Nicolas Kssis Martov

Under the artistic direction of Nicolas Altstaedt, this multi-award winning series in collaboration with the Lockenhaus Festival continues to bring to light great works of chamber music by composers who are already well known or still awaiting discovery. Schoenberg was in his early seventies when he composed his String Trio op. 45 in 1946, completing it after suffering a terrible heart attack. He told Thomas Mann that the trio reflected his physical and psychological condition of that period. The composer Constantin Regamey, born in Kiev in 1907, is little known. A Swiss of Polish descent, he was also a pianist, music critic and writer, who was appointed lecturer in Indian philology at Warsaw University in 1936. He joined the Polish Resistance in 1942 and it was at this time that he wrote his Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano.

As an introduction to these recordings Namoradze writes: "This album presents some of my reflections on the work of Robert Schumann, from both pianistic and compositional viewpoints. The program is centered on two arabesques, and the structure of the recital is itself reminiscent of an arabesque-like texture, interleaving Schumann’s work with my own. The opening sunrise of Schumann’s Songs of Dawn is followed by a pair of arabesques, Schumann’s work exerting an influence on aspects of the formal structure of my piece of the same name. Two considerably more virtuosic and extroverted selections complete the program: Schumann’s monumental Humoreske, followed by three of my piano etudes."

The Enescu Project began life in the concert hall and has now been faithfully recorded to create this album. The programme is devoted to the music of the great Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, and to that of his contemporaries and friends, creating a sense of the context in which Enescu was composing. Enescu studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Massenet and Fauré; rubbed shoulders and shared a stage with Bartók and Ravel; was the dedicatee of a sonata by Ysaÿe; and Debussy attended the premiere of Enescu’s First Symphony. Music by these composers, for different instrumental combinations, leads us to the focus of the album: Enescu’s beautiful Octet for strings, a work composed when he was only 19 and which had a profound impact on violinist Nicolas Dautricourt when he first heard it. Dautricourt is joined for this recording by a gathering of exceptional string players, and the album booklet includes a QR code that takes listeners to the spoken texts included in the original concert version of this fascinating project.

The thirteen sonatas on this première recording represent the complete music for solo piano by the Parisian keyboardist and composer ANNE-LOUISE BRILLON DE JOUY, a musician much celebrated in her day and greatly admired by Boccherini. Introducing technical innovations more usually associated with Czerny and Liszt, these sonatas reflect a gloriously rich musical environment, incorporating and transforming elements from music of the time with great imagination and wit, and showing us that Madame Brillon's glittering salon, though private, was by no means isolated.

In this wonderfully planned programme the whimsical poetry of York Bowen’s Hans Andersen ‘fragments’—music for a fully-fledged technique, despite the fairy-tale titles—is pleasingly complemented by the bravura of the studies. Nicolas Namoradze proves more than equal to the demands of both.

It's always great to encounter the recording that can "crack" a composer open, making his or her music accessible to a general listening public. And it's all the better when such a recording comes from beyond the usual quarters, as, for example, with this American recording of Renaissance polyphony. Nicolas Gombert was a Flemish Renaissance composer, a successor (and possibly a student) of Josquin who entered the service of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His music, especially in his masses, tends to present itself as a dense, unbroken flow of polyphony. Gombert is one of the composers music history students tend to slog through in hopes of getting to the good stuff. One noted Renaissance scholar used to refer to him, Adrian Willaert, and Giaches de Wert as "the Ert brothers." All that could change with this disc of Gombert motets and chansons. These works are less dense than his masses, but not by much, and they are considerably less limpid than Josquin's pieces in the same genres. But here it is the performances that clarify them. The Massachusetts ensemble Capella Alamire (the name is a pun on an aspect of an old solmization system) under director Peter Urquhart, recording in a church in Portsmouth, NH, slows the motets down slightly and addresses them with a group of eight singers – the black belt of choral singing.

For years, Beijer and Van Poucke have performed repertoire by Mozart and Schubert: their first recital took place at Amsterdam's Bethaniënklooster in 2012 and other concerts have followed regularly since. During the corona pandemic, the pianists decided to turn their focus to some of Mozart's four-handed sonatas. They did a number of performances with them and recorded three sonatas for this album: KV 358, KV 497 and KV 521.