Known for his outstanding orchestral works, Jon Leifs draws inspiration from the naturally occurring phenomena of his native Iceland. This disc contains all thirty-two of the composer’s solo songs. Tenor Finnur Bjarnason is joined by pianist Orn Magnusson for this album.

Aside from three impressive string quartets, Icelandic composer Jón Leifs’ (1899–1968) chamber music consists of only two original works - Quintet, op. 50, Scherzo concreto, op. 58 - and his string quartet arrangement of his Variazioni pastorale, op. 8, originally for orchestra. + All of these works are included on this disc, which closes with one of the composer’s most personal works: Erfiljóð (Elegies), composed in 1947 shortly after the death by drowning of his young daughter Líf. + BIS Records have re-mastered these original Smekkleysa label recordings for this present release.

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(World Première Recording) Few composers have been as consistently preoccupied with their national origins as Jón Leifs, who only found his calling as a composer when he encountered a collection of Icelandic folk music. From the very beginning, Iceland, its music and myths, its landscape and climate furnished him with the material for almost all of his compositions. And from the very beginning Leifs knew that he wanted to create a great oratorio using texts from the Edda, Iceland's national treasure. The scoring is among Leifs' most colourful and inspired, including the composer's signature Nordic lurs and an extended percussion section. This landmark in Icelandic music is performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum choir under the baton of Hermann Bäumer - a constellation that last came together on disc on the highly acclaimed Viking's Answer, the previous Leifs' release on BIS.

It is possible that the reviewer who characterized Jón Leifs (1899-1968) as "a composer in no danger of being lost in the crowd once his music is heard" was thinking primarily of works such as Geysir (BIS-CD-830), Hekla (BIS-CD-1030) or Hafís (BIS-CD-1050) - works which contain some of the most astoundingly loud music ever recorded! If the present CD is less generous in terms of decibels or special effects such as the sound of Icelandic rock cascades, the music is still unmistakeably Jón Leifs. All but one of the works are for choir or solo voices and orchestra, and their subject matter is, as often with Leifs, either Iceland itself or the ancient myths of the country. Gróa's Spell and The Lay of Helgi the Hunding-slayer, for instance, are both based on texts from the Poetic Edda, while Landfall for male choir and orchestra was inspired by Leifs' first glimpse of land on his return to Iceland after the 2nd World War. Also included on this disc is the Iceland Cantata (from 1930), a work in seven movements for mixed choir and orchestra which Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, the expert on Jón Leifs, in his generously informative liner notes calls the composer's "first real masterpiece, and one of the high points of his entire career." A curiousity for those who follow our Leifs series is Spring Song, a short work which is strikingly - for Leifs - light-hearted and joyous. As surprising will be the orchestration in Viking's Answer (Víkingasvar).The only instrumental work on the disc, it is scored for a wind orchestra with four saxophones (the only time in Jón Leifs' music), violas and double basses! As on previous CDs in the series, it's the Iceland Symphony Orchestra which gives us this rare - three of the works are World Première Recordings - opportunity to hear the music of their great countryman. (The orchestra's latest offering, Baldr BIS-CD-1230/31, was termed an account of "enormous conviction" by the reviewer in BBC Music Magazine.)

Conductor Dalia Stasevka, who received the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Personality of the Year’ Award in 2023, and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra present three works by the Finnish composer Helvi Leiviskä, who was Finland’s first major female composer. Initially inspired by the language of late Romanticism – she mentioned Brahms as her favorite composer – Leiviskä developed an original, modern style that eschewed all schools, convinced that it was more important to tread one’s own path than to follow fashionable styles. While her output may seem small in terms of quantity, it more than makes up for it in the quality of the works, especially her symphonies, a genre she considered ‘the highest manifestation of music’.

This disc presents three works: the Sinfonia Brevis, a confidently crafted work reminiscent of Sibelius; the austere, restrained, melancholy and at times very dissonant Symphony No. 2, which could be called ‘tragic’; and the Suite for orchestra No. 2, which uses material from a powerfully descriptive score originally composed for a film. This recording bears witness to the ‘Leiviskä renaissance’ that has taken place in recent years, which has contributed to the rediscovery of a neglected but important voice in Finnish music.

