Today's new releases include Haydn, Scheidt and Pärt from Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini on Alpha Classics, Brahms and Dora Pejačević from the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective on Chandos, songs by Florence Price from up-and-coming tenor Ted Black & Sascha El Mouissi on CAvi, and a Heine-themed recital from mezzo Helen Charlston and Sholto Kynoch on BIS.
Haydn2032, Vol. 19: Trauer
Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini
The centrepiece of this latest instalment in Antonini's ear-opening Haydn2032 series is the 'Trauersinfonie' from the early 1770s, so named because of its sombre Adagio. It's flanked here by two similarly elegiac works: the string orchestra version of Arvo Pärt's Da pacem Domine (composed in memory of the victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings) and Scheidt's Paduana Dolorosa, which was written shortly after the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. Haydn's Symphony No. 52 and the early, unnumbered Symphony in B flat complete the programme.
Antonini discussed his approach to programming with Presto last summer, as part of an interview celebrating the ensemble's fortieth birthday.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res+ FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Brahms & Contemporaries, Vol. 3
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
This is the final volume in the Kaleidoscope's series juxtaposing Brahms's Piano Quartets with works for the same forces by composers who deserve to be better known; here his Piano Quartet No. 1 from 1861 is presented alongside Croatian composer Dora Pejačević’s Piano Quartet from almost five decades later, which the group loves for 'the tenderness of its slow movement' in particular.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
A Poet's Love
Helen Charlston (mezzo), Sholto Kynoch (piano)
The BBC New Generation Artist joins forces with Sholto Kynoch for a programme of songs on texts by Heinrich Heine, including Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, Carl Loewe's 'Die Lotosblume', Josephine Lang's 'Wenn zwei von einander scheiden', and the world premiere of Héloïse Werner's Knight’s Dream (written for these artists as a companion-piece to Dichterliebe).
Helen and Sholto will perform excerpts from the album at Presto next Friday - look out for highlights on our YouTube channel the following week...
Available Format: SACD
Florence B. Price: Hold Fast To Dreams
Ted Black (tenor), Sascha El Mouissi (piano)
A recent graduate of the Wiener Staatsoper's Young Artist Programme, rising star Ted Black is partnered by German pianist Sascha El Mouissi for his debut album of songs by Florence Price, many of which remain unpublished; the programme includes settings of texts by Price's close friend Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Lord Byron, and American writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Vivaldi: La Costanza Trionfante
Valeria La Grotta (soprano), Cecilia Molinari (mezzo), Biagio Pizzuti (bass-baritone), Valentino Buzza (tenor), Modo Antiquo, Federico Maria Sardelli
Composed for the Venice Carnival in 1715-6, a Costanza trionfante degl’Amori e degl’Odii does not survive in autograph manuscript, though seven arias and a duet fragment were discovered by Faun Tanenbaum Tiedge and Michael Talbot in 2001; Sardelli has now unearthed sufficient material to reconstruct eighteen of the original thirty-five numbers, including some arias which Vivaldi repurposed for Il Teuzzone a few years later.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
JS Bach: A Life in Music, Vol. 3 - Köthen
Les Arts Florissants, Benjamin Alard (harpischord), Paul Agnew
The third volume of Agnew and Les Arts Florissants's Bach: A Life in Music series focuses on the six-year period which the composer spent in the city of Köthen, where he was appointed Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold in 1717 and composed some of his finest orchestral and solo instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concertos. No. 5 of that set appears here, alongside the Orchestral Suite No. 2 and the cantata Durchlauchtster Leopold (written for his employer, who was also godfather to Bach's son Leopold Augustus).
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Tchaikovsky: Rococo Variations
Gabriel Schwabe (cello), Sinfonieorchester Aachen, Christopher Ward
Both of the headline pieces on this album were altered by their dedicatees: Wilhelm Fitzenhagen re-ordered the Variations on a Rococo Theme to the conternation of the composer, whilst Anatoly Brandukov made changes to the virtuosic solo part of the Pezzo capriccioso. Schwabe performs the original version of both, and follows them with his own arrangements of the slow movement of the Violin Concerto and the 'Valse sentimentale' from the Six Morceaux; the world premiere recording of the second version of the Overture-Fantasy: Romeo & Juliet (prepared in response to feedback from its dedicatee Balakirev) closes the album.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Schumann, Handel, Strauss & Schulz-Evler
Nelson Goerner (piano)
The Argentine pianist's tenth solo album for Alpha Classics centres on Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze, written in 1837 and based on a mazurka by his new fiancée Clara Wieck; it's preceded here by Handel's 21 Variations on the Chaconne in G (aka Suite No. 2) and followed by Adolf Schulz-Evler's Concert Arabesques on Motifs by Johann Strauss '(By the Beautiful Blue Danube'). Schumann is a composer particularly close to Goerner's heart: reviewing his recording of Kreisleriana in 2014, BBC Music Magazine enthused that 'to hear Nelson Goerner navigating Schumann's variety of textures with so much delicacy, good sense, beauty of tone and rapt atmospheres is a treat indeed.'
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res+ FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Irrlichter – Songs By Franz Schubert
Sophie Rennert (mezzo), Joseph Middleton (piano)
The Austrian mezzo teams up with one of today's finest collaborative pianists for an all-Schubert programme including 'Der Zwerg', 'Gretchen am Spinnrade', 'Erlkönig', 'Willkommen und Abschied' and 'Die Taubenpost'; reviewing the results last month, Limelight Magazine praised Rennert's 'clarity and flexibility', describing her as 'an instinctive storyteller [who] effortlessly inhabits the kind of narrative ballads presented here'. Rennert also appears together with Middleton, Sir Simon Keenlyside, Katharina Konradi and Mauro Peter on the Mahler recital Lieder der Jugend - Songs of Youth and Awakening, due out on Signum on 10th July.
Available Format: SACD
Mozart Concert Arias
Sarah Fox (soprano), Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla Y León, Roberto Forés Veses, Malcolm Martineau (piano)
After winning the Kathleen Ferrier Award in 1997, British soprano Sarah Fox went on to triumph as Mozart's Susanna at Glyndebourne and the Royal Danish Opera, and as Zerlina at Covent Garden and Cincinnati. Here she presents a selection of concert arias including 'Vado, ma dove?', 'Nehmt meinen Dank', 'Conservati fedele' (written when the composer was just nine), and 'Ch'io mi scordi di te?', which Mozart composed for the original Susanna, Nancy Storace.
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Filmed at the Opéra Comique between 2009 and 2023, this set brings together superb productions of Bizet's Carmen (performed on period instruments and conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner), Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet (with Stéphane Degout as the Prince of Denmark and Sabine Devieilhe as Ophélie), Messager's Fortunio (with Cyrille Dubois in the title-role), Gounod's La nonne sanglante (starring Michael Spyres and the late Jodie Devos), and Delibes's Lakmé (with Devieilhe as the heroine and her husband Raphaël Pichon conducting Pygmalion).
Available Format: 5 Blu-rays
