Dominic Desjardin Concerto à Quatre Pattes

The music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier has a moderate range and a deceptively simple harmonic framework that lead a wide variety of performing forces to attempt his works. The little Messe de minuit was a Christmastime favorite even in the years when French Baroque music was almost unknown otherwise. But choirs can get in over their heads, and that happens here even to Le Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal, a group that has released fine recordings of music by Carissimi and other Baroque composers.

Hyperion’s Record of the Month for April is the fourth volume in the burgeoning ‘Romantic Violin Concerto’ series. The central work on the disc is Moritz Moszkowski’s C major Violin Concerto, a full-blooded Romantic work which demands exceptional virtuosity. An increasing number of recordings, many on the Hyperion label, of this composer’s music have done much to lift his reputation beyond that of the ‘trifling miniaturist’, and the Ballade in G minor amply demonstrates how even a small canvas can aspire to advanced heights of pyrotechnic wizardry.

Poles apart? Ignacy Jan Paderewski is a familiar name, but the same can hardly be said of Jerzy Gablenz. Jonathan Plowright makes the strongest case possible for Gablenz’s piano concerto: a substantial work rich in melodic invention and thunderous pianism.

Twelve years younger than Bach and Handel, Giovanni BenedePo PlaPi left us a collection of nine Concerti per il cembalo obligato which rank not only among the very early examples of composition for keyboard instrument and strings, but also and above all, the first specimens especially conceived for the fortepiano, the new instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Billiant soloist and regular keyboard player of Zefiro, Luca Guglielmi offers us, for the first time on period instruments three brilliant and foreseeing piano concertos, interspersed with the large-scale Piano Sonata in C minor, a very widespread composition at the time, and the baroque Sonata for oboe, with a special appearence by Paolo Grazzi.