Anima Eterna / Jos van Immerseel

Marianne Muller / Ensemble Spirale

Blandine Rannou

Pieces for viola da gamba by Antoine Forqueray transcribed for harpsichord by Jean-Baptiste Forqueray Blandine Rannou

Antoine Torunczyk / Alfredo Bernardini / L'Assemblée des Honnestes Curieux

Mieczysław Horszowski / Budapest String Quartet

Boston Symphoby Orchestra / Serge Koussevitzky

Les Agrémens / Guy van Waas

Editor's info:
We now present a second recording devoted to the composer who can rightly be considered as the father of the symphony in France: François Joseph Gossec. These three Symphonies Op. VIII proclaim their modernity through their use of clarinets and of a Minuet and Trio, this being rare in Paris at that period. A modern symphonic composer of his time, Gossec, who had been born in Hainault in Belgium, also mastered the styles of his adopted land: the ballets in his tragédie lyrique Sabinus can be placed directly in the orchestral tradition of J.P. Rameau, the older composer who had welcomed Gossec to the French capital in 1751.

Eduardo Paniagua / Jorge Rosenblum

Riccardo Masahide Minasi / Collegium Marianum / Collegium 1704 / Vaclav Luks

Ensemble Europeen William Byrd / Graham O'Reilly

Ami Flammer / Moshe Leiser / Gérard Barreaux

Will Hartmann / Dorothea Röschmann / Diana Damrau / Franz-Josef Selig / Simon Keenlyside / Ailish Tynan / Adrian Thompson / The Royal Opera Chorus / The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House / Colin Davis

Erwin Schrott / Miah Persson / Gerald Finley / Dorothea Röschmann / Graciela Araya / Ana James / Rinat Shaham / The Royal Opera Chorus / The Royal Opera House Orchestra / Antonio Pappano

Vladimir Ognovenko / Vladimir Galouzine / Robert Brubaker / Nikolai Putilin / Vladimir Vaneev / Elena Zaremba / Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Gran Teatre del Liceu / Michael Boder

Franz Raml

Ben van Oosten

Musica Alta Ripa

L'Arte del Mondo / Pera Ensemble / Werner Ehrhardt

Marieke Spaans / Anton Steck

Paul O'Dette / Andrew Lawrence-King / Pedro Estevan

Orlando Consort / Estonian Philharmonia Chamber Choir / Paul Hillier

Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Paul Hillier

Anonymous 4

Paul O'Dette

Alfred Deller / Wieland Kuijken / William Christie

Vivica Genaux / Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin / René Jacobs

Editor's info:
Thanks to the cinema, Farinelli is now popularly seen as the archetype of Baroque vocal art. His timbre and technique were an inspiration to the composers of his time, and many opera arias bearing the mark of Farinelli have come down to us. A selection of these, many of them never recorded before, is performed here by the American mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, one of the few singers capable of doing justice to this demanding repertory. Long acquainted with these virtuoso arias and the vocal technique they require, René Jacobs has provided specially written decorations for each of them.

Bernarda Fink / Roger Vignoles

Editor's info:
""The value of Schumann's songs lies chiefly in their spiritual depth, and in this respect they belong with the greatest and most magnificent inexistence; indeed on can say, with regard to the finest of them, that there are few creative works that can be placed quite beside them."" [Franz Brendel, 1860]. Alongside Frauenliebe und -leben, Schumann's most famous cycle, here is his opus 90 to poems by Nikolaus Lenau, less well known today but quite as celebrated in its time.

Raphael Alpermann / Peter Bruns / Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin

Editor's info:
At the end of the 18th century, the most famous member of the Bach family was not Johann Sebastian, but his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel! This prominent representative of the school of German, and more especially Prussian composers, a pioneer of Empfindsamkeit [the cult of ""sensibility""], was prized above all for what his contemporaries termed his ""originality"" - by which they meant the sovereign ease with which he forged his own style. To understand this, one need only listen to the nine symphonies from his Berlin period, whose radical departure from traditional forms symbolises a stylistic revolution in itself. As for his innovative treatment of the concerto, which overturns all the principles of symmetry so dear to Baroque composers, it seems already to prefigure Romanticism.

