Marcel Dupre (1886-1971) was the most prominent French organist of his generation, playing hundreds of recitals on his international tours, and his compositions have entered the standard organ repertoire. But his piano and chamber works have not received the same attention. They are audibly French - there are points of contact with Chabrier, Faure and Satie - but they go their own surprising way, occasionally taking on a ritual, even hypnotic, character that imparts an oriental, quasi-minimalist, flavour.

Two traditions coalesce in Casanova e l'Albertolli (1937), the third of the four operas by the Swiss late-Romantic composer Richard Flury (1896-1967): Italian bel canto and the Swiss Festspiel - high art and popular culture. Styled a 'Commedia lirica', it invests the comic intrigue onstage with sweeping melodies of Puccinian richness, combining them with choruses based on Ticino folksong - it even has a yodelling chorus - in an engaging hybrid that deserves to be far better known. At the end, of course, evil is banished and love rewarded, but the entire score is dappled with happy inspirations that will bring a smile to the listener's lips.

The largest part of the output of the Hamburg-born composer and writer Walter Niemann (1876-1973), a student of both Humperdinck and Reinecke, is piano music: an astonishing 1,000 or so pieces, divided into 189 opus numbers. Most of them are lyrical miniatures in a warm and approachable late-Romantic style, some evoking the music of the past - often with a touching degree of dignity and restraint, but also with an occasional flash of good humour.

The strength and richness of Estonian classical music has it's origins in two contrasting schools - the international outlook taught by Heino Eller in Tartu and the craftsmanship fostered by Artur Kapp in Tallinn. This album presents Eller's complete output for cello and piano in it's first recording, complemented by works by two of his more important students, Eduard Oja and Eduard Tubin. Villem Reimann and Herman Kand, both students of Kapp, had very different careers, Reimann an established professor in Soviet Estonia, and Kand dying unknown in American exile at only 46. This is the first recording of any of his music.

The music and teaching of Juozas Gruodis (1884-1948) laid the foundations for a national school of composition in Lithuania in the first half of the twentieth century, with his style absorbing influences from both east and west - Rachmaninoff, Skryabin, Chopin, Debussy, Reger, Strauss - and from Lithuanian folk-music. Though the piano works heard here were composed within a span of only eight years, they show considerable variety, from the poised to the passionate and powerful, all expressed with full-bodied late-Romantic virtuosity and verve.

For the latter part of her long life, Ester Magi (1922-2021) was known as 'the First Lady of Estonian music', her modest, charming disposition endearing her to all who met her. But her music reveals the true strength of her personality, and this first complete recording of her songs for female voice - over half a century of compositional activity - covers a striking emotional range, from the ambivalent feelings of falling in love to dramatic ritual invocations of startling force and power. Many of the earlier songs are openly romantic, but Magi soon began to tap into the hypnotic energy of Estonian runic folksong, with it's echoes of village life and it's incantations intended to placate a hostile environment.

The neglect of Moses Pergament (1893-1977) can be ascribed in part to the complexities of his life: he was born in Finland of Lithuanian-Jewish stock, a student in Russia and a Swedish citizen by 1919. As a result, no national culture stepped forward to claim him, with his outsider status initially worsened by blatant anti-Semitism - and the gradual realisation that he was one of the most interesting Swedish composers of the mid-twentieth century then fell away again after his death. This series of recordings aim to return his music to the public ear, beginning with an album tracing the growth of his style, from early Romanticism to a spicy Bart�kian vivacity, occasionally animated by Jewish melos and dance-rhythms.

The exploration of the music of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) on Toccata Classics continues with this first recording of two more of his seven string quartets. Flury was himself a gifted violinist, and these works - written for personal pleasure and for musician friends - observe the classic definition of the string quartet as a conversation between four equal partners, with Flury's many years of practical music-making producing quartet-textures that are thoroughly idiomatic, even masterly. Both works speak a rich late-Romantic language similar to that of composers such as Korngold, Schmidt and Zemlinsky and encompass a gratifying range of emotions, from touching introspection to bucolic cheer.

