrant performances are also hard to put down. Ensemble Avantgarde does Dessau a service by bringing so many facets of his style under the same banner. The album also offers even lesser-known works, such as “Jewish Dance” (1940), for piano and violin, which rides an intriguing line between harmonic peculiarity and jovial effervescence.

– New York Times

This fascinating album is full of unknown gems, including a piano suite on Jewish religious themes, written for a US community in 1946, and clarinet-piano variations on ‘an American folksong’, which turns out to be I Had a Little Nut Tree. There is a marvellously smoky suite for alt-saxophone and piano, as well as an early concertino for violin, flute, clarinet and horn, both of which exhibit Dessau as a composer of fizzing vitality and originality. We need to hear a lot more of him. This recital, exquisitely delivered by the Leipzig-based Ensemble Avantgarde, is a tantalising taster.

– Norman Lebrecht

In life and music, Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman is a master storyteller. Where Only Stars Can Hear Us is a journey through the songs of Franz Schubert, a composer who was able to capture joy and sorrow in a single moment like no other. Karim’s voyage traverses themes of darkness and yearning, guided throughout by moonbeams and shining stars. His partner is historical keyboardist Yi-heng Yang who plays on a fortepiano built by Joseph Simon in Vienna in 1830, adding an air of authenticity from Schubert’s time. “lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma” (BBC Music Magazine) “a pianist of “astonishing skill and vividness” (The New York Times)



REVIEWS:

Sulayman is always engaging, with an appealing honesty to his approach and a vividness to his storytelling. His light, silvery tenor is in many ways suited to much of the programme’s theme, but the flipside is a paleness and shortness of sap and sweetness; nor does the tenor’s German always feel entirely natural. Adjust to the tone, though, and there’s still a great deal to enjoy in these performances.

– Gramophone

This Schubert has its priorities straight. Text comes first in Sulayman's interpretations. The small inflections in his timbre convey textual themes equally well to audiences of all German-speaking levels. From the seemingly bratty child in Erlkönig (RIP), to the poignantly longing fisherman of Des fischers Liebesglück, he is an actor first.

His voice is clear and transparent. He barely covers his sound, allowing every ounce of that underlying emotion to shine through.

Both performers treat these lieder as chamber music. It's unclear who leads the stretches that come so often throughout the album, but whenever one part pushes, the other follows. Yang's slightly delayed cadences gain weight with a quick breath from Sulayman. Sulayman stretches a phrase climax, Yang rolls a chord to help accent. The two work symbiotically, melding the intense drama from each of their parts into a composite, deeply affecting pathos.

– Classical Music Geek

In this album, his third for na�ve, Julien Martineau once again spotlights the mandolin: it's remarkable repertoire, nobility of character, and natural ability as a partner. Together with pianist Vanessa Benelli Mosell, he has devised a programme truly Beethovenian in it's inventiveness, honeycombed with influences and associations. Beethoven wears the crown, with four youthful pieces he wrote for this unusual duo combination, and the Allegretto of his Symphony No. 7 in a transcription by Hans Sitt. Gathered round his throne are those inspired by him - his contemporary Hummel, Romantic virtuoso Fritz Kreisler, and two composers of today: Walter Murphy, whose pop music arrangement realized by Bruno Fontaine brings in contrabassist Yann Dubost and percussionist Jos� Fillatreau; while Corentin Apparailly responds to Beethoven's Letter to the Immortal Beloved in a work specially commissioned for this album. Revisiting Beethoven in the light of later works composed under his influence enables the perfectly matched team of Julien Martineau and Vanessa Benelli Mosell to create a truly audacious, exciting homage, full of dynamic revelations of the unpublished, the un-expected, and the unknown. 'This programme brings together a lot of repertoire that is extremely virtuosic, but not at all showy,' says Martineau. 'Here there's no way to hide be-hind mere technical brilliance: this recording is above all a chamber music disc, a dialogue of equal voices.'

This new release is part of the Best Loved series, covering a substantial selection of iconic and entertaining works from the Naxos catalogue. This series will be accompanied by supplementary online playlists. Includes works by Purcell, Bach, Handel, Couperin and Rameau taken from recordings such as Wolfgang Rübsam’s Goldberg Variations (8.573921), Byrd’s Fantasias performed by Glen Wilson (8.572433), and Carillon from Poulenc’s Suite française played by Christopher D. Lewis (8.573364).