Maria Cristina Kiehr / Concerto Soave / Jean-Marc Aymes

Editor's info:
Magdalene at the foot of the Cross.
The theme of the deploration represents one of the keystones of the Italian baroque revolution in the first half of the 17th century. These lamenti constituted the ideal framework for putting into practice the latest discoveries in expressive solo singing. Freed from the subtleties of counterpoint, it was now able to communicate the emotion expressed in the words directly to the listener. In this respect sacred music was not far behind and it is easy to understand why the plaints of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross were so abundant, especially in Rome where religious music had always occupied a more important position than elsewhere. The solo motets of Rossi, Agneletti, Mazzocchi and Frescobaldi bear dazzling witness to this specifically Roman musical activity.

Huelgas-Ensemble / Paul Van Nevel

Editor's info:
The Tenebrae in music.
The heartrending words of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah have at all times inspired a multitude of musical settings imprinted with a characteristic mixture of pain and hope. It would be wrong to imagine that these famous biblical poems written after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 A.D., with rhythmic verse after verse beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, were exclusive specialities of the Baroque period. Renaissance composers did not have to wait for the 17th French century Leçons de Ténebres before consecrating all their art to these Lamentations - an art marked by an extraordinary personal involvement.

Andreas Scholl / Concerto di Viole / Basel Consort

The Times [London] - Classical CDs of the Year 1998

Editor's info:
A German Anthology
The pieces on this recording demonstrate the consummate art with which the German composers reconciled the new ideas imported from Italy at the very beginning of the 17th century [the principle of the basso continuo, accompanied monody, the concertato technique] with local traditions, thereby giving birth to works of a subtle beauty and an almost inexhaustible richness. This stylistic revolution paved the way to the flourishing of great forms like the vocal solo, the spiritual concert, the cantata, etc. cultivated by composers as different as Schütz, Buxtehude, Tunder and Erlebach: in the very heart of Baroque Europe the Germans were taking their place.

Christiane Oelze / Gerald Finley / La Chapelle Royale / Collegium Vocale Gent / Orchestre des Champs-Élysées / Philippe Herreweghe

Stereophile:
""Herreweghe's innate sense of Brahms's musical lines is evident everywhere as he sculpts this works. Herreweghe's combined choirs respond magnificently to his direction.""

Melos Quartett

Editor's info:
""Search within yourselves and be true""
. . . or music as a witness to a rule of life: Janácek's only precept is perfectly illustrated in these two autobiographical masterpieces. The subject of the First Quartet [1923] is the conjugal drama described by Tolstoy in his Kreutzer Sonata, even if Janácek is not absolutely faithful to his model. . . As for the Second Quartet [Intimate Pages] of 1928, it is an extremely elaborate chronicle of a late love of the ""old white-maned lion"". . .

Véronique Méjean / Käthi Gohl / Jesper Christensen / Ensemble 415 / Chiara Banchini

Les Arts Florissants / William Christie

London Baroque / Charles Medlam

Johannes Weisser / Alexandrina Pandatchanska / Marcos Fink / Malin Byström / Sunhae Im / Nikolay Borchev / Alessandro Guerzoni / Werner Güra / Freiburger Barockorchester / Rene Jacobs

Jerusalem Quartet

Matthias Goerne / Elisabeth Leonskaja

Editor's info:
This recording is the first volume of the Matthias Goerne Schubert Edition, an extensive selection of lieder accompanied by distinguished pianists, with booklet notes by Christophe Ghristi: 'Schubert, in his lieder, recalls us to our condition as short-lived wanderers. A solitary voice sings of its torments and desires, accompanied only by that equally solitary instrument, the eminently self-sufficient piano. Here is no theatre but the echo, at last perceptible, of our inner depths, where silence reigns, where all is grave and nothing lies to us.'

Dorothee Mields / Matthew White / Hans Jörg Mammel / Thomas Bauer / Collegium Vocale Gent / Philippe Herreweghe

Editor's info:
Although Bach had dreamt of establishing a 'well-regulated church music' since his early days, it was only between 1723 and 1750 that he finally had the chance to do so, as Kantor and Director Musices in Leipzig. Here he invented the 'modern' cantata, combining chorales and traditional biblical texts with arias and recitatives on freely composed texts. The four cantatas recorded by Philippe Herreweghe offer a magisterial demonstration of the transition from cantatas initially judged 'too theatrical' to a perfectly achieved form - as in the cantata BWV 84, among the very last to be written.

Andreas Staier

Editor's info:
Who was the young Bach? A rebellious, provocative adolescent? A clever, stubborn careerist? An innovator, as gifted as he was prolific? Certainly a mixture of all three, replies the harpsichordist Andreas Staier in this selection of early works that are anything but run-of-the-mill. This programme shows how Herr Bach, eager to call the music of his time into question, assimilated multiple influences and gave a 'new look' to the traditions of north Germany.