Includes song(s) without words by Felix Mendelssohn. Soloists: Leo Eide, Håkan Sund.

The collaboration between composer Philippe Leroux and the husband-and-wife team of Claude and Odile Delangle began in the early 1990s and has grown ever closer over the years. In October 2019 the three met up again for a few intense days, in order to record Noûs, a programme of works for soprano saxophone and for solo piano. The album is bookended by two duos for the instruments – the opening SPP a reworking by the composer of an earlier score, and the closing Noûs that Leroux wrote for the Delangles only a few months before the recording. In both of these – albeit in different ways – the composer explores a couple of his favorite principles, namely those of continuity and transformation. Between them we hear works from the past decade, beginning with AMA for solo piano, from 2009. The other two piano works, Répéter… Opposer and Dense… Englouti are both tributes to Claude Debussy, a composer who occupies an important place in the musical universe of Philippe Leroux. At the centre of the disc, finally, is the highly virtuosic Conca Reatina for soprano saxophone. Loosely inspired by the contours of the mountains surrounding the Rieti Valley (Conca reatina), the piece is a dizzying sonic Möbius strip which keeps returning the listener to his point of departure.

Following acclaimed recordings devoted to English music for viol consort, notably that of Christopher Simpson (BIS-2153), Henry Purcell (BIS-2583) and William Byrd (BIS-2663), the Chelys Consort now presents a programme that explores the kind of music that might have been played in France in the 16th and 17th centuries. The works presented here include arrangements and fantasies on popular songs, dances and a suite, demonstrating the extreme versatility of the viola da gamba, which, alone or in a group, could adapt to all musical genres. Although the French golden age of said instrument was between the mid-17th and mid-18th centuries - represented here with works by Charpentier, Metru and Lully - the programme also gives prominence to earlier compositions, with dances and fantasies by Caroubel, Le Jeune, Moulinie, Du Caurroy, Louis Couperin and Du Mont. Finally, the programme also includes three pieces for solo guitar by Francois Campion, performed by guest musician James Akers. These pieces remind us that the baroque guitar, depicted foreshadowingly in paintings by Vermeer and Watteau, was to replace the lute as the most widespread domestic musical instrument. A programme that emphasises elegance, refined melancholy, beautiful sound and a subtle dialogue between the different instruments.

Theodor Leschetizky, born 1830, was a pianist and an internationally renowned and sought-after mentor to a large number of pianists. Although Leschetitzky was also active as a composer, his music is largely ignored nowadays, and in his liner notes Tobias Bigger relates how he came across it indirectly, through an interest in Ignaz Friedman, one of Leschetizky’s most famous students. Much of Leschetitzky’s production consists of character pieces for piano, and a closer study convinced Bigger of the particular qualities of many of them. He was particularly impressed by the fact that even though they convey Leschetitzky’s own joy in masterful piano playing and place considerable demands on the performer, there are no displays of empty keyboard acrobatics. For his first disc on BIS, Bigger has selected pieces from Leschetitzky’s later production, and primarily those that are not readily available in recorded form.

REVIEW:

All of these pieces are quite fetching, some are arrestingly beautiful, and it’s Tobias Bigger’s artistry that makes them so. There’s much to admire in Bigger’s playing of these Leschetizky pieces: pellucid tone, sure-fingered technique, and an obvious relish for music that not many others have found the taste or time for. Pianists, in particular, may take special interest in this release, but appreciating Leschetizky’s music is not contingent on your ability to play the piano. Bigger will do that for you, and he does it really well.

