Mahler: Piano Quartet (in one movement) in A minor

Best-selling Scottish virtuoso Nicola Benedetti moves dramatically from the 18th-century world of Italia to the 20th-century world of cinema.

As a long-time champion of the lush Violin Concerto by the great stage and screen composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Nicola Benedetti has chosen to build a programme around his late Romantic concerto masterpiece.

This unique collection of violin classics, written specifically for the movies, includes the poignant lament from Schindler’s List.

Dmitri Shostakovich, recognised as the Soviet Union’s greatest film composer, is represented by the beloved Gadfly Romance, as well as the similarly lyrical Andante from the film The Counterplan

The contemporary British cinema is represented by the haunting main theme and specially-composed Fantasy for Violin & Orchestra from the 2004 hit Ladies in Lavender

Luigi Piovano and Sara Mingardo choose a different perspective on the music of Gustav Mahler, through the eyes of Arnold Schoenberg.

A great admirer of Mahler and founder of the Society for Private Musical Performance in Vienna in the 1920's, Schoenberg and his followers transcribed several works by Mahler for chamber ensemble. The programme for this disc traces an imaginary concert typical of these private concerts. Music lovers know Sara Mingardo as a baroque specialist but here she brings to these arrangements a warmth of tone, whilst the colours of the orchestrations are rendered with great finesse and breathtaking dynamics by Aurei Musici, led by Luigi Piovano.

“Schönberg, insisting on the legitimate interest that attaches to every aspect of the life and person of a great man, once said he would have liked to see how Mahler tied his tie. It is in something of that spirit that one approaches the earliest Mahler work to have come down to us, the single movement for piano quartet in A minor (apparently the first movement of a projected four-movement opus), which he wrote while a student at the Vienna Conservatory, probably late in 1876 when he was 16 years old. As Mahler put it in 1893 “in the end I sent it to Moscow for a competition and it got lost”. But in fact it was found among the effects of his widow Alma after her death in 1964, in a folder labelled “early compositions”…

"Weighty, four-square, thickly-scored, discursive, impassioned, Franck’s quintet seems to transgress against every one of what one usually thinks of as the conventional “Gallic” virtues: deftness, lightness of texture, epigrammaticism, objectivity, elegance, wit… Even such a quintessentially “Gallic” composer as Debussy could respond to Franck’s idealism and purity of aims, despite the gulf that separated their artistic temperaments. “César Franck is always a worshipper of music”, he wrote. “No power on earth can induce him to interrupt a passage he considers just and necessary; however long it is, it must be gone through. This is the hallmark of an imagination so selfless as to check its very sobs until it has first tested their genuineness.” What redeemed Franck for Debussy, then, was the intense, irresistible sincerity that has won his late work a devoted audience now for over a century. The quintet, the earliest of Franck’s works to have joined the enduring concert repertoire, bears it the most eloquent of testimonies.” Richard Taruskin / Columbia University 1981

EMI Classics is pleased to release the 10th annual 3CD set of highlights from the Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano, “the delightful festival where youth meets experience and both benefit” (Gramophone). The Times described Argerich’s Lugano Festival as “community music-making on a deluxe scale, with performers and listeners mutually uplifted by music’s wonders”. The set is being released in anticipation of the Festival’s 2013 season.

Reviewing the 2011 Live from Lugano release, Nicholas Kenyon wrote in The Observer, “There are not many reliable annual treats among classical CDs these days, but the series of live recordings from Martha Argerich's Lugano festival are now a highlight of each year.” Andrew Clark in the Financial Times wrote, “Every June [Argerich] and a clutch of friends and protégés make music in a style that reflects her free spirit and total dedication. Even when Argerich is not playing, she seems to inspire the performance.”

In addition to Argerich, the performers in 2012 included many familiar names from previous Live from Lugano releases, among them the violinist and cellist brothers Renaud and Gautier Capuçon and pianist Nicholas Angelich, all of whom record for Virgin Classics. The current set also welcomes back Mischa Maisky, Lilya Zilberstein, Polina Leschenko, Dora Schwarzberg, Nora Romanoff-Schwarzberg, Lyda Chen, Ilya Gringolts, Georgio Tomassi, Carlo Maria Griguoli and Alessandro Stella. Newcomers include the pianists Maria João Pires and Nelson Goerner.

The repertoire of Martha Argerich and Friends – Live from Lugano 2012 puts the piano at the centre of the programming, focusing particularly on piano duets and rarely performed and recorded compositions. There is a group from the Austro-German Classical and Romantic tradition, followed by works from Slavic composers, sounds from Italy and France and, as a send-off, a two piano arrangement of an Argentinean tango. The performance of Mahler’s Piano Quartet is something of a family affair, performed by Ms Argerich’s longest-standing artistic collaborator Mischa Maisky, his pianist daughter Lily and violinist son Sascha and Ms Argerich’s daughter Lyda Chen. The orchestral work in this year’s set is Mozart’s Concerto K503 with Argerich and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk.

Martha Argerich’s passion, technical virtuosity, temperament, commitment and supreme artistry have illuminated the music world and left audiences spellbound since she won the 1964 International Chopin Competition. Reluctant to perform solo for many years, she has continued to perform chamber music and concertos with orchestra where, in her own words, “I feel the musicians moving about. I watch them and I also move. I’m more natural.”

EMI Classics marked the occasion of Martha Argerich’s 70th birthday in 2011 with the release of four multi-disc sets bearing some of her finest performances from 1965 to 2009.

Few artists have nurtured and promoted emerging young musicians with the level of personal commitment shown by Martha Argerich. In the process, she has created inspired chamber music partnerships mixing established and up-and-coming artists. After setting up Meeting Point at Beppu, Japan in 1996 and the Martha Argerich Festival in Buenos Aires in 1999, the pianist decided to create a similar gathering of musical minds in Europe. The southern Swiss town of Lugano was identified as an ideal setting for a project based on the spirit of building a community of close-knit relationships among young and established artists and the Progetto Martha Argerich was launched in 2002. More than a decade later, the Festival continues to retain its original experimental ‘feel’ because of the original programming and the emergence of new performing talents. Geoffrey Norris in The Daily Telegraph wrote, “It is always instructive to see who has been invited to perform at the Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano, because the cast list is a reliable guide to some of the most exciting talent in the musical world today.”

The twelfth season of the Martha Argerich Project will take place from 9 June to 3 July 2013 and will include performances by many of the artists on this set.

EMI would like to dedicate these recordings to the memory of Jurg ‘Abdul’ Grand, who founded the Martha Argerich Project at the 2002 Festival and co-directed the 2002 and 2003 events.

“Everything Martha Argerich touches turns to gold, not only her own piano playing but those around her whom she evidently inspires to new heights.” (The Observer)

“These discs are a reminder of a unique, ever-formidable and enchanting artist.” (Gramophone)