Presented in a stylish 4-CD box set, here is a comprehensive recording of one of the most enigmatic manuscripts in the history of European music, preserved in the museum at the Château de Chantilly, France. ‘Anything that can be sung, can be written in music notation,’ claimed an anonymous treatise on notation in the late fourteenth century. The harmonies thus ‘captured’ on parchment represent an apex in Western music, associated with the wealthiest courts in Christendom, called ‘decadent’ by some.
It was Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Album fur die Jugend that inspired Tchaikovsky to start composition on his Children’s Album in 1878. He dedicated the set to his nephew Vladimir Davidoff (Bobik) who was 7 years old.‘For a long time I have been saying to myself that it would be a good thing to contribute, within the limits of my powers, to the enrichment of the piano literature for children, which is rather poor. I would like to compose a series of very easy little pieces with attractive titles like Schumann did’ he wrote to his patron Mme von Meck.