The young John Barbirolli was hardly known in America when the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra chose him to be Arturo Toscanini’s successor starting in 1937. The 36-year-old Londoner’s first season was a triumph with both players and audiences, and although his years in New York would be increasingly marred by unfair rivalry with Toscanini – lured back to lead a specially created NBC Symphony – and by partisan hostility from two influential critics, Barbirolli’s tenure can now be looked back on as a real success.

From 1938 until 1943, when he returned to the UK to take over Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, Sir John made a series of recordings in New York for American Columbia and RCA Victor which are still essential for a full appreciation of this revered conductor’s career, “performances that are as competitive today as they were when initially released” (Fanfare). Sony Classical is pleased to reissue them in a newly remastered six-CD set.

Among the treasures here are Debussy’s Iberia and Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini (both recorded in 1938) and the first-ever recording of Schubert’s Fourth (“Tragic”) Symphony (from 1939), together cited by Gramophone as “a demonstration that the Philharmonic-Symphony had few rivals in the world at the time as a recording orchestra … A forceful, high-powered reading [of the symphony] which yet has a Schubertian smile … The crisp attack in the Tchaikovsky, even tauter than in Barbirolli’s superb 1969 HMV New Philharmonia version, is thrillingly caught. The Debussy brings the most vivid sound of all, weighty and full of presence, with castanets and brass leaping out from the speakers. This is a white-hot performance, every bit as exciting as those of Toscanini, and with a moving vein of tenderness in the slow second movement.”

There are several works by Mozart, among them the Clarinet Concerto with Benny Goodman (from 1940) and the Symphony No. 25 and Piano Concerto No. 27 with Robert Casadesus (both from 1941). The Piano Concerto’s opening Allegro “is beautifully shaped with an almost palpable sense of wonder in the music and the pianist is definitely having a ball of time,” said Classical Net. “The final Allegro is also very commendable for its grand sense of pomp and majesty … The exquisite symphony also receives wonderful attention and care from Barbirolli and the NYPSO. Here one can sense the conductor's love for Mozart’s inspired melodies … Benny Goodman is a characterful interpreter of the Clarinet Concerto.”

“The generous flavor of Barbirolli’s Brahms comes through in the Academic Festival Overture and the Second Symphony [both from 1940],” wrote Audiophile Audition’s reviewer. “The Overture is rife with ceremonial grandeur and jolly spirits. The D major Symphony has a debonair airiness and bucolic relaxation about it.” And Sibelius’s First Symphony (from 1942) “should delight fans of Barbirolli’s 1960s complete traversal of the symphonies … The conductor’s warmth, vision, and emotional urgency has lost none of its appeal in the more than half century that has passed” (Fanfare).

Also from 1942 is Nathan Milstein playing the Bruch Concerto with “the Philharmonic-Symphony in tremendous form,” exclaimed MusicWeb International’s critic. “Barbirolli opens powerfully and Milstein responds in kind; not over emoted and with vibrato perfectly scaled to the demands of the music. He is really quite withdrawn and introspective in the Adagio, powerfully so indeed, and Barbirolli brings out the horn harmonies in a way that seems to reveal them for the first time. There is romantic fervour but also passagework clarity and digital cleanliness in the finale … a model of concerto accompaniment and creative collaboration.”

CONTENTS

DISC 1:
Purcell (arr. Barbirolli): Suite for Strings, Woodwind and Horns (Remastered)
Debussy: Images pour orchestre, L. 122: No. 2, Iberia (Remastered)
Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 (Remastered)
Respighi: Antiche danze et arie per liuto, Suite No.3 (Remastered)
Respighi: Fontane di Roma (Remastered)

DISC 2:
Schubert: Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, D. 417, "Tragic" (Remastered)
Schubert: 5 German Dances, D. 89 (Remastered)
Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 (Remastered)

DISC 3:
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 39 (Remastered)
Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 (Remastered)

DISC 4:
Smetana: The Bartered Bride, JB 1:100: Overture (Remastered)
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio espagnol, Op. 34 (Remastered) with Mishel Piastro, violin & Joseph Schuster, cello
Ravel: La valse, M. 72 (Remastered)
Berlioz: Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9 (Remastered)
Brahms: Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80 (Remastered)
Debussy: Petite Suite, L. 65, No. 4 "Ballet" (Remastered)
Debussy: Première rhapsodie, L. 116 (Remastered) with Benny Goodman, clarinet
Bach, J.S. (arr. Barbirolli): Sheep May Safely Graze, BWV 208, No. 9 (Remastered)

