Fernando Velazquez

Contemporary composer Fernando Velázquez presents Viento, together with the Basque National Orchestra, the choir Kup Taldea and international star cellist Johannes Moser. After multiple international successes as a film composer, Viento shows Velázquez’s skill in genres such as the symphonic poem, cantata and cello concerto. The album opens with his cello concerto, which combines an elegiac, Stabat Mater-like opening movement with a heroic, rock-inspired middle movement and a finale that employs the Basque Zortziko dance rhythm. Moser’s masterly interpretation brings out all the colours and episodes of this exceptional score.

With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

Cellist Johannes Moser and pianist Andrei Korobeinikov present Bohuslav Martinů’s complete cello sonatas. These works belong to the most significant twentieth-century repertoire for cello and piano. Reflecting Martinů’s troubled existence, defined by wartime, emigration, longing for the homeland, yet also full of hope and life-affirming energy, the music seems entirely topical in our own troubled times. After their award-winning recording of works by Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff from 2016, Moser and Korobeinikov demonstrate their congeniality once more, fully realizing the extreme interdependence of cello and piano in these works.