– Fanfare

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Described as ‘one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time’, György Ligeti (1923 – 2006) was able to constantly reinvent himself. In his earliest works, written in Communist Hungary, the musical language is often an extension of that of Bartók’s and he kept his most daring compositions to himself. Escaping Hungary in 1956 he was able to revel in the freedom to experiment – with electronic techniques as well as elaborate serialism – but he was forever sceptical of schools and steered his own course throughout life. The 1960s and early 70s were a highly productive period, which saw works such as Lux Aeterna and Lontano, as well as three of the works on the present disc. In the Cello Concerto and the Chamber Concerto, Ligeti in different ways explores the idea of the concerto as something collective, rather than polarised between the one and the many. The Cello Concerto is striking, and even provocative, in that the soloist often seems to aspire to silence and even absence rather than virtuosic display. The Chamber Concerto, on the other hand, dazzles because here all 13 players are unmistakably present, all essential to the design and character of the whole. Like the Cello Concerto – and the Piano Concerto – Melodien can be performed by large orchestra, but also, as on the present recording, with a single string player per part, becoming a natural pendant to the Chamber Concerto. The disc closes with the Piano Concerto from 1988, which Ligeti had begun sketching eight years earlier but was only able to proceed with after having composed his first set of studies for piano solo. Ligeti himself described the five-movement work as a statement of his ‘aesthetic credo’. Performing these complex scores is the Norwegian specialist ensemble BIT 20 under the Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann, with soloists Christian Poltéra and Joonas Ahonen, making his first appearance on the BIS label.

For it's first recording for BIS Records, the Marmen Quartet tackles three major works from the twentieth-century string quartet literature. The two quartets by Gyorgy Ligeti belong to two different periods in the composer's output. Written before Ligeti left Hungary and emigrated to the West, the First, subtitled 'Metamorphoses nocturnes', represents the peak of his 'Hungarian' period. Regarded as a virtuoso exercise, the work reveals the influences of Bela Bartok, particularly from his Third and Fourth Quartets. Ligeti's Second Quartet belongs to his second period, particularly rich in significant works. Considered by the composer as a response to the works of his illustrious predecessors such as Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok and Berg, the Second Quartet, with it's calculated anarchy, dynamic extremes and sublime climaxes, is not only one of Ligeti's masterpieces but also a true classic of modernism. Bela Bartok's Fourth Quartet, which had a particularly strong influence on Ligeti, is widely seen as one of his most radical; it requires high levels of technical accomplishment from the performers, yet reveals a deep understanding of the instruments, and draws an unprecedented range of colour and character from them.

Selected by ECHO (the European Concert Hall Organisation) as one of its ‘Rising Stars’ of the 2009/10 season, the Swedish clarinettist Emil Jonason has become increasingly visible on the international music scene. For his first release on the BIS label he has chosen to record a concerto written for him by his compatriot Christian Lindberg, composer, conductor and legendary trombonist. As Lindberg remarks in his own note on the work, the soloist was involved at all stages of the compositional process. But the Erratic Dreams are the composer’s own – as is the figure of Mr Grönstedt, the main character of those dreams, and of the six movements that make up the colourful score. In his teens, Emil Jonason was attracted by klezmer music, and played in various klezmer bands. It was therefore a natural choice to combine Lindberg’s concerto with the Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s work The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. In contrast to Lindberg, Golijov found inspiration in a historic figure, the medieval rabbi Isaac the Blind, and his lifelong dedication to the ideas of the Kabbalah. Golijov describes the movements of his work being written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout its history: Aramaic, Yiddish (‘the rich and fragile language of a long exile’) and Hebrew. The work includes references to Jewish prayers as well as to klezmer tunes and the clarinettist is specifically requested by the composer to acquaint himself with the idiom of klezmer music.

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As a performer and conductor, Christian Lindberg has a rare ability to electrify an audience, and as reviewers attest, the same applies to his compositions. Released on disc in 2018, his viola concerto Steppenwolf was described as ‘one of those rare contemporary works that captures the attention from the first notes’ (Fanfare) while the five-star review in BBC Music Magazine spoke of ‘thrilling orchestral storytelling’ and ‘glorious musical cavalcades’. The present album offers further opportunity to acquaint oneself with the unstoppable energy of Lindberg in all of his three incarnations. The album is named after the closing work, 2017, described by Lindberg as his testimony about a year when the world changed, as a result of the US presidential election. Starting work on it on 1st January he followed the news in the media and let it feed his creative process throughout the course of the year. The opening work is an earlier one, commissioned for the nine trombones of The New Trombone Collective, and inspired by the spectacle of great waves rolling in at the beach in Wollongong, Australia. Framed by these two is Liverpool Lullabies, a concertante work for percussion and trombone which Lindberg composed with Evelyn Glennie and himself in mind. They are also the soloists on this recording, supported by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra which also shines in the other two works on the album.