Paul Lewis

Graindelavoix / Björn Schmelzer

Cantica Symphonia / Giuseppe Maletto

Editor's info:
With this disc, Giuseppe Maletto and Cantica Symphonia complete their 'Dufay trilogy' on Glossa: two volumes of motets and one of chansons. This release sees Cantica Symphonia traversing all the currently attributed motets by Dufay - works written to set the seal on historic occasions as well as those with liturgical texts. The accompanying essay admirably captures the pervasive fifteenth century currents of Humanism and religious splendor.

Le Concert Spirituel / Hervé Niquet

Ensemble Aurora / Enrico Gatti

Jocelyne Cuiller

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Bernard Haitink

The Sixteen / Harry Christophers

The Hilliard Ensemble

The Hilliard Ensemble

Rosemary Joshua / Early Opera Company / Christian Curnyn

Ensemble Peregrina / Agnieska Budzinska-Bennett

Virtuosi delle Muse / Stefano Molardi

Editor's info:
The Virtuosi delle Muse under Stefano Molardi have devoted their new recording for DIVOX ANTIQUA, their second, to several contemporaries of Antonio Vivaldi and to works whose origins lie in Venice. In the early 18th century, Venice became the musical crossroads of Europe for a great number of composers. Later, a new generation of musicians entered the Venetian musical world and brought about many innovations such as the ""Ospedali,"" which left an indelible mark on Venice's musical scene, promoted young talents, and drew many musicians from all over Europe to the Serenissima, including George Frideric Handel, Johann Adolf Hasse and Francesco Gasparini.

The main figures on this CD are George Frideric Handel [1685-1759] and Nicola Porpora [1686-1768]. Both lived and worked in Venice at different times of their lives, and both were sought-after composers in London. Porpora, however, later fell into oblivion after the Neapolitan opera went out of fashion in the late 18th century. Even if Porpora's instrumental works represent only a small percentage of his overall output, the originality of his works was highly esteemed in his day, and the Virtuosi delle Muse succeed in giving voice to the beauty and songfulness of his works. Francesco Gasparini [1668-1727] began his career in Rome before going on to the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice. Antonio Caldara [1670-1736], a native of Venice, was a singer and instrumentalist at San Marco before transferring to Mantua and, later, Vienna. Benedetto Marcello [1686-1739] and Tommaso Albinoni [1671-1750] were members of the Venetian nobility who lived and composed in Venice.

Angela Hewitt

Mark Padmore / Elizabeth Kenny / Craig Ogden

Academia Montis Regalis

Editor's infi:

Hyperion is pleased to announce a new recording relationship with Academia Montis Regalis, of which this thrilling disc is the first fruit. San Giovanni Battista is a deeply 'Baroque' score, vibrant, rhythmically insistent and vocally exciting. The libretto is dramatic and emotionally vivid, and the music is closely tied to the text, creating a distinctly operatic atmosphere- described by the disc's conductor Alessandro De Marchi as 'a true Salome'.


'When you learn that Handel owned an early copy of the manuscript all the pieces begin to fall into place; here is a perfect example of the Italian manner that was to influence him so fundamentally . . . Each soloist is given masses of opportunity to display their bravura technique, both as individuals and jointly, when they comment on the action in some lovely choruses and madrigals . . . De Marchi really scores in his choice of soloists. Salome is sung by the exquisite soprano Anke Herman, Battista by the firm-voiced countertenor Martin Oro and the court counsellor by the excellent tenor Fredrik Akselberg, but the star of the disc is the bass Antonio Abete who as Herod thunders through some truly stunning arias' [The Observer]

Dresdner Kammerchor / Cappella Sagittariana / Hans-Christoph Rademann

Norddeutscher Figuralchor / Musica Alta Ripa / Jorg Straube

Le Concert de l'Hostel Dieu / Garlic Bread / Franck-Emmanuel Comte

Bach Collegium Japan / Masaaki Suzuki

Emma Kirby / Agnes Mellon / Charles Medlam / Terence Charlston

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande / Evelino Pido

Hespérion XXI / Jordi Savall

Hespérion XXI / Jordi Savall

Jonathan Aasgaard / Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Gerard Schwarz