DISC 5:
Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 with Benny Goodman, clarinet
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-Flat Major, K. 595 (Remastered) with Robert Casadesus, piano
Mozart: Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183 (Remastered)

DISC 6:
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26 (Remastered) with Nathan Milstein, violin
Tchaikovsky: Suite No. 3 in G Major, Op. 55: IV. Tema con variazioni. Andante con moto (Remastered)
Various (arr. Barbirolli): An Elizabethan Suite (Remastered)

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REVIEW:

It is surely no coincidence that this retrospective set is released in the 50th anniversary year of Sir John Barbirolli’s death. It focuses on almost all – but not quite all – of Barbirolli’s recordings with his Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, here updated to ‘New York Philharmonic’. The missing item is the Schumann Violin Concerto with Menuhin, the rights of which now lie with Warner. The inclusion of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze is very welcome here, and as Leonard Slatkin showed in his Bach ‘Conductors’ Transcriptions’ album, it’s a most effective and affecting piece of work.

The first of the six well-filled discs disinters Barbirolli’s arrangements of Purcell. The six-movement Suite proves memorably sonorous and full bloodied with highlights being Fairest Isle and When I am Laid in Earth. This is followed by a splendidly recorded and vividly played Iberia with the Victor engineers on top form, and Francesca da Rimini. Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome and the Arie di corte from the Ancient Airs and Dances are similarly charged.

The Schubert Fourth on Disc 2 - the first recording of the work ever made - is tremendously impressive: powerful, lyrical, excellently controlled. Brahms’ Second Symphony however is exceptionally fast – not a criticism that could ever be levelled at the older JB – and if one thinks that Monteux in San Francisco in 1945 was fleetness itself that would be to reckon without Barbirolli. The Allegretto is uncomfortable to listen to and in fact the whole performance is unconvincing on a number of levels.

Sibelius comes to the rescue in disc three where there are memorable recordings of the First Symphony (1942) and the Second (1940). Sibelius was a known Barbirolli strength but his tempi in the 1950s with the Hallé are predictably more driven than those he took in the following decade. If sound quality is king then the Hallé recordings from the 60s are preferable but interpretively the 1957 First and the 1952 Second – along with the famous RPO Second – are indispensable, along with these two New York recordings.

The fourth CD is a bits-and-pieces affair. There’s lusty Smetana, a brightly recorded but idiomatically played Rimsky Capriccio espagnole, and La Valse which faced predictably strong competition on disc from Munch and Monteux. If the string tone in Le Carnaval romain is a touch acidic, the Academic Festival Overture is more rounded, and the performance a strong B plus. Benny Goodman joins for a timbrally distinctive Debussy First Rhapsody. There’s more Goodman in the penultimate disc where he plays Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Casadesus and Barbirolli make a fine team in Mozart’s Concerto No. 27. Symphony No.25 completes this all-Mozart disc; athletic, youthful and vibrant.

Nathan Milstein’s excellent Bruch G minor heads the final disc and whilst the recording is not top-drawer, Milstein’s playing is. Tchaikovsky’s Tema con variazioni from the Orchestral Suite No.3 is slightly cut. Finally, we end with Barbirolli’s An Elizabethan Suite, his arrangements of Byrd, Farnaby, and Bull, a synchronous way to end given that the first piece of the first disc was his Purcell arrangement.

Each disc is housed in a retro, 78rpm album sleeve and the booklet is filled with 78 and subsequent LP sleeves – very colourful and tactile – as well as job and recording sheets from the sessions and black and white photographs of Barbirolli.

This box is a finely produced and concentrated focus on Barbirolli’s New York shellac years and comes with a fair-minded, level-headed booklet note from James H North.

– MusicWeb International (Jonathan Woolf)

AND I PAINT STARS WITH WINGS is composer Stanley Grill’s most ambitious album to date, presenting several related works for larger ensembles. Expanding on the same themes that influence most of his work, the music on the album represents the composer’s attempt to influence the minds and hearts of those who hear it in such a way as to encourage thoughts about the possibility of world peace, as well as music composed in an attempt to translate something about the nature of the physical world. At the core of the works on the album is the string orchestra, an ensemble that is particularly well suited for composer’s delicate sound landscape based on Renaissance influenced modal, contrapuntal writing, employing extended, interweaving lines of melody. The one work for string orchestra alone, Pavanne (for a world without war), is the first in a series of works for various instruments belonging to the composer’s Music for Peace project, composed, as described by the composer “after having made a decision that my music needed to serve another purpose besides the obvious one of touching the hearts of those who listened to it. However unlikely of success, that purpose is the achievement of world peace.” The work, intended to encourage a spirit of non-violence in those who hear it, imagines music that might be played in a world without war.

