From the desk of Giorgio Gaslini, here we introduce a love story between the voice and the guitar. A story described inside the Sei Interludi has been recorded for the first time on this release, in which you will find both rarified and crystalline atmospheres as well as the bluesy soul of Gaslini with his more sensual, whirling and mystical sounds. Giorgio Gaslini, Italian jazz artist, was a prolific pianist and bandleader whose improvisations and compositions embraced jazz-song forms as well as folk tunes, popular music, ballets, symphonic works, and operas in fusions that he called “total music.” Gaslini, a pioneer of post-World War II modern jazz in Italy, was a versatile performer whose recordings included works by the early-jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton, maverick pianists Thelonious Monk and Sun Ra, and classical composers Giuseppi Verdi and Robert Schumann, among others.

Russian composer, teacher, and conductor Alexander Glazunov is best known as a teacher and mentor of Dmitri Shostakovich. He served as director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928, and was also important in the reorganization of the institute into the Petrograd Conservatory following the Bolshevik Revolution. His Symphonies 2 and 3 are featured on this historic album, as well as his Violin Concerto and his symphonic poem Stenka Razin. These pieces were recorded between 1954 and 1966, and feature the very best musicians of that time, including the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse romande, violinist Nathan Milstein, and The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Beethoven's sacred masterpieces and Helmuth Rilling, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, the Gachinger Kantorei Stuttgart and the outstanding quartets of vocal soloists have achieved world-wide acclaimed in producing a reference recording. Now available in a new 3 box-set, celebrating Beethoven´s anniversary year. Claudio Ronco is undoubtedly among the best artists in Baroque music repertoire, as a skilled Basso Continuo player and a Soloist of virtuoso repertoire. His twenty years of experience with the greatest groups and directors specialized in XVI to XVIIIth Century music, assure him a great stylistic flexibility, together with an extraordinary instrumental virtuosity, so as to distinguish his performances for the freshness of his inventions, spontaneity and elegance. In 2001 he met the cellist Emanuela Vozza who, at the time the first cello of the Bolognese ensemble DSG and of the Cappella Musicale of San Petronio in Bologna, a group created to promote the baroque repertoire, mostly unpublished, preserved in the rich library of this ancient musical institution . The characteristic freshness of her performances and the quality of sound combined with the expressive research, are the qualities that make her playing particularly suitable for facing the chamber music repertoire as well as the difficult art of the Basso Continuo.

The sylloge proposed in this album contains five quartets belonging to different years. Each of them has been composed on the basis of common formal characteristics, but each of them develops its own peculiarities too. The variety of musical choices, the different traditions, solutions and combinations in these quartets shows how Donizetti conceives the quartet form as a compositional workshop. The Mitja Quartet was founded in 2008 by four musicians from Naples, Cosenza, Potenza and La Serena (Chile). The ensemble was formed in the most prestigious academies in Europe (the Fiesole Music School, the European Academy of the Quartet of Florence, the W. Stauffer Academy of Cremona, the Pro Quartet Academy of Paris, the Jeunesse Musicale Deutschland of Weikersheim, the International Piano Academy Incontri col Maestro of Imola), studying with internationally renowned musicians and ensembles, such as the Artemis Quartet, the Alban Berg Quartet, the Casals Quartet, the Kuss Quartet, the Cremona Quartet, Antonello Farulli , Andrea Nannoni and Alfred Brendel. Important Scholarships have been recognized at Mitja by the Fiesole Music School and the Pro Quartet of Paris.”

Giovanni Battista Columbro and the Orchestra Barocca Di Cremona perform Corelli's 6 Concerti Grossi, Op. VI. The Opus number VI presents itself as the 'quintessenza di una ben altrimenti fluida e ricca prassi orchestrale' ('quintessential fluent and rich orchestral practice). On the wave of the transcriptions of opus VI, in this album the musicians employed wind instruments in addition to the strings. This choice is a filological one seeing that, after years of research it has been proved that in the Corellian orchestras there was a significant presence of wind instruments. In this version, the original tonalities have been maintained (which does not often happen in other transcriptions) and the original parts of the two solo violins have been assigned to two transverse flutes as it happened in the first decades of the XVIII Century.

The program chosen for this release features works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Christian Fischer, and Franz Joseph Haydn, all three truly masters of classical composition. The Divertimenti, K. 240 and K. 252 were originally composed for wind sextet, but for this recording an arrangement by Ernst Naumann has been used. Italian Classical Consort is oboist Guido Toschi Misiani, clarinetist Luigi Magistrelli, bassoonist Edmondo Crisafulli, and harpsichordist Chiara Nicora.

A versatile collection of Concertos and Arias by Vivaldi echo of a disenchanted, essential but always energetic experience, which is both human and musical and is translated into those melodic inventions rich of cosmopolitan suggestions for those who are able to grasp all the modern seduction of its nuances. The Solisti Ambrosiani are an Italian ensemble specializing in early music and in the philological performance on original instrumentation, founded in 2008 by the soprano Tullia Pedersoli and the violinist Davide Belosio.

