Nicola Dinan

This set is what early music or baroque opera purists might call politically incorrect. The orchestra at Venice's La Fenice is too big, the playing is Romantic, with plenty of rubato and not crisp, and very few of the singers get through the music as Handel wrote it or embellish it the way he wished. But it does feature Joan Sutherland at her most amazing. Her huge voice, pure tone, impeccable technique, seamless legato, and glorious ease are the definition of bel canto. While this two-CD release is not ideal, it does present Alcina in much of its loveliness.

It’s been two years since the release of "Koan" through Dodicilune, and fourteen years since "Quintessenze", the album that he shared with saxophonist Nagual, and now Nicola Cristante is back with a new album as leader; he has temporarily left aside jazz to give voice to the Afroroutes Projects which has seen him collaborate assiduously with Senegalese drummer and percussionist Moulaye Niang.
Theirs is a similar research which joins African musical traditions to the music of the Americas and singer Milky Malick, who works especially in the reggae field, makes such research even more original. The musicians involved by the Venetian guitarist in such new adventure are all Senegalese, and every track is imbued with Africa through evocative, colorful reflections upon Cristante’s essential and lucid guitar which gives away his blues and funk influences…

Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 – Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17.

Nicola Benedetti joins that small group of violinists who have given us really special recordings of Elgar’s concerto. Accompanied by an orchestra with this music flowing in its veins—it played for Nigel Kennedy’s now-classic version— and a conductor whose attention to the score’s myriad details never stands in the way of the work’s vast panoramas, Benedetti rises magnificently to the challenge. She achieves moments of great inwardness when needed, but sings out like a lark when the music demands it. It’s a very considerable achievement, and shows what a superb, mature musician she has blossomed into. Delightful encores too!

Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, HWV 17), commonly known simply as Giulio Cesare, is an Italian opera in three acts written for the Royal Academy of Music by George Frideric Handel in 1724. The libretto was written by Nicola Francesco Haym who used an earlier libretto by Giacomo Francesco Bussani, which had been set to music by Antonio Sartorio.

Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis' first forays into classical music in the 1980s were celebrated as some kind of unique breakthrough, but that overlooked the fact that Marsalis was classically trained at the Juilliard School, absorbed all kinds of traditions, and has always had aspirations in the classical sphere. Credit Marsalis with broad ambitions when he turns to classical composition, as in his Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), and again here with a Violin Concerto and Fiddle Dance Suite, written for violinist Nicola Benedetti. Both works are impressive, not least in their idiomatic writing for the violin; they flatter Benedetti considerably.

This has the look of a career-making recording from Scots violinist Nicola Benedetti, putting her up against difficult repertory that diverges from the crowd-pleasing fare that formed the basis of her career up to this album. It would have been hard to predict just how well she pulls off her task here; few could have heard the profound interpreter of Russian music in the Italia and Silver Violin collections from earlier in the 2010s. The Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 99, is an emotionally thorny work in five movements anchored by a tense passacaglia in the middle. The composer withheld it from publication during the period of renewed Stalinist repression in the late 1940s. It was premiered in 1955 by David Oistrakh, and in endurance and elevated tone even if not quite in lyrical grandeur, Benedetti brings that master to mind. Sample the Stravinskian "Burlesque" finale for a sense of how Benedetti gets outside herself here. The Glazunov Violin Concerto, Op. 82, is a more stable work, rooted in pre-WWI conservatory traditions, and Benedetti's reading is nothing short of letter-perfect.

The titular character of Bellini’s Il pirata is the tenor, Gualtiero, but it is the soprano, Imogene, who leaves the most powerful impression, thanks above all to her lengthy and dramatic closing scena. Il pirata had fallen into obscurity before it was revived for Callas at La Scala in May 1958. She went on to make a studio recording of the final scene a few months later and early in 1959 starred in this concert performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Collaborating with one of her favourite conductors, Nicola Rescigno, she electrified the audience with singing of inimitable poetry and theatrical power.