Future Releases

Award-winning conductor and composer Johan de Meij’s First Symphony ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a spectacular evocation in five portraits and scenes based on Tolkien’s tale of a grand quest and the struggle of good against evil. The Second Symphony is an ode to the symmetry of New York’s streets and its massive architecture, as well as a tribute to the American styles of Copland and Bernstein, while the cinematic effects of the Third Symphony form an epic paean to the entire earth in all its miraculous beauty.

Internationally renowned and award-winning composer Salvador Brotons brings classical music into the here and now, depicting our contemporary world in his Fifth Symphony. Its first three movements are musical representations of the more negative aspects of the human condition, before the slow, final section offers a positive resolution. The Oboe Concerto brings out both lyrical expressiveness and virtuoso thrills from the soloist, and the Four Pieces for String Orchestra was the prize-winning work which brought acclaim and recognition to Brotons at the age of seventeen.

Following his triumphant visit to Vienna in 1822, when several of his operas were extremely well received, international success beckoned for Rossini. First performed at La Fenice, Venice in 1823, Semiramide was Rossini’s last Italian opera, written at the height of his creative powers. Its subject is Greek tragedy for which librettist Gaetano Rossi drew on an adaptation by Voltaire. Instrumentally sophisticated and classically structured, the opera remains one of the most remarkable examples of Rossini’s cultivation of bel canto.

The 16th century witnessed an astonishing flowering of instrumental music in Venice.

At the heart of this artistic explosion was the emblematic focal point of St Mark’s Basilica, with its cappella (choir, orchestra and organists), its rich tradition of liturgical and devotional practice, and its role as the venue for the numerous festivities associated with the history, power and splendour of the Venetian Republic. Music emanated from the basilica to many other parishes, to the religious confraternities, orphanages, artistic academies, palaces of the nobility and, before long, theatres.

Dance music in particular flourished.

Various sub-genres developed, some from folk traditions, others by association with specific instruments or the sights and sounds of nature. These genres include the passamezzo, pavana, romanesca, gagliarda and saltarello, several of which were often grouped together to make up a suite. At the same, and partly as a consequence of these developments, organ music flourished too, its repertoire largely consisting of the contrapuntal ricercare, the showpiece toccata and transcriptions of dance music.

Transcriptions of a different kind come from 17th- and 18th-century Venice, in the form of arrangements of string concertos by Albinoni and Vivaldi by Johann Gottfried Walther, cousin and contemporary of J. S. Bach.

The soprano Toti Dal Monte was born Antonietta Meneghel in Mogliano Veneto in 1892. After study at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, she made her début at La Scala in 1916, in Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini. It was at this time that she adopted her stage name: ‘Toti’ from childhood, ‘Dal Monte’ from an aristocratic grandmother. Her career soon took off both nationally and internationally, as she toured as far afield as the USA, South America, China, Japan and Australia. Held in high regard by the world’s greatest conductors (not least Toscanini), Dal Monte appeared on stage into the late 1940s, in a large repertoire that embraced almost the entire Italian canon of her day. She died in 1975. In his passionately informed booklet essay, Giuseppe Pugliese measures Dal Monte’s singing and career against the judgements and classifications of the tenor and opera historian Giacomo Lauri-Volpi and others. He makes a detailed case for seeing Dal Monte’s as ‘a naturally lirico voice, shaped to the liricoleggero repertoire’. Reckoning her also as nonpareil among her generation, he cites another authority, Eugenio Gara: ‘[Toti Dal Monte] portrayed the moonlit visions and arcane enchantments of Bellini’s heroines, and the passions and sacrifices, woes and remembrances of those of Verdi and Donizetti, with flawless abandon.’

If it is a cliché to refer to Mozart’s last four string quartets as ‘unjustly neglected’, they have nonetheless been overshadowed not only by Mozart’s own ‘Haydn’ quartets but also by his quintets and the late quartets of Joseph Haydn. The neglect robs us of better acquaintance with some extraordinary music in Mozart’s rich late style. The composer’s contemporaries, by contrast, were quick to recognise the special virtues of these quartets. On 30 November 1791 – just six days before Mozart’s death – one commentator wrote of the String Quartet in D K499 (the other three are K575, 589 and 590): ‘[This quartet is] written with that fire of the imagination and that correctness which have long since won for Herr Mozart a reputation as one of the best composers in Germany. [It is in] four movements, and even the minuet is composed with an ingenuity (being interwoven with canonic imitations) that one frequently finds wanting in other such compositions, even by famous masters.’ Mozart’s last string quartet, K590 in F, furnishes an exuberant conclusion to the composer’s writing in this genre, and even more than the others exhibits many features of Mozart’s late style, not least in its dazzlingly elegant counterpoint. In these classic 1970s recordings, the Juilliard String Quartet explore in depth the intricate emotional power and beauty of this sublime music.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685. After appointments as organist and composer in Naples and Rome and various foreign travels, in 1720 he settled in Portugal (and later Spain) as music tutor to Princess Maria Barbara. The princess was a gifted harpsichordist, and it was for her that Scarlatti wrote his unparalleled corpus of more than 500 sonatas. The editor of the first major published edition, Czerny, wrote in 1839 that these works were ‘undoubtedly worthy of preservation because of their unique character, ntouched by the passing of time, and because of their calm, natural and invigorating freshness, which is peculiar to an art then at the height of its youthful powers’.

