Honegger Songs

True to the motto “Stay curious,” Audax Records offers a second excursion through the catalog of Greek-born composer Hélène Covatti and her husband Robert Dussaut. After an album devoted to the songs of the couple (ADX13722 with Adriana González and Iñaki Encina Oyón), here the Brüggen-Plank duo presents their works for violin and piano, some of them in premiere recordings. With extensive experience in the twentieth-century repertoire, Marie Radauer-Plank and Henrike Brüggen approach this music with flair and an impressive palette of colours and complete the album with works by composers close to the couple in Paris during the inter-war period.

The 37 songs in this recital, written by 27 composers – male, female, English, French, Swiss, German, Romantic, modern and contemporary – bear witness to the richness of Shakespeare’s works to which this recital is dedicated.

One of the most persistent questions that musicians ask themselves while practicing a piece is the inevitable query of how the composer himself might have performed his music. There are many written reports on how the old masters such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven may have played or improvised; and there are lines of teacher/pupil relationships which can trace their lineage back to the pianistic greats such as Liszt, but still we have to imagine the sound since we cannot actually hear it.

Granting a long-held wish of many record collectors, Sony Classical is issuing the complete monaural American Columbia discography of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a vast box set of 120 CDs, all in new remasterings. Almost all of this material will be appearing for the first time on CD on Sony Classical. Indeed, 152 of these recordings have never been released at all on CD before now.