Label: Brilliant Classics

For the first time complete (including 3 world CD premières): the piano works of Ildebrando Pizzetti. Pizzetti was a contemporary of Respighi, Malipiero and Casella. His style is retrospective, nostalgic and influenced by the Italian Belcanto. Excellent performances by Giancarlo Simonacci, a specialist in 20-th century music, as demonstrated in his superb recordings of the piano music of John Cage on Brilliant Classics. Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) belonged to the group of Italian composers (the so called ‘Generation of the ‘80s’), his contemporaries were Respighi, Malipiero and Casella. Of these composers, Respighi and Pizzetti composed relatively little for the piano, and their works for the instrument tend recall music of the past - with echoes of baroque and Gregorian chant detected in many of them.

On this CD Fabio Antonio Falcone presents recordings of possibly the two oldest examples of printed keyboard music. He uses three instruments, each of distinctive character: an Italian harpsichord after Alessandro Trasuntino (Venezia 1531) and a polygonal virginal after Domenico da Pesaro (ca.1550), both built by Roberto Livi. For Cavazzoni, he plays the organ of the Church of San Giuseppe, Montevecchio di Pergola, an instrument by a builder now unknown, which dates back to the end of the 17th century.

Many of Liszt’s 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 of his life and are the product of his old age and his quest for spirituality. Far from the virtuoso brilliance of his earlier works, their intense and romantic melodies express melancholy and desolation, the sparse textures and harmonic instability daringly looking forward to the twentieth century.

Though Tchaikovsky had an obvious penchant for writing astounding melodies for the cello (the soaring 5/4 waltz from the Sixth Symphony, or the brooding opening of the A minor Piano Trio for example), he wrote surprisingly little repertoire for the instrument on its own. No concerto exists; the closest cellists have is the popular and charming Variations on a Rococo Theme. Four other short works – two of which are transcriptions by the composer himself – make up the remainder of Tchaikovsky's cello works.

Reissue in the Brilliant Classics Opera Collection of this excellent “HIP” performance of Monteverdi’s ever popular L’Orfeo, history’s first real opera. Soloists include the crème of Baroque Voices: the great Sara Mingardo, Sylvia Pozzer, Gabriella Martellacci, Gianpaolo Fagotto and the inspiring and historically based direction of Sergio Vartolo. Narrating the famous tale of the Thracian singer Orpheus and his quest to the underworld to bring his wife, Euridice, back to the land of the living, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is one of the most enduringly popular of all operatic works.