Sûpâ Mario Yosshî Airando

In this wonderful recording, cellist Lorenzo Meseguer and pianist Mario Mora bring together four composers who have historically been undervalued: From Fanny Mendelssohn’s Fantasia to Gustav Jenner’s Sonata in D major, the album also includes Felix Mendelssohn’s Sonata op. 58, a masterpiece for this combination, and an arrangement for cello and piano of Clara Schumann’s Three Romances op. 22.

Mario Escudero (October 11, 1928 – November 19, 2004), was one of a handful of Spanish flamenco guitar virtuosos who, following on the footsteps of Ramon Montoya, helped spread flamenco beyond their Spanish homeland when they migrated to the United States in the early 1950s. Along with others such as Sabicas, Carlos Montoya and Juan Serrano, Escudero helped forge the viability of solo flamenco guitar as a concert instrument, with lauded performances at New York's Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and other venues. Invited to perform at the White House for President John F. Kennedy, Escudero was counted among the best in his era; Ramón Montoya called him "the best flamenco guitarist of this new generation."

Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.

After the success of their Tartini disc (Arcana 478, Diapason d'or, 5 stars from Musica), Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell'Annunciata return for an ingenious collection of six concertos, all of which are transcriptions of other works. Not only do we hear the keyboard arrangements of Venetian concertos such as Marcello's famous oboe concerto and Vivaldi's Violin Concerto RV230, but also reconstructed concertos by Bach such as those for oboe and oboe d'amore (BWV 1056 and 1055) and those that have come down to us in their original version — from the Violin Concerto BWV 1042 up to and including the renowned Concerto nach Italienischen Gusto BWV 971.