Classical Music

As we all know, Walter Gieseking was the first pianist to record the entire piano works of Mozart. This series was produced by the British Columbia and it consisted of no less than 16/20 LPs which have represented a reference point of Mozart’s chamber music discography. From this edition, we have taken all these “minor” but absolutely fundamental pieces (minuets, Variations, Fantasies, Rondos) that today are difficult to find together in one release. French-German pianist Walter Gieseking was largely self-taught. He was born in France and travelled with his family throughout Europe until he enrolled at the Hannover Conservatory where he studied under Karl Leimer until his graduation in 1916. In 1915 he made his debut in Hannover. He was drafted into the German army in 1916, but escaped combat by performing in his regimental band. After the war he undertook the life of a working musician, accompanying singers and instrumentalists, playing in chamber music ensembles, and working as an opera coach.He later became an advocate of new music, performing works by Arnold Schoenberg, Ferruccio Busoni, and Paul Hindemith. One of the most extraordinary pianists of his time, he never practiced, except in his mind. He would study the score, imagine playing it, and then perform it flawlessly.

Classical Music

Giovanni Battista Martinis sacred compositions are considered to be of absolute value for their formal rigor and teaching counterpoint, whereas the works for keyboard instruments, mostly composed for the regligious service at St. Francis chapel in Bologna, already anticipate that gallant taste, with th epractice of teh accompanied melody, which will become trendy at the end of the 18th century. The sonatas included on this album, many of which have eloquent titles don't go beyond that context and if this feature can result in a small interest for such works, they certainly deserve more attention for their historical value.

“With this album we wanted to fill the lack of recordings devoted to the Belgian XVIII Century keyboard repertoire. Belgian music, taking inspiration from the French style, is likewise significant from the musicological point of view.” (Luigi Chiarizia) Luigi Chiarizia, harpsichordist, organist and composer, was born into a family of artists and began to study music at the age of six. He was able to learn from his impressive teachers while at the same time maintaining his own personal musical style and interpretation. He graduated with honors in organ and organ composition at the Pescara Conservatory of music and by the age of nineteen he debuted for I Solisti Aquilani and at twenty five he had already appeared in over eighty concerts. He has studied at the l’Università di Paleografia e Filologia Musicale and, after a few years had won a bursary to study at Accademia Musicale Chigiana di Siena. He continued to hone his skills with Christophe Rousset and, later on, with Leonhardt, Tagliavini, Stembridge and Baiano. He was organist at S. Agata in Cremona and subsequently in S. Stefano in Tesserete (Ticino). He is the author of twenty transcriptions, an anthology of music composition, and eight books of compositions.

The two-act comic opera L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) by Gaetano Donizetti was written hurriedly in only six weeks. It has endured massive success in its life, and remains one of Donizetti’s most performed works. The recording featured here is from 1952, and features the Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Roma della RAI, conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. Soloists featured here include Alda Noni, Cesare Valletti, Sesto Bruscantini, Afro Poli, and Bruna Rizzoli.

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The baroque ensemble I Fiori Musicali has chosen Urania Records for their newest production, a collection dedicated to Boismortier. The name of this composer comes after the decline of the great explosion of French artists of the golden age of Louis XIV. He is not comparable to Lully, Couperin or Rameau, but he expresses a whole part of the early French Englightenment and he fights against the school by Rousseau. This album brings available some of the lesser-known but more refined works of the French composer. The ensemble plays on period instruments and follows the proper timeline of Boismortier's compositions.

Franco Gulli was one of the most prominent and active Italian violinists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He began his studies with his father (a pupil of Šev?ík and Ma?ák at the Prague Conservatory), then went to Arrigo Serato in Siena and later to Szigeti in Switzerland. His varied and significant career included leading the Orchestra of the Pomeriggi Musicali, Milan, for several years, after which he took up a similar post with Virtuosi di Roma. The recordings on this release showcase Gulli at the beginning of his rise to stardom, and were all made over the course of a decade between 1958 and 1967. Three of these works feature Gulli’s wife, pianist Enrica Cavallo, as his accompanist. These are truly spectacular recordings from an outstanding figure in 20th century classical music.

This selection of chamber compositions for the cello aims to reveal the gradual birth of the romantic idea of music in the middle of the historical period called Classicism. Although still partially formulated on the late eighteenth-century model, these works go beyond the usual aesthetic formulas of their time, showing the restlessness and curiosity for the new horizons that revolutionary thought had opened to the eyes of the European minds, in the footsteps of “sentiment” and above all of a new mythology which, as Friedrich von Schlegel wrote: “must be formed by the extreme depth of the spirit.”

The present release features a classic of the Rossini discography, absent from the market for a long time, featuring an entirely Italian cast dominated by Ettore Bastianini. This production was recorded in London in 1956 and has been expertly mastered for optimal sound quality. Originally encouraged to become a singer while training as a pastry chef, Bastianini joined the cathedral choir of Siena and began to study as a bass in 1939. He gave his first professional concerts during 1940 and 1941 and in 1942 won first prize in the National Singing Competition in Florence. In Europe during the mid-1950s Bastianini appeared in historic productions, many of which have fortunately been preserved through unofficial recordings.

Little is known about the life of Dietrich Steffkins. He worked during the apogee of solo music practice and was considered an extraordinary viola da gamba virtuoso. His compositions are collected in some funds together with the works of other musicians, and are still to be fully rediscovered. The purpose of this album is to testify to the compositional practice of an author who still offers great expressive possibilities through the research and use of the viol used in its various forms.

A leading German cellist and viola da gamba player with training from the top conservatories, Dietmar Berger is primarily known for his performances of early chamber music for strings. Berger has been a member of the Delos Trio Köln, and he has been featured as a soloist in several recordings, such as his Manchester Gamba Book (2012) and Berlin Gamba Book (2015), both released by Naxos, and Music for the Medieval and Renaissance Fiddle, released by Urania (2018).

This double album aims to gather Beethoven’s works for flute, whether they are cataloged with opus numbers or classified after his death under the abbreviation WoO. This choice is going to enhance those compositions which have too often been dismissed as not reflecting the Romantic image of Beethoven’s character, and have been disregarded in the theatre programs, thus depriving us of the pleasure of imagining and appreciating the true nature of Beethoven’s personality in compositions that are pleasant and “simple” to listen to.

The compositions contained in this release allow us to become familiar with the most significant and compelling chamber music scores composed on texts by Dante between the 19th and the 20th centuries. The primary literary source is the Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno with its characters whose worldly events were horribly and romantically overwhelming. The other work whose verses have been put to music is Vita nova, a middle way between poetry and prose, that is the emotional obsession of an adolescent for the stylized figure of a woman his own age.

Brazil is not only coffee, football, carnival, toucans and parrots. There is another, parallel world, which is just as colorful: the world of classical music, most of which is still unknown to Europeans. Indeed, this album is part of a piano project dedicated to the rediscovery and dissemination of Brazilian composers who worked between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. The aim is to emphasize and enhance the universal characteristics of mixture and cultural heritage, erasing the distance between the music and the listener. In order to do this we decided to start with the man who is considered the greatest Brazilian classical musician, Villa-Lobos: a prolific composer, multi-instrumentalist and promoter of cultural renewal.