Halasz

German guitarist Franz Halász displays a fine sense of tone and pacing in this revealing overview of Takemitsu's solo guitar music. Takemitsu wrote for the concert stage in an original avant-garde idiom, created over 100 film soundtracks, and produced arrangements of Japanese folk tunes and Western popular music. This range, except for the soundtracks, is represented here. The title tracks are from the concert work All in Twilight – Four pieces for guitar (1987), inspired by Paul Klee's painting of the same name. Here Halász's beautiful touch is shown in contrasting and subtle timbres on the composer's rich, jazz-like harmonies, sometimes brooding, sometimes in quickly flowing passages like those of the third movement. Next, the first six of "12 Songs" introduces some technically challenging, but aesthetically straightforward arrangements – Sammy Fain's classic Secret Love, four tunes by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and George Gershwin's Summertime in which Takemitsu spectacularly manages to reduce the best orchestral parts to the limits of the guitar and to improvise in a free-flowing manner.

Henze recordings don’t come my way very often, but when they do I’m reminded of just how versatile a composer he is. There are also fine DVDs of his best stage works; L’Upupa und der Triumph des Sohnesliebe (Euroarts) is a treat for the eye and ear, and there’s an unmissable Ondine from Covent Garden, with Miyako Yoshida in the name part.

The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.

In 1875, The Demon had the greatest success of any of Rubinstein operas, both in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Other compositions included the E flat Piano Concerto, Fantasia for Two Pianos, and the opera Nero". After a concert tour of England, he was made a Hereditary Nobleman by the Tsar, and in 1883 he was awarded the Cross of St. Vladimir for his contribution to musical education in Russia. He also gained a new student named Alexander Glazunov, whose talent at the piano greatly impressed him.

The universal appeal of the music of Johannes Sebastian Bach is such that most musicians, regardless of their instrument, long to play it. As a consequence, his works are constantly being arranged for other instruments – following a practice that Bach himself excelled at, repeatedly reworking his own music as well as that of others. A case in point are the four so-called lute suites, all of which now belong to the standard repertoire of most concert guitarists. To what extent they were originally composed for a plucked instrument has always been a matter of contention and has given rise to many hypotheses.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, possessed a panoply of talents – leading swordsman, athlete, virtuoso violinist, composer and musical director – so it is not surprising that by the standards of his age he was not especially prolific. Nevertheless, Saint-Georges’ violin concertos demonstrate a gift for writing attractive and engaging music as well as a virtuoso technique with which to dazzle audiences, not least in his own performances. Published in pairs, the concertos recorded here show his originality of expression, his command of structure and a bravura exploitation of the violin’s higher register.

After his latest recording, devoted to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas in his own arrangement, Franz Halász returns to Spanish music with this recital devoted to Federico Moreno Torroba. The composer of many of the best-known zarzuelas, Moreno Torroba did not initially seem destined to specialize in guitar music. It was his symphonic poems that caught the attention of the legendary guitarist Andrés Segovia, who commissioned Moreno Torroba’s first compositions for guitar despite the composer’s unfamiliarity with the instrument. The compositions gathered here showcase a composer who, although deeply rooted in the Spanish musical tradition, was attuned to what was being done elsewhere, including the music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, and who created a personal language marked by impressionism that would later influence guitar music throughout the twentieth century, from Heitor Villa-Lobos to Leo Brouwer.