In fact the sonatas had a precarious history: after Scarlatti’s death in 1757, they eventually passed to the celebrated castrato Farinelli, but his collections were broken up when he died. Fortunately, the 15 morocco-bound volumes of the sonatas were purchased in 1835 by the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice. These works are remarkable for their extraordinary inventiveness and technical innovation. Drawing on the musical traditions and, more broadly, the sounds of everyday life in both Italy and Iberia, Scarlatti endowed an instrument once thought to have a limited capacity for expression with the broadest range of tonal and imitative capabilities.

In this comprehensive survey of Italian Baroque sonatas and concertos, the virtuoso period-instrument ensemble Accademia Vivaldiana takes its lead from Frescobaldi’s address to the reader in his first volume of toccatas. There the great organist enjoins on the performer an exceptional degree of interpretative freedom, and the improvisatory aspect of these performances will surely move and beguile the listener just as the composers intended. We visit the three cities that were the focus of the new age of Italian instrumental music in the mid-17th century – Modena, Venice and Bologna – and hear music by such key figures as Marco Uccellini, Giovanni Legrenzi, the Gabrielis and Giovanni Battista Vitali. Later, Bologna would cede its pre-eminence as Venice became the cultural and economic heart of Europe and the undisputed centre of Italian music. The solo sonatas and concertos of Vivaldi, Albinoni, Galuppi and Marcello, with their expansive, flowing and richly ornamented melodies, tell the story of Venice with a melodic immediacy that reflects familiar scenes, places and colours: a musical equivalent of the landscapes of Tintoretto and Veronese.

While a hint of nostalgic melancholy sometimes pervades the slow movements – perhaps reflecting the watery setting of their composers’ city – the Allegros, full of light and joy, remind us of all the glories of Venice.

They were the two greatest pianists of their time, and friends (of a sort), yet in many ways they could hardly have been more different: Chopin the conservative revolutionary with his heart in the past; Liszt the arch-Romantic who championed the present and wrote for those as yet unborn (hurling his lance, to use his own term, ‘into the indefinite reaches of the future’). Where Chopin – except in his music – was introverted and ill at ease with crowds, Liszt was almost shockingly extroverted, and wowed the crowds in their thousands, frequently driving them near to hysteria. Chopin’s repertoire was small (though it included the complete Well-tempered Clavier of Bach), Liszt’s was apparently limitless, and richly nourished by his 700-plus arrangements of other people’s music. Yet the two men were mutually indebted. In this intriguing, insightful and illuminating recital, Emanuel Ax achieves a fascinating exercise in portraiture, celebrating one of the most ambivalent friendships in musical history (always closer on Liszt’s side than on Chopin’s). The great B minor Sonata of Chopin is permeated by his love and profound understanding of Bach, while the bulk of the Liszt arrangements reflect both his adoration of the then still little-known Schubert and the prodigal generosity and resourcefulness of Liszt’s creative mind.

Though Mendelssohn’s two string quintets sound as if they were written one right after the other, they were actually composed 20 years apart; and a good deal of revising and refining went into them. Overall, Mendelssohn’s approach reveals a very different sense of how music is constructed, certainly compared with the compositional aesthetics of Beethoven’s chamber music. The techniques used are nowhere to be found in Beethoven, least of all in his revered string quartets. Rather they are to be found in the composers who were being rediscovered as part of the growing historical awareness of Mendelssohn’s era. Mendelssohn’s interest in chamber music helped fuel his own compositions, and in a sense forced him to clarify his own understanding; thus in 1842 he wrote a famous letter stating his musical aesthetic and the importance of instrumental music:

‘So many words are uttered about music, and yet so little is said... People complain that music is so open to interpretation and that they don’t know what they are supposed to think. Words, on the other hand, they think, can be understood by everyone. For me it’s exactly the other way around… What music expresses for me… are not ideas that are too indefinite to put into words, but too definite…’ That is the aesthetic embodied in these delightful works; and it is captivatingly articulated here by the original-instrument ensemble L’Archibudelli.