The Cremonese composer Marc'Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36-92) is chiefly remembered as the teacher of Claudio Monteverdi while, for well nigh 500 years, his own achievements were left to sit in the shadows. This pioneering recording reveals Ingegneri to have been one of the masters of his age, writing music of breathtaking richness and beauty: the polychoral works to be heard here combine learned, intricate counterpoint with the kind of sheer sonic thrill that brings a shiver of physical excitement. Girton College Chapel Choir is an international-prize-winning choir of some 25 members, which has grown in prominence over the last ten years, due to it's impressive musical standards, regular recordings, and ambitious, exciting touring schedule. During Full Term, the Choir's principal function is to sing the liturgy in Girton's Chapel. This includes Choral Evensong every Sunday, and Compline (a beautiful, meditative evening service) every Tuesday, and Vespers every Friday. For this, the Choir rehearses just twice a week. Recent foreign tours have included Israel & Palestine, Canada, Portugal, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, USA, Germany, Slovenia, France, Ireland, Switzerland and Spain.

In this second volume of his survey of Cuban composers for the piano, Jose Raul Lopez presents the work of Nicolas Ruiz Espadero (1832-90), the most prominent name in Cuban music in the second half of the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Espadero's output ranges from delicate Chopinesque salon miniatures to barnstorming Lisztian operatic paraphrases that demand a fearsome virtuoso technique to do justice to their high-Romantic swagger. Jos� R. L�pez is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Keyboard Studies Program at Florida International University in Miami. Dr. L�pez is the President of the South Florida Chapter of the American Liszt Society, inaugurated in 2010 at FIU and was recently appointed Honorary Secretary of The Alkan Society, based in London. He has performed throughout the United States, Italy and Central and South America with orchestras, in solo recitals, and with chamber groups in summer festivals such as the Music Festival of the Hamptons in New York and the Killington Music Festival in Vermont. Active throughout South Florida, he has been a featured performer in the Florida International University's Music Festival; ISCM New Music Miami Festival, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, Coral Gables' Mainly Mozart Series, University of Miami's Miami Festival, and as founder and co-director of the Deering Estate at Cutler's "Chamber Concert Series," entering it's 12th year.

Classical Music

Piano music forms a large part of the output of the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea (b. 1959), as you would expect of someone who has been playing the instrument since she was four. This first album of her music reveals a latter-day Impressionist, sensitive to half-light and petal-delicate tonal color – but she can also generate powerful surges of energy, and her musical portrait of Charlie Chaplin testifies to an impish sense of humor. Teodorescu’s music explores spectralism, neoimpressionism and postmodernism with a powerful lyric and dramatic effect (Oxford music online). She is Professor of composition at the National University of Music Bucharest and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She introduced a new musical poetics called hypertimbralism pursuing intertextuality based on timbre. Teodorescu has lectured at Illinois Urbana Champaign, Oslo, Monash and Huddersfield Universities. She has written over 60 works.

This second volume of orchestral music by the English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957), long since resident in France, brings three powerful works all with their origins in earlier pieces. Incubus examines the terrors of nightmare-riven sleep in a vigorous symphonic essay based on a movement from Elcock’s string quartet Night after Night. The impulse behind Haven, an expansive and surprisingly muscular fantasy, is the Sarabanda theme from Bach’s First Partita for solo violin. And Elcock’s Fifth Symphony takes its cue from the most famous of all Fifth Symphonies, re-examining Beethoven’s structural logic in Elcock’s own musical language to produce a volcanic new Fifth, its charge of wild energy husbanded to maximum dramatic effect.

In the last years of his life, the composer, violinist and swordsman Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) laboured at a vast cycle of sonatas for solo violin. The resulting manuscript offers the most important composition for solo violin after Bach and, at six hours in duration, the largest integrated work for the instrument. This first complete recording is based on a fresh study of the source and includes a number of works deciphered from Tartini's shorthand and overlooked in earlier editions. These 'Little Sonatas' tread a delicate line between Baroque formality and proto-Romantic passion, occasionally illuminated with an echo of the folk-fiddling of his Slovenian homeland.

Much of the music of Joan Cabanilles (1644–1712) is as virtuosic and colourfully Baroque as that of his northern contemporary, Dietrich Buxtehude, though it is also touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. He is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ, and publication of his works, begun in 1927, is still under way. This is the second in an ongoing series of recordings designed to restore a great Valencian master to his unique glory. Timothy Roberts studied with Christopher Kite and Jill Severs, also receiving masterclass tuition from Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. He worked for about thirty years as a busy touring keyboard player, twenty of them as principal keyboard of the Gabrieli Consort and his Players; he also became director of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. In recent years he has also gained experience as a recording engineer and sound editor, composer and music-typesetter.