The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. By Carolina Maria de Jesus

After this preamble or subtle captatio benevolentiae, I will tell you that in 1992, at the age of ten, I gave my first public recital in the beautiful monastery of Santa Maria del Puig, founded no less than in 1240 near Valencia and where my parents had married in 1980. I could not have imagined that only seven years later I would go to live and study in New York and that Haydn would accompany me on that difficult journey as a fragile but permanent connection to my childhood… And in that 1992 recital, the main score of the evening was a Haydn Sonata, one of the ones I include on this CD: the Sonata in D Major Hob. XVI/14, which is so full of tenderness and of a serene bucolic-pastoral luminosity. It is an inner idyll of simple but sublime grandeur. And so began the red thread that represents Haydn in my life, a kind of locus amoenus (a pleasant place) where I have so often found, and continue to find, solace, consolation and shelter. In my childhood, everyone loved Mozart and Beethoven. Haydn was the ugly duckling. I always felt I was an ugly duckling and maybe that is also why I loved him so much from the beginning…

For her Deutsche Grammophon debut, this rising star has chosen the Beethoven, the most musically demanding of all violin concertos, as the centrepiece. Recorded live at Vienna's prestigious Musikverein María has composed her own cadenzas for the violin concerto. The album also includes works by Kreisler, Saint-Saëns, Spohr, Wieniawski and Ysaÿe, as well as the Beethoven cadenzas by the same composers.

A CD of world premiere recordings of music not heard since Vivaldi’s day. Volume 28 of the Foà Collection is Vivaldi’s personal collection of opera arias, and includes variants on the arias performed in the operas. The performances under the stylish direction of Federico Maria Sardelli, who also contributes a dazzling recording obbligato in the concluding aria, are splendid.