Producent, wytwórnia Brilliant Classics - Muzyka. - strona 17

The supreme master of the chamber duet genre was Agostino Steffani, recently celebrated by Cecilia Bartoli, and it is no coincidence that Handel had a manuscript copy of Steffanis famous duets with him at the beginning of his stay in Rome. The...

Kompozytor: Ferenc Liszt Wykonawcy: Michele Campanella Historische Ungarische Bildnisse, S. 205 Late Works Valses oubliées, S....

This new recording presents the complete guitar works of Llobet, who himself was a virtuoso on his instrument, as shown in the complex and innovative writing. Barcelona-born Miguel Llobet once played for the Spanish royal family in the early...

If it is true that the end of Romanticism coincided with the invention of electric light, then we can date this to 1880 -- the year in which Thomas Alva Edison patented the light bulb. At around this time, a brilliant student at the Paris...

20th Century French composer André Jolivet was known for his devotion to French culture and this can be clearly seen in his fine mélodies, or French art songs, which combine all the qualities of rich melody and sensitivity to text that are...

The third instalment of this survey of Bela Bartóks output for violin offers the two violin sonatas and the two rhapsodies. The sonatas, masterpieces of immense complexity and difficulty, show Bartók from his most austere, uncompromising side,...

The 19th century was a significant time for both opera and the guitar. Opera was everywhere, and its characteristics gradually began to appear in other styles of music as composers tried to encapsulate the expressiveness and flexibility of the...

Felix Mendelssohn is associated with one brilliant score of incidental music for the theatre -- A Midsummer Nights Dream -- but in fact he composed scores for no less than 15 stage works. The most significant of them, including the three works in...

Many of Liszts works were transcribed for other instruments, both by the composer himself and other musicians.These hauntingly beautiful pieces for cello and piano were originally written for piano solo or the voice. They are from the final period...

Among the most prized exhibits of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, stands the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the largest surviving anthology of Elizabethan and Jacobean keyboard music. Dating from a period during which theory and notation were...

It was with this opera, premiered in Milan in 1830, that Donizettis reputation as one of the leading opera composers of Europe was cemented. The premiere was quickly followed by performances in London, Paris, and in 1839, in New Orleans....

Apollo e Dafne is an early work of Handels, completed at the latest by 1710 when he was 25 years old in Hanover, whence Handel departed in 1710 after Agrippina had made such an impact in Venice. He thence decamped to London in the autumn of...

Although little appreciated in his native France for many years, Hector Berlioz now safely resides among the giants of the 19th centurys musical scene. The composers vocal output is extensive and includes several operatic works; written during...

Béatrice et Bénédict was borne of Berliozs lifelong fascination with Shakespeare. A performance by the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet reportedly inspired him to commence work on his own Roméo et Juliette,...

It seems strange that such a celebrated composer as Alexander Borodin actually spent much of his life as a distinguished research chemist. While working as a professor in Chemistry at the University of St Petersburg in 1862, Borodin met pivotal...

They are a rarity: complete issues of Listzs 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies. Especially the later ones written at the end of Liszts life are hardly ever recorded. The numbers 16 to 19 seem to be less popular with pianists. Too difficult A new recording...

The origin of the dialogue between a solo voice and several obbligati instruments dates from the early baroque period (1600), and probably emerged from the hum drum setting of the market square where a singer would perform to the accompaniment of a...

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) composed his comic opera May Night in 1878-9, at a time when he was fascinated in the stories for the supernatural and the fantastic. It was also at this time that he had been appointed to a teaching role at the...

This compilation provides a showcase of the many aspects of the cello and the range of emotions and characters that the instrument is able to convey. Opening the collection is Debussys technically demanding Sonata in D minor, a staple of the...

These choruses are not (or not entirely) the tub-thumping exercises in blatant jingoistic rabble-rousing that you might expect, but contain many moments of poetry that make them secular rivals to earlier works by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov which...