Alba

The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

Finland-based Tempera Quartet is best known for its incisive interpretations of the complete string quartet oeuvre of Jean Sibelius. Tackling some 20 works, or 70-odd movements, that make up the Finnish master's output, is no small feat, and the Tempera Quartet received high praise from critics for its three-CD set on BIS, which contains this mostly neglected music.

Recent scholarship on Luis Misón (Mataró, 1727–Madrid, 1766) demonstrates the growing interest among the musicological community in studying the life and work of one who is an essential composer in the history of Spanish music. Musical historiography has extolled Misón's contribution to the genre of the tonadilla escénica, a genre widely appreciated in his time and which must have had a notable influence on his instrumental music, about which less is known.

Various Artists - Flamenco: Patrimonio de la Humanidad (2011) [4CD BoxSet] {EMI Music Spain}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.73 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 675 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 56 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2011 EMI Music Spain | 0 87048 2 5
Latin / World Music / Flamenco / Guitar

The CD-book ‘Flamenco: Patrimonio de la Humanidad’ journeys through the history of jondo music. In November 2010, UNESCO decided to include flamenco on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural World Heritage, which is the greatest international distinction for any cultural expression. There have been somewhat more than 200 years of history, according to the documented information which is currently held, in which flamenco has continually grown thanks to the creativity of mighty, brilliant, courageous artists who have gone beyond the limits of diverse kinds (territorial, social, political) in order to offer a type of music too beautiful to be ignored.

Though Luigi Boccherini composed some 30 sonatas that we know of for his primary instrument, the cello, only six were actually published during his lifetime; still fewer are performed now with any great frequency. As a performing virtuoso, many of Boccherini's compositions for cello would certainly have been for his own use and as such place high demands on the performer; the mass appeal of chamber music for people to play at home, however, ensured that not all of his sonatas (or concertos, for that matter) are primarily technical in nature. This Alba disc features five sonatas including the very popular Sonata in A major, G4, and the B flat major Sonata, which listeners will in part recognize as the doppelgänger of the famous concerto in the same key.