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At first glance, the two composers represented on this disc may seem an unlikely couple: Franz Liszt the archetypal virtuoso-composer who crisscrossed 19th century Europe mesmerizing his audiences, and Olivier Messiaen who at the age of 22 was appointed organist at the Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris, remaining there for the rest of his life. In this imaginatively constructed programme, the Swedish pianist (and neuroscientist) Fredrik Ullén juxtaposes music by the two, showing that there are closer parallels between them than might be expected. For a start, a significant role in both composers' work was played by religious convic­tions, and three of the Liszt pieces included here are related to saints of the Catholic Church: the composer's own patron saint St Francis of Paola, St Dorothea and St Francis of Assisi, whose sermon to the birds is the subject of the first of the Two Legends. But both men also ventured into unexplored musical territory, with Messiaen exploring bird song (which he chose to regard as an expression of 'religious joy') and Hindu rhythms, for instance in Cantéyodjayâ. Meanwhile Liszt in his later years would develop an austere musical style full of dissonance, whole-tone scales, diminished and augmented chords - as striking as it is advanced, and looking ahead far into the twentieth cen­tury. One of the prime examples of this late style is Unstern! Sinistre, disastro. On several discs for BIS, Fredrik Ullén has demonstrated not only a stupendous virtuosity, but also a striking originality in his choice of repertoire, including Ligeti's Études and George Flynn's unique, almost two-hour long triptych Trinity, described as 'an utterly convincing performance of this incredible work' on the website MusicWeb International.

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Few literary works exerted as strong an influence on European culture in the 19th century as Goethe's play Faust. While several important composers drew inspiration from it, Franz Liszt seems to have had a particularly close relationship with Goethe's masterpiece. He came up with the idea of a symphony 'in three characteristic pictures', each devoted to a key character in the play: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. Rather than telling the story of the play, Liszt composed a psychological exploration of these three main figures. He was also a pioneer in his use of leitmotifs, i.e. short musical ideas that underline a trait of character or evoke feelings, a process that his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner, would take even further in his operas. This recording presents the original, purely instrumental version of the Faust Symphony from 1854. This gigantic work is complemented by the first of the Mephisto Waltzes, inspired by Nikolaus Lenau's vision of the Faust myth. These two works offer two very different perspectives on Liszt's intense relationship with the character of Faust, and in particular with that of Mephistopheles, around whom many of his compositions are structured. They are key works for understanding Liszt's aesthetic project and the typical nineteenth-century tendency towards a combination of the arts.

This is the best Liszt orchestral recital to come along in many a moon, and it's all the more enjoyable given the involvement of Rafael Frübeck de Burgos, a fine conductor and a real trooper who has not received much attention since he ended his association with EMI several decades ago. Hopefully, this release signals an extensive new partnership with BIS, because Frübeck has the potential to become a major musical voice given half a chance. My, but this man knows his Liszt! Les préludes has grandeur, athletic vigor, and a genuine rush of excitement in the closing pages, with nary a trace of gratuitous bombast. Anyone who knows these works understands just what an achievement this represents. Take, for example, the concluding phrases for lower strings and trombones at the end of Tasso's allegro sections: Frübeck conjures an ideally rich, dark sound, perfectly balanced, never crude. Similarly, the much-maligned Festklänge displays nobility without excessive weight or rhythmic ponderousness. Best of all, Orpheus' sweetness avoids any hint of tackiness, thanks in large part to sensitive phrasing applied to warm, cultivated string sonorities.

Frübeck secures marvelous playing from the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been Music Director since 1994. The solo winds sport fresh timbres and excellent intonation, the brass cut nicely but never overpower, and the strings attack their parts with great confidence and rhythmic security. Add to these qualities first class recorded sound, which gives the percussion excellent impact without undue spotlighting, and if you have ever doubted the quality of this music, here's a disc that should dispel any qualms. Incidentally, Festklänge sports a tune that sounds remarkably like the Canadian national anthem, which I always thought was stolen from the opening of Act 2 of Mozart's Magic Flute. Go figure. Recordings such as this are all too likely to be dismissed because of the repertoire, or lost in a torrent of new releases arriving monthly in the shops, particularly as Frübeck isn't the "name" he once was. So don't make the mistake of passing this one by.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