Europeen Brandenburg Ensemble / Trevor Pinnock

L'Estravagante

L'Estravagante

Nancy Argenta / Klaus Mertens / Claudia Iten / Charles Daniels / Rosa Dominguez / Roberta Internizzi / Dulio Galdetti / Coro della Radio Svizzera / I Barocchisti / Diego Fasolis

Joël Grare

Editor's info:
This recording is a manifesto: modernism, culture, temporality, style, improvisation are all concepts with which Joël Grare plays, like a juggler. At a time of globalisation, of standardisation of cultures, this disc lets us hear the vision of the world of one man, at one given time.
The Paris-Istambul-Shanghai Ensemble [Chinese violin, theorbo, bass and percussions] forms the musical base of this invitation to travel. The guests, such as Claire Lefiliâtre, contribute their personnality by taking up the learned or popular themes.
This ""group"", somewhere between a chamber music ensemble and a traditional one, plays standards like Jazzmen. Their standards? Magnificent themes stemming from Spain, Turkey, China, ancient music. . . Analysing these melodies well beyond their borders, thoroughly enjoying them to interpret them better, improvising, composing, whether or not in the style of their country or their period, following his mood, the taste of tea, the moment; welcome to the world of Joël Grare.

Eric Le Sage

Arte dei Suonatori / Alexis Kossenko

Alexis Kossenko i Arte dei Suonatori spotkali się po raz pierwszy w roku 2000, w czasie wykonania bachowskiej 'Pasji wg św. Jana'. Od tego momentu datuje się ich nieprzerwana, bardzo systematyczna i niezwykle intensywna współpraca.
Realizowana jest ona w ramach festiwalu 'Muzyka dawna - persona grata', którego ważną częścią jest cykl 'Historia koncertu fletowego'. Oprócz tego, Alexis Kossenko i Arte dei Suonatori występują wspólnie na festiwalach w Toruniu, Wrocławiu i Paradyżu.
Od kilku lat Alexis Kossenko występuje także jako dyrygent orkiestry. Współpraca Alexisa Kossenko i Arte dei Suonatori jest wspierana przez Ambasadę Republiki Francuskiej w Warszawie oraz francuskie Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych.
Celem obu partnerów jest systematyczna płytowa dokumentacja najciekawszych projektów realizowanych w ramach serii 'Historia koncertu fletowego'.
Zainteresowanie współpracą w tym zakresie wyraziła wytwórnia Alpha. Wykonawcy i wytwórnia postanowili rozpocząć serię nagrań od znakomitych, ale rzadko nagrywanych koncertów C.P.E. Bacha.

Les Folies Françoises / Patrick Cohen-Akenine

These Diverimenti and Serenades were played during nocturnal performances in the Salzburgian and Viennese tradition. They all share the same general style with a recurrent evocative theme and explore the potential of the double bass admirably.
4 étoiles du Monde de la Musique

Les Basses Réunies / Bruno Cocset

Friederike Heumann / Dirk Borner / Gaetano Nasillo

Le Cafe Zimmermann / Pablo Valetti

5 de Diapason
4 étoiles du Monde de la Musique

Vincent David / Ensemble Quarendo Invenietis

Barthold Kuijken

Ewald Demeyere / La Petite Bande / Sigiswald Kuijken

Currende Vocal and Instrumentalensemble / Erik Van Nevel

Itzhak Perlman

Michael Ludwig / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / JoAnn Falletta

Jussi Makkonen / Rait Karm

Editor's Info:
Sibelius wrote very little for the cello, although some of his violin pieces allow alternative instrumentation. Some of his songs and piano pieces, and the popular Finlandia, are here given in effective arrangements for cello and piano, in addition to the original cello fantasia Malinconia, perhaps inspired by the death of his infant daughter.

Dmitry Kouzov / Peter Laul

Editor's Info:
The second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote prolifically for the harpsichord and the clavichord, and was regarded as the leading keyboard-player of his day. His three sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard, written during the earlier part of his career as Court Harpsichordist to Frederick the Great, are virtuoso works that also display a fine command of melody.

Danish National Symphony Orchestra / Michael Schönwandt

The Presidents's Own' U.S. Marine Band / José Serebrier

Editor's Info:
Having orchestrated Gershwin's piano works [at the request of Gershwin's family], numerous Grieg songs, and more recently a symphonic synthesis of Janáček's The Makropulos Case, José Serebrier compiled a sequence of orchestral interludes from Bizet's Carmen to try to extend its magic to the concert hall. Carmen Symphony, unlike the well-known Carmen Suites, follows the thread of the opera. Serebrier has always been fascinated by the music of the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, and Mexican Dance is his homage to this original composer. This, and Serebrier's own Night Cry are world premiere recordings. The United States Marine Band, the oldest professional musical institution in the United States, regularly invites prominent conductors. This is a recording of a concert performance in 2007.

