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The very first-ever set of ‘piano sonatas’ in a new and highly imaginative recording.Following Andrea Coen’s 2010 recording (94021) Brilliant Classics is the only label with two complete versions of Giustini’s sonatas on the market, showing its commitment to significant but under-recorded turning points in musical history. Lodovico Giustini (1685-1743) seldom left his native Pistoia, where he worked as organist of the Congregazione dello Spirito Santo. Published in nearby Florence in 1732, this set of 12 elegant sonatas is, in keeping with Scarlattian practice, dominated by movements in binary form, featuring dances and contrapuntal excursions, and displaying hints of the emerging galant style, which replaced busy Baroque continuo textures with a singing, more natural approach. Giustini enjoys high contrasts, soft and loud, and teases out of the new fortepiano technology everything it had to offer.However, the extant scores are not free of errors, and they leave a good deal up to the performer. Paolo Zentilin makes the most of Giustini’s writing.

Pietro Antonio Locatelli's arrival on the musical scene during the first half of the eighteenth century was like a bolt from the blue. He wrote and performed things which had never been heard before on a violin; he was able to play in such acute regions 'that a canary lost its balance and fell off its perch' according to an anecdote of the times. His contemporaries had nicknamed him 'Earthquake', and he possessed great performing power and charisma.

Handel is best known to the wider public for his large-scale choral and orchestral works, but his organ music is equally precious. It was the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels who, diverting him from a career in the law, spotted his exceptional abilities on the instrument. By the age of seventeen, Handel was already the resident organist at the Domkirche in Halle, and he was later to defeat Domenico Scarlatti in a contest of virtuosity during his time in Rome.Martin Haselböck and the Orchester Wiener Akademie have recorded the Organ Concertos, Op. 4 and Op. 7 in the prestigious Vienna Musikverein, world-famous for its acoustics. Haselböck plays on the hall’s imposing Rieger organ in what is one of its very first recordings. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the fourth organ in the Musikverein since the hall opened in 1870. With its considerable dimensions – much larger than the organs Handel used to play on – the instrument offers a tonal palette rich in contrasts.

Most of us only think of the great Antal Dorati as a conductor, but this prominent Hungarian came from a family of musicians and started the study of music at the age of five, learning the cello a couple of years later and composition lessons beginning at 12; this in spite of the fact that he had already written several works, including three operas with original libretti, all of which he considered to be immature effords. His first composition teacher was Leo Weiner (1885-1960) who had a profound effect on Dorati's musical taste and performing background.

Auteur d’un nombre phénoménal d’opéras (cent quinze lui sont attribués, sans compter le reste d’une production considérable), Alessandro Scarlatti avait soixante ans lorsqu’il composa son dernier ouvrage lyrique, Griselda, pour le prince Ruspoli. Créé au Teatro Capranica à Rome en 1721, il s’inspire du Décaméron de Bocacce sur un livret dû à divers auteurs, dans une distribution exclusivement masculine comportant à l’origine cinq castrats et un ténor.Parmi les enregistrements de cet ouvrage, celui de René Jacobs paru en 2002 avait d’emblée placé la barre très haute. Le présent témoignage enregistré en 2021 durant le Festival della Valle d’Itria à l’occasion des trois cents ans de l’ouvrage comporte une distribution essentiellement italienne distribuée à deux sopranos, un contre-ténor et une mezzo-soprano avec des voix lyriques convenant particulièrement bien à cet ouvrage dramatique.

Published almost two centuries ago in 1823, the Diabelli Variations are more than just a major work in Ludwig van Beethoven’s oeuvre and in the history of piano music. Rather, they are among those exceptional works of music history that simply cannot be classified and – as Igor Strawinsky wrote in amazement about the Grand Fuge for string quartet composed three years later – could well have been created on a satellite in outer space. Despite only daring to première the Diabelli Variations in Berlin in 1856 and focussing on them throughout his life as an artist and publisher, Hans von Bülow was correct in his prediction that this work would provide “musical brain food for generations” – and not just for pianists and their audiences, but for music historians and theorists too. As such, countless works have been dedicated to the origins, intention, structure and (biographical) symbolism of the work – not least, in the tradition of von Bülow, by the pianists themselves, as demonstrated by the editions and statements of greats such as Artur Schnabel, Alfred Brendel and Rudolf Buchbinder.

Born in Bologna, Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632–1692) spent all his life between his birth city and Modena, where he moved in 1674. There is something noteworthy in this geography of the composer: Vitali’s move from Bologna, then part of the Papal States under the administration of Rome, to the smaller but significantly more secular and artistically stimulating Modena, under the rule of the splendid Este family, is suggestive of a desire to achieve greater expressive freedom. All composers must tackle the dilemmas of their times, and Vitali’s legacy is his ability to use his great skill to achieve that ideal synthesis between tradition and innovation.

The character of Gioconda is one of the most tragic in the whole history of Italian opera: an altruistic cantatrice who sacrifices everything, to the death, to secure the escape of the man she loves with her rival. Who was better suited than Maria Callas to assume such a role? La Gioconda, the only opera by Ponchielli that has not fallen into neglect, is a stunning transitional work between Verdian romanticism and verismo. La Divina particularly liked this opera.