As a teenager, Franz Liszt created at least two virtuosic concertos for piano and orchestra, scores which now are lost. The three works gathered here first saw the light of day only a few years later, however, during the 1830's when Liszt’s career as a young, travelling virtuoso was at its height. The two numbered concertos, which Liszt revised extensively before letting them be published some 25 years after their conception, frame the single-movement Malédiction for piano and strings which Liszt composed in 1833 and revised in 1840, but which was never published in his lifetime. Stepping into Liszt's shoes for the present recording is Alexandre Kantorow, another very young man. Born in 1997, Alexandre is here supported by his father Jean-Jacques Kantorow conducting the Tapiola Sinfonietta, a team with a number of highly acclaimed recordings to their credit. The recording is Alexandre’s first for BIS, as well as being his début concerto disc, and represents a remarkable achievement by a hugely promising talent, as well as being a vibrant and exciting account of three impassioned scores.

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On the present disc it is the all-Brazilian team of eminent pianist Arnaldo Cohen and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Neschling who join forces. Arnaldo Cohen is a highly respected Liszt interpreter, as he has shown on a previous BIS release (CD1253), which earned him an Editor's Choice in Gramophone as well as glowing reviews, such as the following in the Chicago Tribune: 'These performances pack a tremendous visceral punch...among the most musically intelligent recordings of these celebrated pieces to grace the catalogue.' The São Paulo SO and Neschling have recently been earning international recognition both after highly successful tours and a number of BIS recordings that among other things have been desribed as 'the most vibrant, colourful, rhythmically vital and virtuosic performances imaginable' (Classics Today.com)

The Transcendental Études form a cycle of twelve pieces whose composition began in 1826 and was completed in 1851. Starting from the idea of an encyclopædic collection which, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Liszt’s Transcendental Études became something of a seismograph of his compositional aesthetic, first strongly under the influence of Paganini, later more in the style of character pieces. These études are among the most difficult works ever written for the piano. Together with Chopin’s Études, they serve as a basis for piano technique, some of them already prefiguring musical impressionism, and they had a significant influence on subsequent piano music, most notably that of Debussy, Rachmaninov, Bartók, and Ligeti.

In 2009, Haochen Zhang was the youngest pianist ever to receive the Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Since then, he has captivated audiences worldwide with a unique combination of deep musical sensitivity, fearless imagination and spectacular virtuosity. After two releases devoted to concertos (Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, BIS-2381 and Beethoven, BIS-2581), Zhang returns to the solo recital with this disc devoted to some of the most important works in the repertoire of modern pianists.

REVIEW:

Haochen Zhang’s Liszt Transcendental Etudes are bound to attract intense scrutiny, in light of these works’ recent proliferation in the catalog and Zhang’s growing prominence on the international piano scene. The brief opening Prelude’s individual touches are totally borne out by the score: such as the accented ascending left-hand lines, or how the marcatissimo chords take on a slashing ferocity when played strictly in tempo, as opposed to the broadening one hears from most pianists.

Some may find the second etude too compulsively detailed where inner voices sometimes stick out to a fault, while the upward leggermente triplets are on the careful, studio-bound side. It takes a while for Paysage’s long lines to truly resonate and soar. Mazeppa’s thickets of notes hold no difficulties for Zhang’s technique, yet his clattery, undifferentiated textural layering pales next to the extraordinary three-dimensional perspectives revealed in Yunchan Lim’s 2022 Van Cliburn Competition semi-finals performance.

Happily, Zhang’s fusion of breathtaking speed and felicitous poetry make for a Feux Follets worthy to mention alongside those of Sviatoslav Richter and Minoru Nojima. The pianist builds Vision in steadily moving blocks, and wisely starts out less loudly than Liszt indicates in order for the fortes and fortissimos to make a stronger impact. He takes more than usual dramatic advantage of Eroica’s fermatas, while his muted deliberation in the main section transforms the music into more of a funeral than military march.

To my ears, Zhang’s swiftness and clipped articulation in Wilde Jagd’s broken octaves and rapid-fire chords evokes not so much a royal hunt as a Road Runner cartoon. However, the lyrical Ricordanza features some of Zhang’s most direct, and stingingly proportioned pianism in the cycle. His forthright pacing and wide dynamic scope in Harmonies du Soir convey a similar impression. While it’s impressive how Zhang shapes and controls No. 10 to the extent that he does with little help from the sustain pedal, the effects draw more attention to themselves rather than to the music’s underlying agitato subtext. By contrast, the pianist’s variety of touch and timbre minimizes the tremolo texture’s potential for fatigue and monotony.