Ryszard Minkiewicz / Orkiestra i Chór Filharmonii Narodowej / Antoni Wit

Editor's Info:
Composed in 1910, at a time when Szymanowski was influenced by Richard Strauss, Reger and Scriabin, the unusually structured Symphony No. 2 is a work of great power and invention, with many passionate and varied contrasts in its use of solo instruments, in particular the violin. Szymanowski's Symphony No. 3 'Song of the Night', in which orchestra, tenor and choir are subtly blended in a continuous web of intoxicating sound, is a ravishing setting of a Polish translation of a poem by the great medieval Persian mystic known as Mevlânâ, our Master, Jalal ad-Din, which evokes the mysteries and beauty of a starlit Persian night.

Martha Folts

Editor's Info:
Girolamo Frescobaldi was the most celebrated keyboard musician, teacher and composer in Italy in his day, serving various nobility and the Church in Rome from 1608 until his death in 1643. He had the greatest influence of any musician in the seventeenth century on the keyboard music of Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and Denmark. The music presented here is attributed to Frescobaldi from various manuscript sources dating between 1630 and 1650 and is not otherwise included in the volumes of his music printed during his lifetime.

Gerald Place / Dorothy Linell

Jie Chen

Editor's Info:
While the piano is a western invention, it has come to occupy a special position in Chinese musical life. The earliest Chinese piano pieces date from the first half of the twentieth century; many remain popular in the concert hall today. This latest release in Naxos' Chinese Classics focuses on piano works from the Republican period [1911-1949], featuring Jie Chen, Bronze Medal Winner of the 2005 Santander Piano Competition. The music draws on well-known ancient melodies or folk-tunes, as reflected in the titles.

Alessandro Marangoni

Nicolas Koeckert / Rudolf Joachim Koeckert / Kristina Miller

Editor's Info:
The son of a violin teacher and an accompanist, Igor Alexandrovich Frolov grew up in a musically rich environment. As well as a composer, he is a violinist, a conductor, and a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Although his roots are grounded in classical tradition, elements of jazz can be found in many of Frolov's compositions, such as the witty and entertaining Divertissement and his arrangement of Jerome Kern's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The Concert Fantasy on Themes from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess contains various changes of mood and a multitude of virtuosic passages for the violin, before the brilliant coda concludes this challenging fantasy, popular with both performers and audiences.

Lars Ulrik Mortensen

Editor's Info:
Having been born half a century after Heinrich Schütz, the 'father of German musicians', and a little less than half a century before J. S. Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude was a living link between the founder of Protestant Baroque music and its greatest master. While Buxtehude's organ music is comparatively well known, his harpsichord music has not yet found the reputation it deserves. This first volume of the series covers the full range of Buxtehude's compositional styles for the keyboard, from the brilliant and virtuosic opening Toccata in G major, to the more subtle and melodic Suites in C major and D minor in the French style, and finishing with the flamboyant and highly virtuosic Canzonetta in A minor.

Robert Barto

Editor's Info:
When Silvius Leopold Weiss died [in 1750, the year of Bach's death], he was eulogised as Europe's greatest lutenist and one of Germany's most gifted musicians. This series devoted to his complete lute works continues with the large-scale Sonata No. 52. Thought to be a late work of the composer's full maturity, this Sonata is notable for its extended movements and wide use of adventurous chromaticism and modulation. The Sonata No. 32 makes much use of the extra low notes characteristic of the enlarged thirteen-course lute introduced around 1717. In the Sonata No. 94 Weiss seems consciously to be experimenting in a style more akin to that of the following generation.

Cambridge University Chamber Choir / Christopher Robinson

Editor's Info:
When Elgar's popular part-song My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land was published in 1890, a ready market for such pieces had been established by the competition festival movement, itself fuelled by the enormous growth in the number of choirs. This wide-ranging selection features several of Elgar's finest songs, including his best-known work in the genre As Torrents in Summer, which boasts a memorable tune, the highly original and chromatic Owls, probably the strangest that Elgar ever set, and the ambitious and bitonal There is Sweet Music which the composer himself described as 'a clinker, and the best I have done'.

