Soprano Ruby Hughes, celebrated for the profound "understanding and stylishness" (Gramophone) she brings to her artistry, has a distinguished discography of recitals showcasing the exquisite beauty of her voice. She is particularly known for her carefully curated programs that weave together works from diverse eras. In Amidst the Shades, Hughes reunites with gambist Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann and lutenist Jonas Nordberg. The same inspiring sonic constellation contributed to the success of Heroines of Love and Loss (BIS-2248). This new recital explores their shared passion for Elizabethan music, which served as the catalyst for the program's creation. The contemplative and melancholic songs of John Dowland form the foundation, leading to works by Robert Johnson and John Danyel, interwoven with Purcell's intimate vocal pieces. Seeking to further enrich the repertoire for lute and voice, Hughes commissioned new works from Errollyn Wallen and Deborah Pritchard, setting texts by William Shakespeare. She also obtained permission from Cheryl Frances-Hoad to arrange one of her existing compositions for this unique ensemble. Amidst the Shades promises a recital brimming with nuanced expression and delicate sonic colors.

Nancy Dalberg's (1881 - 1949) songs were written in the period from 1909 to the beginning of the 1930s, and through her choice of lyrics she tells a lot about herself and her life. She grew up in a prosperous entrepreneurial environment, and early on she developed skills as a pianist. In 1901 she married First Lieutenant Erik Dalberg, who also had a significant artistic vein, and a few songs were thus written together. Due to an arm disease, however, she had to give up becoming a concert pianist, and with Johan Svendsen and especially Carl Nielsen as teachers, she acquired from 1909 on the compositional skills that, in addition to the songs and other smaller works, led to her string quartets and orchestral works, thus three of her songs are also available in an orchestral version. With the very personal choice of 47 mainly Danish poems, her songs take up a considerable amount of space, and she provoked her contemporaries with a sometimes quite rich piano accompaniment, whereby the soloist and pianist became more equal in the performance. The lyrics range widely from the cheerful to several more serious lyrics that revolve around the family and marital dreams that remained unfulfilled due to her lifelong health challenges and her husband's increasing mental illness, of the present selection, 9 songs have not previously been recorded.

Featuring the first recording of BRITTEN's Les Illuminations, Op. 18 sung in English, from a brand new translation by Timothy Ades. Also includes the original French version. Coupled with Samuel BARBER's dramatic masterpiece Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24, written just a few years after Les Illuminations. Among the most personal and powerful music ever written for the human voice, Britten and Barber's masterpiece settings of texts by Rimbaud and Agee continue to resonate intensely. Taken together, they form bookends to the cataclysms of the 20th century, with it's two life-shattering world wars. The colours, verbal and harmonic, of such human drama are a dazzling mix, running the gamut of life in dramatic flux. Mild mannered it is not, though parts are hauntingly beautiful.

The New Winter Songbook is a collection of twenty-one songs by a diverse range of composers, featuring contemporary musical settings and lyrical responses to the winter season. Whilst more traditional winter themes do recur within the songs - those of cold, loss, stillness, grief and darkness - those of belief, faith, and hope, offer an emotional counterbalance. Each individual composer approaches and explores these themes from their own perspective, lending their voice to a musical tapestry, expressing what it means to reflect upon and celebrate the season of winter today.