In sum, you may not agree with all of Zhang’s interpretive decisions, yet he clearly is a thinking and often stimulating virtuoso who leaves a strong imprint on these oft-recorded works. With that in mind, I prefer the conceptual consistency and more settled musicality of an earlier BIS Liszt Etudes from pianist Laszlo Simon (a/k/a Joyce Hatto, for those who remember the scandal we helped to uncover back in 2007). I also should mention that Yunchan Lim’s stunning Liszt cycle from the Cliburn is imminent from Steinway & Sons, hence its inclusion among the reference versions.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

With this recording of a selection of Franz Liszt’s music for violin and piano, Ulf Wallin and Roland Pöntinen aim at expanding our understanding of the prolific composer whose style, especially later, evolved in a manner far ahead of its time. Liszt composed his first music for violin and piano as early as 1832, returning to this instrumental combination throughout his life. Some of the pieces are re-workings of earlier compositions. In the early Grand Duo concertant pure virtuosity and the joy of playing are to the fore, but in the late works Liszt takes us on a journey into his own innermost soul.

Published in 1733, Pietro Locatelli’s L'Arte del violino for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo took both violin technique and the solo concerto as a genre into a whole new realm. The twelve concertos included in the collection also played a part in forming the image of the violin virtuoso, reaching its full bloom with Paganini towards the end of the century. Locatelli probably composed the set between 1723 and 1729, years that he spent mainly on the road performing at princely courts across Italy and Germany. While the unusually high technical demands of the solo part are obvious to the listener from the start, the great surprise comes at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos. Here Locatelli inserts Capriccios for the soloist alone of a difficulty previously unheard of, with a left hand technique making use of extensions, octaves, unprepared tenths, double and triple stopping, arpeggios and double trills. The writing also favors playing in extremely high positions: in Capriccio No. 22 (from the third movement of Concerto no. 11) rising broken thirds go as high as 17th position. Ilya Gringolts, whose discography includes the better-known caprices by Paganini, has accepted Locatelli’s challenge, and here performs three of the L’Arte concertos. He does so with the support of the Finnish Baroque Orchestra, which he conducts from his gut-stringed violin by Ferdinando Gagliano, ca. 1770.

REVIEW:

The whole thing sounds fabulous. First, there’s the sheer energy and joy radiating out from what is a deliciously luminously stringy sound from the orchestra. Then in comes Gringolts, equally full of stylish, multicoloured élan on his gut-stringed 1770 Gagliano – especially in the outer movements’ solo capriccios.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2021)

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As the hub of a fledgling British Empire, London around 1710 was burgeoning with new wealth and offered the perfect setting for operatic entrepreneurs eager to spread the latest Italian fashions. It was thus a city of opportunity for Handel, fresh from spending five years in Italy, but also for many other touring musicians including Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Maria Veracini and Francesco Geminiani. This recording unveils a portrait of the chameleon Handel, emerging in the panache of his early Italian-styled Amadigi, reaching maturity in the 'English operatic' Hercules and arriving finally in the perennial melodic grace of Theodora, his penultimate oratorio. Extracts from these works, in which the young Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tuva Semmingsen displays both vocal agility and a wide-ranging emotional palette, are interspersed with instrumental works by Handel's Italian contemporaries. Corelli's Concerto grosso in D major, from the celebrated Opus 6, and Geminiani's 'La Follia' in D minor - incidentally a reworking of Corelli's famous violin sonata - both illustrate Italian instrumental music at its most sumptuous, in colourful and dynamic performances by the Norwegian period band Barokksolistene. For further variety, the leader and artistic director of the ensemble, Bjarte Eike, also performs a chamber work by Veracini, who visited London regularly during some three decades in the early 18th century. The Sonata in A major was published in England in 1744, and it would be quite tempting to interpret the use in it of a Scottish tune, Tweed's side, as merely a clever marketing device to charm a local audience, were it not that the tune, and the composition itself, was so attractive.