O. Müller / E. Ottensamer

Editor's Info:
The music of Alexander Zemlinsky has come to the attention of an increasingly wide public over the past quarter-century. As with many of his contemporaries, chamber music features prominently in Zemlinsky's formative years. The three works on this recording, written during the 1890s, reveal a skilful and assured figure in the process of working free of influences, notably Brahms. The Cello Sonata is a substantial work, notable for a dark-hued slow movement and a warmly lilting finale. While indebted to Brahms in its scoring, the Clarinet Trio is nonetheless Zemlinsky in its formal and expressive approach, and today certainly ranks among his most performed works.

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Marin Alsop

Editor's Info:
The Wooden Prince is a fairy tale ballet with an original story by Bartók's literary acquaintance Béla Balázs, who had also written the libretto to Bluebeard's Castle [available on Naxos 8.660928]. Though outwardly sunny in its subject matter, The Wooden Prince has a mystical side that may explain Bartók's attraction to the story. The ballet's opening pages have often been compared to the opening of Wagner's Das Rheingold, and the majestic heart of the score lies in the glorious music Bartók wrote to accompany the prince's apotheosis.

John Salmon

Editor's Info:
Kapustin's pianistic textures are rich, spanning the entire keyboard, with melodies in every register, sweeping arpeggios, tons of chords, and a fantastic array of runs. Such music is Kapustin's birthright: Ukranian born and Moscow trained, he has Medtner, Rachmaninov and Scriabin in his veins. But the jazz side is equally authentic, incorporating the fleet pianism of Oscar Peterson and the harmonic volatility and technical exuberance of Art Tatum. Kapustin's music also encompasses more modern sounds, such as McCoy Tyner's quartal voicings and the pop-tinged stylings of Keith Jarrett.

Julia Brown

Editor's Info:
The eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach was hailed as the greatest organist in his time. Living in a time of transition, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach forged his own highly original style, combining the traditional writing learned from his father with new elements of the 'expressive and sentimental' period. Among his most famous compositions, the Eight Fugues, Fk 31 are miniature jewels. His Fantasias are wonderful examples of the freedom of expression in the new style of Empfindsamkeit.

Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Stéphane Deneve

Editor's Info:
A perennial outsider in French music, Albert Roussel was the tutor of a whole generation of composers, including such diverse figures as Eric Satie and Edgard Varese. The three works inclided here outline the transitional phase in which Roussel's mature idiom took shape. Most important of these is the Second Symphony with its densely intricate orchestration and its wide range of expression, while Pour une fete de printemps is a symphonic poem that could be thought of as preparation for the larger work. With Suite in F, Roussel arrived at his mature style; the piece is taut and economical in design, with a distinctly 'contemporary' feel.

Sebastian Knauer / Cologne Chamber Orchestra / Helmut Müller-Brühl

Editor's Info:
While, unlike Mozart, Haydn never made a living as a keyboard soloist, he nevertheless came nearest to Mozart in the best known of his keyboard concertos, No. 11 in D major. First performed in Paris in 1784 this is a work of the composer's maturity, with strikingly dramatic contrasts, an expressive slow movement and an infectious Hungarian Rondo. Although slight by comparison, if not in craftsmanship, Concerto No. 3 is notable for its wistful slow movement and lively Finale, while Concerto No. 4, with its elaborate solo part, includes a dramatic and sombre Andante cantabile, and an exuberant Rondo.

Leon McCawley / Ashley Wass

Ljuba Kazarnovskaya / Ljuba Orfenova

Editor's Info:
This is the final disc in the Naxos edition of the complete Tchaikovsky songs, which represent a little-known but highly characteristic facet of his musical personality.

ClassicsToday on Volume 3
Kazarnovskaya possesses a soprano rich in timbre and powerful in projection. . . Tchaikovsky's ever-ingenious melodic gift combined with Kazarnovskaya's ever-probing and emotive singing make for a continually engaging program, one that you will no doubt play many times over.'[8.555371]

Maria Bayo / City of Granada Orchestra / Jean-Jacques Kantorow

Editor's Info:
Lorenzo Palomo is one of the most successful contemporary Spanish composers. His Cantos del alma [Songs of the Soul] are settings of four poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez, ""a composition in which voice, clarinet and orchestra. . . establish a poetic dialogue, both intimate and idyllic"". Palomo's Sinfonia a Granada [Granada Symphony] was written in response to a commission from the area's regional government. The composer himself has written, ""I have been faithful to the most authentic Andalusian music, introducing a number of Arabic and Hebraic melismas as well as cadences characteristics of flamenco"".