This recording with AZICA Records marks the first modern-day capture of the music of Julia Lazarevna Weissberg Rimsky-Korsakov (1878-1942). During her lifetime, Weissberg ascended the heights of cultural life in Russia's "Silver Age", only to be relegated to obscurity in the subsequent era of socialist realism. A prominent composer, critic, and public figure, she was particularly celebrated for her art songs, symphonic poems, and children's operas. Her works, known for their harmonic ingenuity, were widely published and performed during her lifetime in both Russia and Germany. Born to a prominent Jewish family in Orenburg, Weissberg was a composition student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and continued her studies in Berlin with Max Reger and Englebert Humperdink. While in Germany, she saw the premieres of many of her songs for voice and orchestra, which received reviews across Germany, France, England, and Russia. By the time of her return to St. Petersburg in 1912, she was a widely-published composer, publishing under the name Julie Weissberg. She subsequently married musicologist Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai's son. The couple founded the first Russian music magazine Muz�kal'n�y sovremennik (Contemporary Music) for which Weissberg served on the editorial board and was one of the main reviewers. In her lifetime, Weissberg published more than 75 works, including art songs, symphonic poems, symphonies, chamber works, folk songs, and operas for children. Contemporary Russian composer Mikhail Gnesin referred to her as "the first professional female composer in the history of Russian musical art of the 20th century," and contemporary critic Leonid Sabanayeff claimed that she was "a master in the full sense of the word" for her extraordinary musical and text setting abilities. Many of her art songs feature texts by prominent contemporary women creatives from across the globe, including Indian activist Sarajini Naidu (1879-1949), Polish author and activist Maria Knopnicka (1842-1910), German children's author Paula Dehmel (1862-1918), and her close collaborator Sophia Parnok (1885-1933), later known as the 'Russian Sappho'. Weissberg was a leader in the contemporary music community, championing the creation of new works. She died in 1942 with her son Vsevolod Rimsky-Korsakov in the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Soprano Sarah Moulton Faux, an Opera America and America Prize winner, first saw mention of Julie Weissberg's work while researching the art songs of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Intrigued, Sarah began a two year research project into Weissberg's catalogue with the assistance of musicologist Dr. Olga Panteleeva. Together, they found a treasure trove of Weissberg's published manuscripts in the Russian State Library in Moscow. Panteleeva also discovered a doctoral dissertation by Mazur Marina Moiseeva from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Composer Julie Weissberg: Personality and Creative Heritage (According to the Materials of the Archives of St. Petersburg), which proved to be an invaluable resource. Fifteen songs for voice and piano handpicked from that treasure trove comprise this album, featuring Sarah Moulton Faux and internationally acclaimed pianist and composer Konstantin Soukhovetski. Seven-time Grammy-winner for Classical Music Producer of the Year Judith Sherman is the lead producer and sound engineer.

Teyte, Maggie: A Vocal Portrait (1932-1948)

MAHLER: Symphony No. 2 / Kindertotenlieder (Fried) (1915-19

DONIZETTI, G.: Parafrasi del Christus / PERGOLESI, G.B.: Sal

The Lamento di Zaida mora by Luigi Rossi sets a lament by the Moorish girl Zaida for the loss of her lover Mustafa, seized by a Christian marauder and taken as a prisoner to Italy, a characteristic treatment of a subject drawn from the neighboring Islamic world. The lament, in which Zaida inveighs against her barbarous enemy, is framed by introductory and concluding narrative. Rossi himself was born in Torremaggiore about the year 1597 and studied in Naples, where he remained for some years in the service of the court. He later moved to Rome in the service of the Borghese family and became organist at the church of S Luigi dei Francesi in 1633, retaining this position until his death in 1653. He joined the musical establishment of Cardinal Antonio Barberini in 1641 and wrote for him his very successful opera, Il palazzo incantato, followed by a second opera, Orfeo, for the French court, during the period of the Barberinis' exile, after the death of the Barberini Pope, whose patronage was so important to the cultural life of Rome. His compositions include some three hundred or so surviving cantatas in which he captures a blend of recitative, arioso and lyrical aria, as in the present lament, one of seventeen such compositions. Rossi's Ingordo human desio sets a poem in a more regular metre than the varied versi sciolti of the Lamento di Zaida mora, it's ten-line stanzas in a rhyming pattern of seven-syllable lines and hendecasyllabics. This account of the vanity of human wishes again blends recitative, arioso and aria.

