This is the third release in a series of toccata classics critically well-received recordings of orchestral music by the Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000). this volume features works for oboe and strings, the solo instrument played by legendary Hungarian oboist Lajos Lencses, who has made more than fifty recordings. the recording highlights the characteristics that make his music so appealing: Catchy tunes, transparent scoring, buoyant rhythms and a fondness for baroque forms and folk-dances. Two chamber pieces featuring the oboe and Cor Anglais offer textural contrast.

The music of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explores the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. The Second Symphony is a diptych where the wild, stamping, manic whirl of the second movement releases the store of energy pent up by the grief-stricken first. The four-movement Sixth Symphony is a tragic utterance in the monumental manner of the middle-period Shostakovich symphonies, bleak and gripping in equal measure.

Classical Music

As composer, musicologist and critic, Erkki Salmenhaara (1941–2002) was one of the major figures in Finnish musical life in the second half of the twentieth century. His music for organ charts his stylistic evolution, from a modernism influenced by his teacher, György Ligeti, to triadic harmonies spiced with dissonance. Even so, all these works manifest his fondness for the ability of the organ to generate massive and powerful blocks of sound, giving this music a monumental character in keeping with the grand spaces of the buildings in which it is usually heard.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This first recording of the works for violin and piano by the Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin (1902–63) – a close friend and colleague of Shostakovich – reveals a surprisingly high number of unsuspected gems: music immediate in its melodic appeal but plumbing real depths of feeling. It reflects the personal integrity to which Shostakovich paid heart-felt tribute: ‘Shebalin was an outstanding man. His kindness, honesty and absolute adherence to principle always amazed me. His enormous talent and great mastery immediately earned him burning love and authority with friends and musical community.’ Violinist Sergey Kostylev is a first violinist with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra. He performs this programme alongside Russian prizewinning pianist Olga Solovieva.

In the last years of his life, the great composer and violinist Tartini (1692-1770) labored at a 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 is a world premiere of the complete work.

Giacomo Facco (1676–1753), born near Venice, was active in southern Italy as violinist, choirmaster and teacher before his appointment to the Spanish royal court c. 1720. Although highly esteemed in his own time, Facco had disappeared from musical history until his Pensieri Adriarmonici were discovered in a Mexican library in 1962. Bright and buoyant, they have much in common with the music of Vivaldi, Albinoni and Facco’s other Venetian contemporaries – but are here given a distinct twist with a basso continuo of vihuela and guitarrón, as they might have been performed in 18th c. Mexico.

This album is the fourth release in a series of orchestral recordings by Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000). The album focuses on his compositions for strings and flute. These works have all the transparent scoring, driving rhythms, and hearkening to Baroque-style dance forms that make Neo-Classical music so appealing. Flutist Andras Adorjan is featured on this album, alongside Viktoria Herencsar on cimbalom. Janos Rolla also leads the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra on this recording.

A major force of late-Renaissance polyphony, Italian composer Giovanni Maria Nanino (1544-1607) was Palestrina’s successor as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. While at Santa Maria Maggiore, Nanino produced a small, but masterful catalogue of sacred music, which was popular throughout Italy. This is the first recording to be dedicated to Nanino’s music. Maurizio Pastori, the leading authority on Nanino, has prepared the material for this recording, and the edited scores will be soon published by Toccata Press.

The Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) felt the fascination for A Florentine Tragedy, Oscar Wilde’s drama of love and violence in Renaissance Italy, that also attracted his near-contemporary Alexander Zemlinsky: they set the same libretto. Flury responded to the text with this dark and swirling one-act verismo opera, sizzling with sexual tension, the vocal lines of the three characters unfolding over an orchestral texture remarkable for its plasticity and kaleidoscopic color. It is preceded here by a dignified but impassioned operatic scene setting Grillparzer’s dramatic treatment of the suicide of the Greek poetess Sappho.

The Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015) was a virtuoso concert pianist in the tradition of Beethoven, Liszt and Rachmaninov but, like his friend Percy Grainger, he was also fascinated by the folk musics of the world. This third album of his piano music juxtaposes his arrangements of Celtic - Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scots and Welsh - folk-songs and dances with his Chinese and Ghanaian Folk-Song Suites and his resourceful transcription of Grainger's visionary Hill Song No. 1 for wind band, here realized as an expansive tone-poem for the piano. This is the third installment of Christopher Guild's exploration of Ronald Stevenson's music - a crusade he will soon be extending to other Scottish composers.

Bronius Kutavicius' oratorio The Seasons (2005-8) sets texts from a classic Lithuanian poem by 18th c. pastor-poet Kristijonas Donelaitis describing the peasant's life of toil. The Seasons mixes musical modernism and folk-inspired primitivism in an astonishingly powerful portrayal of the interaction of human activity and natural forces. Born 1932, Mr. Kutavicius is Lithuania's senior composer and is regarded as a national treasure. This 2012 live recording documents the first complete performance, given in the composer's presence, as part of the celebrations marking his 80th birthday.

Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), born in Worms, on the Rhine, grew up to be one of the most formidable musicians of his age: composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Even as a teenager, Gernsheim was attracting attention as a virtuoso-composer, earning comparisons with Mozart. These two early piano sonatas – restored by Jens Barnieck from Gernsheim’s manuscripts – combine youthful freshness with preternatural assuredness, showing awareness of Schumann and anticipating Brahms. By the time of the Six Preludes, written a decade later, Chopin has become the dominant star in Gernsheim’s firmament.