English Chamber Orchestra / Andrew Litton

Editor's Info:
Giovanni Bottesini was not only among the most famous double bass virtuosos of his time, but he was also a distinguished conductor and composer. Known to some as the Paganini of the double bass, he significantly extended the technical possibilities of the instrument. The Gran Concerto in F sharp minor is arguably Bottesini's most accomplished and involved composition for the double bass in which the instrument's resources are fully exploited with virtuoso passages and adventurous modulations. The popular Gran Duo Concertante, originally scored for two double basses, was reworked by Paganini's only disciple, Camillo Sivori, who rewrote and greatly expanded one of the double bass parts for the violin.

Immortal Bach Ensemble / Leipziger Kammerorchester / Morten Schuldt-Jensen

Editor's Info:
One of a remarkable series of works Schubert wrote in his final year, Mass No. 6 in E flat lay unperformed until a year after his death. With an unusually prominent part for trombones, this is a powerful and disquieting masterpiece, reconciling the liturgical grandeur and monumentality of the vast fugues that end the Gloria and Credo, with the composer's natural lyricism and daring chromatic digressions.

Simon Mayr Chorus & Ensemble / Franz Hauk

Editor's Info:
Born near Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Simon Mayr spent the greater part of his career in Bergamo, a flourishing cultural and economic centre in the early nineteenth century. An important figure in the promotion of Viennese classicism in Italy, he combined, in his own style, the legacy of Vienna with the dramatic and melodic genius of Italy, and held a dominant position in Italian opera before the emergence of Rossini. His oratorio David in spelunca Engeddi [David in the Cave of Engedi], with a Latin text, was written in 1795 for the Ospedale dei Mendicanti in Venice, one of the four great charitable institutions there, known for the musical achievements of its members. The oratorio deals with the conflict between David and Saul, and the refusal of David to harm the Lord's anointed, in spite of the opportunity offered him.

José Antonio Escobar

Editor's Info:
A new generation of Chilean composers, influenced by national folkloric traditions and the best of contemporary music, is featured in a programme of varied styles, rhythms and concepts. The music of Violeta Parra in guitar arrangements is also presented here for the first time along with recent compositions by Chile's foremost younger artists. Chilean musicians find themselves at the crossroads of creative development where popular art forms of Chile, South America and Spain converge and classical music merges with the modern.

Laurence Kayaleh / Paul Stewart

Editor's Info:
Distinctly Russian, unabashedly Romantic and full-bodied, yet intellectually devised and highly disciplined, Medtner's compositions for violin and piano encompass music of rare beauty and power, gratifying for both performer and audience. Violin Sonata No. 1, one of his best-known works, was inspired by the myth of Dionysus [or Bacchus], god of wine and intoxication. Known as the 'Spring Sonata', Medtner's epically-proportioned Violin Sonata No. 2 is a work of exile with distinct memories of springtime in Russia in its late romantic textures. The first volume of this series is released on 8.570298..

Jeremy Jouve / Judicael Perroy

Ilya Kaler

Editor's Info:
Profound in spirit and monumental in scope Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are arguably the most difficult original solo works ever written for the violin. Thier formidable technical challenges, especially the persistent use of multiple stops are not just virtuoso features but are the natural result of the complexity of Bach's musical ideas and his understanding of the instrument. The crowning glory of the set is the immense Chaconne from the Partita in D minor, a set of variations on a theme which makes unprecedented demands on the performer's expressive and technical abilities.

Aradia Ensemble / Kevin Mallon

Editor's Info:
Written mostly during the last five years of his life, Purcell's Theatre Music is a rich and varied collection of some of the composer's finest melodic inspirations. They include solemn overtures, cheerful and sad songs, as well as delightful dances, either incorporated into the action of the play or performed as preludes and interludes. This first volume of the series includes many gems such as the erotic musical diversion in Amphitryon which takes the form of a Pastoral Dialogue betwixt Thyrsis and Iris, the amorous shepherd begging for, and finally being granted, his heart's desire; and the series of dances in The Gordian Knot Unty'd, the most delightful of which are the Rondeau, Minuett and the final

New Zealand Symph. Orchestra / Pietari Inkinen

Editor's Info:
During the last decade Einojuhani Rautavaara has become one of the internationally most popular and frequently performed Finnish composers. The Eighth Symphony, Rautavaara's most recent, includes a second movement Scherzo which is among the most propulsive and concentrated pieces of his later output. Manhattan Trilogy [2003-2005] was described by The New York Times, following its world premiere at Carnegie Hall, as 'a reminiscence of the hopes and anxieties of his student years. . . The outer movements, Daydreams and Dawn, are cast in consonant but freely modulating chord progressions, with achingly beautiful solo lines darting through the thick textures. Even the central Nightmares movement, though darker and more freely dissonant, often has a lush quality.'