One of the foremost vocal chamber ensembles active today, New York Polyphony is renowned for it's innovative programming ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary commissions. On Sky of my Heart, the selection spans over four hundred years of musical history and bears witness to this vocal ensemble's commitment to discovering and developing new works that augment it's core early music repertoire. Some of the works performed here deal with the essential themes of life, death and the afterlife and have been inspired by personal bereavement (Smith) or by the impact of Covid confinement (Moravec). Others are steeped in a spiritual atmosphere, whether religious (Byrd, Moody, Tavener and McGlade) or meditative (Naito). The contemporary works, some of which were written at the behest of New York Polyphony, are firmly rooted in the rich history of plainsong, while at the same time featuring some very contemporary harmonies. The vocal ensemble is joined by LeStrange Viols in three pieces: My Days by Nico Muhly, a ritualized tribute to the early 17th-century English composer Orlando Gibbons, The Silver Swan by Gibbons himself, which brings the programme to an appropriately quiet and poignant close, and Byrd's Agnus Dei. The viol ensemble adds a colour that is both appropriate for Gibbons and original in it's treatment of sound.

Dmitri Shostakovich is known for his symphonies, his chamber music, maybe the popular Suites, and to some extent even his film. Largely unknown, however, is his vocal symphonic music, of which only the cycle on Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79, has gained some wider popularity. Here these hidden gems are brought together in authoritative interpretations under Michail Jurowski and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne with it's rich Shostakovich tradition under Semyon Bychkov and Rudolf Barshai, among others, from the Six Romances on words by Japanese poets to the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Lars Forssell's lyrics are both lyrical and down-to-earth and often deal with love experiences, exposure and vulnerability. They can be provocative, politically pronounced, mix light and dark and can be both shimmeringly beautiful and agonizingly black. Evert Taube had great significance for tango in Sweden during the 20th century. Lars Forssell was a close friend of the family and played an important role in how the view of Evert Taube changed from a slightly odd troubadour to the role of popular national poet. Sven Bertil Taube and Lars Forssell went to Argentina together in 1988 and experienced Argentine tango. When they got home, they recorded a tango LP. I have chosen some of these songs with Lars's ingenious lyrics. Our last cafe depicts how painful it is to be abandoned. In Lost Birds we meet the deceived man and the broken love. In Again, the lost love is portrayed. Belgrano is nostalgic and invites us to "play the piano of the past".

Composing for voice is a passion for me, and as a result the largest part of my catalogue is music for voice. The human voice - possibly the most subtle, complex, and fragile yet forceful carrier of musical ideas and meanings - has always been an inspiration for my musical thinking. I strive for craft, clarity, and passion. The carefully sculpted music and poems of Far Past War develop a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the choir and musicians in a virtuosic display of their emotional palette, strength, clarity, and majesty. The opportunity to collaborate with my sister, Cammy Thomas, has been a highlight of my life. Music's eternal quality is it's capacity for transformation and renewal. Together, we have created a work that celebrates the unsurpassed power of nature, and it's potential to move us toward peace.

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Sacher. Schweiz. Nachhall

CAPPELLA COLONIENSIS (1954-2004)

Classical Music

Oelze, Christiane: Songs and Arias

Le Souvenir (Canadian Songs for Parlour and Stage)

This is the third volume in this phenomenal series devoted to Mexicoís greatest 20th century composer (volumes 1 and 2, CB8850 and CB8851 respectively won the 2003 and 2004 GRAMMYS in their categories). In this international collaboration between Southwest Chamber Music and Mexicoís Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, we hear a celebration of the composerís native culture, with such powerful works as Xochipilli (a pre-Columbian god of music) and the vocal works Cuatro Melodias and Lamentaciones. The other vocal works, with their melodic gifts, come close to revealing the operatic composer Chavez could have been. Of particular interest are the percussion works: the famous Toccata is here, along with Tambuco and one of his final works, the Partita for Solo Tympani. In between is the dramatic incidental music to a 1932 production, Antigona, apuntes para la Sinfonia. The previous volumes have been consistent best-sellers, and volume 3 should be immensely popular. Even more good news: the series, to be completed in 2006 to mark Southwest Musicís 20th anniversary, will eventually include the complete String Quartets and the complete works for piano and string ensemble. Definitely one of the most important chamber music releases this year!