The present release is an album which aims to provide a recording of material which has been unreleased so far and which completes the corpus of the composer, Bartolomeo Bernardi. I Solisti Ambrosiani Baroque Ensemble was founded in 2008 by soprano Tullia Pedersoli and violinist Davide Belosio. The mission of the Ensemble is the study and interpretation of ancient music, performed on original or reconstructed instruments. I Solisti Ambrosiani are often guests of national and international festivals. They have gained the approval of the public and critics for the quality and refinement of their performances. In 2012 they created the Musica Sibrii Festival of which they supervised the artistic direction, organizing concerts of ancient music in the artistically most significant places of the Seprio. Every year the event also hosts external artists, thus becoming an opportunity for cultural exchange and growth.

Despite the fact that this historical execution does not follow the recent philologic parameters, it offers an example of unmatched classicism for its cleanliness, strength of the performers and equilibrium in the recording. The works are performed by Henryk Szeryng. Henryk Szeryng was a Polish-Mexican violinist. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, he studied piano and harmony with his mother before turning to the violin at age 7. He made his solo debut in 1933 playing the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. “One of the music's great aristocrats, violinist Henryk Szeryng was a perfectionist in all things. A man of phenomenal intellect, he combined exemplary musical taste with a super-refined technique and ravishing purity of intonation.” (Julian Haylock – THE STRAD July 2009)

The present release features the first recording of Johann Carl Bischoff's Six Sonatas for Cello performed by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza on period instruments. Johann Carl Bischoff (1747-1800) was a a German composer and a virtuoso cellist. He became a member of the court orchestra of the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau in the 1770s. In 1793, Bischoff invented a cello-like instrument, which he named the Harmonicello. The instrument had five bowed gut strings and ten sympathetic metal ones. The Six Sonatas, featured here, are rooted in the best classical tradition, but above all are able to anticipate the sublime adventure of German Romantic music.

This album gathers several world premiere recordings by a composer who for too long has been pigeonholed as a jazz-only artist: Chick Corea. This is Roberto Franca's homage to an artist able to merge different genres in his compositions and combine the experiences of giants of the classical repertoire such as Bach and Debussy, Bartók and Ligeti. With the phrase “This is...music”, he shows that he does not want to categorize his compositions in a specific musical genre.

This release is dedicated to the most personal vein of Brahms, to that musical intimacy that dwells in him from the works of youth to the works of extreme old age. A melancholy tenderness deeply rooted in his soul on which (and, at times, against which) the Hamburg composer built all his rigorous creative teaching. On the one hand, one of the many manifestations of romanticism, on the other the classical Beethoven heritage and the great tradition of counterpoint (Bach, but also masters more distant in time). The realization of the great forms (symphonies, concerts, sonatas, variations, the major chamber works, the Requiem) often takes place in Brahms through long and troubled gestations, studded with trials, errors, second thoughts: his masterpieces of larger dimensions reveal, among their folds, an incessant effort to perfect. Despite the chronological distance of the proposed works, a red thread connects them: the taste for a lean writing style that evokes solemn and tragic atmospheres; the deep lyrical sweetness, the sense of a pressing and inexorable destiny, a certain irony and almost unsettling playfulness, but, above all, a calm and resigned melancholy that reveals his deepest voice to us.

Brought to London by great Italian virtuosos, around the mid-eighteenth century a season of extraordinary splendor for the cello began, thanks to the enthusiasm of the nobility and the musical market fueled by the emerging bourgeois class. In a short time, the first national cellists will also appear on the scene, such as the celebrated John Crosdill and Robert Lindley. This new publication by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza returns a broad cross-section of the European cello production dedicated to the British public, with chamber works until now largely waiting on the libraries’ shelves, silently.

Chelleri is far older than any other symphonist in our series. In his corpus, the symphony (as understood in a modern sense) is the accomplishment of a long path of research and transformation of style. When Chelleri did deal with “modern symphonies”, counting himself among the proponents of the new instrumental music, after having written mainly harpsichord suites as well as old-style symphonies, he no longer resided in the Duchy of Parma, where he was born, but in northern Europe, in Germany and in Sweden. Chelleri was a great imitator, and these “Six new symphonies” are clearly six stylistic studies on the new trends in vogue in Europe in the 1730s and 1740s.

One of the most legendary conductors of the twentieth century, Charles Munch was, with Pierre Monteux, certainly the greatest French conductor. After a long activity in France, Munch then moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen and reaching the apex with the conduction of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with which he recorded a large number of performances, especially symphonies, published by RCA. These 2 albums represent an important document of some live concert versions of his American activity and are completely unpublished. The sound quality is excellent!