New Zealand String Quartet

Editor's Info:
With their often turbulent and dark-hued openings, poignant slow movements, elfin Scherzos reminiscent of the music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and tense, thrilling last movements of perpetual motion, Mendelssohn's String Quartets are works of considerable emotional range and mastery of form. This first disc of the complete String Quartets ranges from the youthful No. 1, Op. 12 [actually the second of the published quartets] to the great, tragic String Quartet No. 6, Op. 80, Mendelssohn's last major work, composed after the death of his sister..

Ralph van Raat

Editor's Info:
The People United Will Never Be Defeated! by the left-wing composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski is a landmark in American piano literature. The work comprises 36 variations on a protest song of the same name by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Almost every bar is laden with pianistic virtuosity, yet the listener is carried through some very complex music in a wholly natural way. The variations themselves all symbolize the different phases and aspects of a struggle: from angry, highly-energized modernism, via melancholic references to blues, calculated dense polyphony and nostalgic folk-music to written-out free jazz passages. Rzewski's popular Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, written in 1979 as part of the set North American Ballads, forms a fitting counterpart.

Sibylla Rubens / Ulrich Eisenlohr

Editor's Info:
The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenthcentury German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert's Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to Bärenreiter's Neue Schubert-Ausgabe [New Schubert Edition], Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. This disc is the third part of the Romantic Poets series. Volumes One and Two are available on 8.554797 and 8.557831.

New York Woodwind Quintet / Philharmonia Orchestra / Robert Craft

Editor's Info:
The little-known Second Chamber Symphony ought to be the most popular of Schoenberg's later masterpieces. Neither 'atonal' nor 'twelve-tone', it contrasts a lush, melodious, dramatic first movement with a rapid and richly polyphonic second movement. Die glückliche Hand is a pantomime for two silent actors and one solo singer, 'the Man'. The music is very compressed, and its two middle scenes, apart from the lines by the Man, are purely orchestral. Realising that a work of 38 minutes in atonal idiom for five winds might be less audience-friendly than any of his music heretofore, Schoenberg imparted his Wind Quintet with a display of instrumental virtuosity that surpassed anything even he had ever attempted.

Miquel Villalba

Editor's Info:
The Catalan composer Manuel Blancafort believed strongly in the importance of nationalism in music and was keen to follow in the footsteps of Albéniz, Granados and Falla, but always with a Catalan bias. Most of the works on this recording belong to a prolific period of creative activity towards the end of the 1920s. Depicting a transatlantic journey to the USA, with impressions of both the ocean and life on board ship, the American Souvenir suite also includes a vivid yet tender homage to Charlie Chaplin. Inspired by the classicism of Bach and Scarlatti, the Sonatina antiga surprises with its bold harmonic writing. The impressionistic Ermita i panorama conjures up, through the development of a folk tune, the silence of twilight within the Catalan hermitage of Puiggraciós and the view of the landscape from the summit of the hill.

Joel Quarrington / Andrew Burashko

Editor's Info:
Giovanni Bottesini enjoyed a globe-trotting career as 'the Paganini of the double bass'. He was also a successful conductor and a composer, although only the music he wrote for his own instrument has outlived him. Many of the works on this recording emphasize the essential bel canto quality of Bottesini's inspiration, most explicitly in the dazzling Bellini Fantasia, but also in the duets with clarinet and soprano which demand virtuosity of both feeling and technique. The Concerto No. 2 is a fully mature work, from the somewhat laconic first movement, through the simply singing second, to the third, driven by a rhythmic figure typical of the polonaise and the Cuban bolero.

Stagione Armonica Chor / Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto / Sergio Balestracci

Rheinische Kantorei / Das Kleine Konzert / Hermann Max

Markus Becker

Pellegrini Quartet

Stuttgarter Kammerorchester / Johannes Goritzki

The Young Danish String Quartet

Nederlands Dans Theater

Bolshoi Ballet