After calling it ‘a wonderful album in all respects’, the magazine Diapason concluded its review of Suite Case. Violin Duos from Vivaldi to Sollima (A448) with the question, ‘When can we look forward to the second volume?’ In this new project, the violin of Stefano Barneschi gives way to the cello of Giovanni Sollima, the multi-talented musician from Palermo featured here not only as a composer. On this new journey, again beginning with Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Sollima and Chiara Zanisi travel between early and modern music, between classical and folk (the Old Scots Tunes of Francesco Barsanti), with two previously unrecorded gems by the Roman composer Giovanni Battista Costanzi. The entire recording is punctuated by tracks taken from Suite Case, a cycle composed especially by Sollima for this project.

As a teacher of piano, theory and composition at the conservatoire in Valencia, Vicente Asencio (1908-1979) played an instrumental part in the success of Narciso Yepes and countless other influential Spanish musicians in the middle of the 20th century. His role as a teacher has unfairly overshadowed his own creative output, which now justly takes the spotlight in the talented hands of the Italian guitarist Alberto Mesirca. Asencio’s output for guitar has previously been investigated on record, including by the young Elise Neumann on Brilliant Classics (BC9287) but this is the first-ever album dedicated to his guitar music. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his established reputation as a teacher, it reveals a composer of considerable craft and fluency, entirely at home in his adopted medium. Valencian born and bred, Asencio composed a Suite of Homages that became a calling-card for Yepes and other Spanish guitarists looking to play music of their own era that had something distinctive to say about modern Spain to an international audience. In turn, the homages pay tribute to Scarlatti, de Falla and Lorca, and between them they sum up the ingredients of Asencio’s style: the ruminative grace of the Sonatina, the evocative melancholy of the Elegia, and the fiery sensuality of the Tango. Dating from 1965, Collectici íntim was a second commission from Yepes, a character suite of portraits in the manner of the personalities so wittily drawn by Couperin in his keyboard pieces. Suite mistica derives from a piece commissioned by Spanish radio to mark Holy Week in 1971. Andres Segovia was taken with the work, Dipso (‘I thirst’ – one of the Seven Last Words) that he asked Asencio for two companion pieces, which were written on the subject of the Agony in the Garden and then the rushing wind of Pentecost. Finally, from 1971, there is Asencio’s masterpiece for the guitar, the Suite Valenciana in which he celebrates his own cultural heritage.

 

REVIEW:

 

From a composer who never played the guitar, this music is astounding! It is rich in melody and harmony, with moments of technical brilliance and romantic expression; and it has found a sympathetic voice in the hands of an excellent artist, Alberto Mesirca, who continues a trend among classical guitarists of producing recordings of the complete works of composers, giving us the opportunity to hear more than just their “hits."

 

– American Record Guide

Wilhelm Goldner (1839–1907) was one of the many composer-pianists who populated European musical life in the nineteenth century. Born in Hamburg, six years after Brahms, he trained in Leipzig and made his name and his living in Paris, where his attractive and easy-going music became a favorite of the salons. His first Suite moderne for piano duet, written in 1875, proved so popular that his publisher asked for more, and over the next twelve years Goldner composed five further Suites modernes. Although all six were reprinted in 1904 (by Universal in Vienna, no less), they have long since slipped from sight, and these first recordings restore their charms to modern audiences.

On her PENTATONE debut Reine de coeur, star soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller brings the German and French art song traditions together, focusing on song cycles by Robert Schumann, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Francis Poulenc, accompanied by pianist Juliane Ruf. The album presents a highly personal anthology of songs that address love and loss, and the heights and depths of the human soul. While Schumann’s Sechs Gesänge Op. 107 and Sechs Gedichte und Requiem Op. 90 offer the quintessence of the Romantic German Lied, Zemlinsky’s turn-of-the-century Walzer-Gesänge introduce the listener to a later and less well-known chapter in the genre’s history. Poulenc’s La courte paille and Fiançailles pour rire provide an atmospheric, at times humoristic complement to the Weltschmerz of the German songs. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller is among the most celebrated young sopranos of our times. Reine de coeur is the first album of her exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE. She works together with her regular accompanist, pianist Juliane Ruf.

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REVIEW:

Müller’s timber is well-suited to Poulenc’s whimsical harmonic and compositional idiom. Her French diction is clear and direct, allowing the listener not just to appreciate her musicality but also the poems upon which the songs are based.

