Grigori (Grigory) Samuilovich Frid was a distinguished member of the generation of composers born in Russia just before the Revolution of 1917. Frid’s significant corpus of piano music can trace its lineage to Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky, and his skill in conjuring entire worlds in music can be heard throughout this recording. His albums of Children’s Pieces are rich in gems that evoke poetic nostalgia, seasonal moods and witty pictorial descriptions that genuinely transcend their didactic purpose. In these world première recordings, distinguished pianist Elisaveta Blumina reveals Frid’s extraordinary character – a gifted composer, pedagogue and artist who lived his life to the full, despite many personal setbacks and difficulties.
Who the devil is Walter Kaufmann? Sorry that the cloven-hoofed one is summoned right at the start in a prominent place. But it is true – Armin Kaufmann is an Austrian composer, known at least for the title of one of his orchestral works, Erotikon. Dieter Kaufmann is an Austrian composer, pioneer of electro-acoustic music, co-founder of the society for electro- acoustic music. So far, so good.
For more than forty years, Lalande was the French court’s favourite composer, cultivating the most elevated and touching aspects of the spirit of the Grand Siècle. Sébastien Daucé and the Ensemble Correspondances offer us some remarkable examples of his output here: with the imposing Miserere, ample and sombre, the Dies irae and the rarely heard Veni Creator, this ‘Latin Lully’ brought the art of the grand motet to its zenith.
Inspired by the Psyché created collectively by Lully, Molière, Corneille and Quinault, Locke’s Psyche was a veritable artistic firework display: seeking to vie in splendour with the operas of continental Europe, it luxuriously combined theatre, song, dance, and spectacular machines and scenery. Sébastien Daucé here offers us his splendid reconstruction of this key masterpiece in the history of early English opera.
The violinist, cellist, flutist and oboist Robert Valentine (Leicester, 1671 - Rome, 1747) was a prolific author of sonatas - especially for recorder - and an instrumentalist engaged in the musical life of Rome, the city where he moved, in a period between 1693 and 1700, from his native England. Valentine belonged to a group – not very large but quite important for their excellent performative qualities – of virtuosos of wind instruments (oboe and also flute) who in the first half of the eighteenth century moved to Italy, also to make up for some shortage of instrumentalists in this sector, even if recent researches show, especially in Naples, a great vivacity of local schools even for what concerns wind musicians. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, between Rome, Naples and Florence, we discover the presence of at least four foreign instrumentalists: the oboists / flutists Ignatio Rion (active in Venice, Rome and finally in Naples), Ignazio Sieber (Venice), Ludwig Erdmann (Florence) and finally Robert Valentine. The work of this English-born musician greatly fostered the development of flute music in Italy. His work as a composer and performer places him among the most prolific authors of original music for recorder of the period.