The sound engineering is top notch: a nice balance is established between both artists. Where is it easy for the piano to be cast aside as mere accompaniment, this recording gives it considerable weight which allows hearing Ruf’s tone quality. Overall, “Reine de coeur” is a consistently enjoyable album.

– The Classical Review

Any cellist seeking new repertoire, and any listener in search of Romantic cello sonatas beyond Brahms, will alight upon this album with enthusiasm. Although Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) studied under Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) at the Conservatoire in Florence during the early years of the 20th century, their paths diverged when the Jewish Castelnuovo-Tedesco had to emigrate to the US in 1938. Back in 1921 Pizzetti had composed a Cello Sonata thematically unified across its three movements, with an ‘agitated and anguished’ Scherzo at its heart, while the slow outer movements translate elements of medieval chant and polyphony into soulful meditations. Three years later he composed a cycle of Tre Canti – three songs more commonly encountered in the version for violin and piano but better suited to the pitch and expressive range of the cello, so closely molded to that of the human voice. And these really are ‘songs without words’ – by turns affectionate, tender and impassioned. The younger Castelnuovo-Tedesco was more concerned to establish a mood than to tell a story in his instrumental music, and the first movement of his Cello Sonata from 1928 is an object example of his tendency to face both backwards and forwards, artistically speaking, so that he can evoke Romanticism while simultaneously casting doubt upon its certainties and view them from an anxious distance. The album is rounded off with the delicious fantasy on the Largo al factotum and ‘Un voce po’ fa’ from Il barbiere di Siviglia which Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed in two versions, for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, having emigrated and become a fixture on the Hollywood musical scene.

William Mathias was one of the most significant and prolific Welsh composers of the 20th century. His flexible and highly approachable style can be heard in the holiday mood of the Suite Parisienne, the brilliance and lyricism of the Capriccio for flute and piano and the wonderfully rhapsodic Sonata for Harp. Mathias’s songs are among the most communicative settings of their kind, including Pan Oeddwn Fachgen (‘A Dream of Youth’), considered by the composer to be ‘one of the finest lyrical poems in modern Welsh.

Cellist Bozidar Vukotic and pianist Alissa Firsova make their debuts on SOMM Recordings with Russian Visions, a revealing survey of chamber duets by three 20th-century giants: Stravinsky, Schnittke and Dmitri Smirnov. Five contrasting works reveal the diversity of stylistic approaches in modern Russian music while also paying tribute to the country’s revered school of cello playing in pieces dedicated to legendary Russian cellists of the last century – Gregor Piatigorsky, Natalia Gutman and Mstislav Rostropovich. The modernism of Schnittke’s Second Cello Sonata is heard alongside the romantic lyricism of his First Sonata and Smirnov’s Tiriel, and against the neo-classical leanings of Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne and Schnittke’s Musica nostalgica. Heard here in its first recording, Dmitri Smirnov’s Tiriel – one of many pieces inspired by the artist William Blake – was drawn from his similarly titled 1985 opera and takes the form of a lilting, lyrical lullaby welcoming the release from sorrow afforded by sleep. Bozidar Vukotic is a founder-member of the Tippett String Quartet and has been guest principal cellist with leading orchestras in the UK and Europe. He studied with Rostropovich protégé Stefan Popov at the Guildhall School of Music, where he was awarded the prestigious Premier Prix, completing his studies with William Pleeth in London and Alexander Kniazev in Moscow. He teaches at the Purcell School and is Cello Professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire. A much in demand pianist who made her Wigmore Hall and BBC Proms debuts in 2009, Alissa Firsova is also a former BBC Proms Young Composer whose music has enjoyed widespread international exposure in the concert hall and on disc. Her solo performing is complemented by chamber collaborations with distinguished artists such as Stephen Kovacevich, Steven Isserlis, Tim Hugh and Andrew Marriner. She also has a burgeoning career as a conductor. Dmitri Smirnov is her father.

Jacques Casterede was one of many composers who refused to abandon tonality and traditional forms amid the stormy avant-garde of the 20th century. The Quintette for winds was written in 1953, the same year that Casterede won the Prix de Rome, and touches of Gershwin appear among its witty colors. Neo-Classical restraint in the Sonate en forme de Suite contrasts with the grittier and more modernist Musique for flute, harp and string trio, and La Belle Epoque takes us on a whistle-stop tour of Classical repertoire, parodying famous tunes by Haydn and Mozart.