Responsorium

The music throughout this set, which consists of Dino Saluzzi originals, is quite charming. The combination of Saluzzi's bandoneon, acoustic guitarist Jose Maria Saluzzi, and bassist Palle Danielsson works quite well, and both the arranged and improvised ensembles are melodic. Some of the music consists of modern tangos and there are also ballads and more jazz-oriented pieces. The mood is sometimes wistful and nostalgic, but it is not derivative of the past. A delightful set.

Leslie Howard's recordings of Liszt s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard's Herculean piano playing, this survey remains invaluable to serious lovers of Liszt. Every known note of Liszt's piano music has been recorded and is included here: Leslie Howard's 57 original volumes plus the further 3 supplements. GUINNESS WORLD RECORD for the world s largest recording series by a solo artist.

Carlo Gesualdo's name will always conjure up a special image: When he discovered that his wife had been unfaithful, he had her and her lover murdered and left on his palace steps, impaled on the same sword. Ghastly, but gripping–and, oddly enough, his harmonies, dissonances, upsetting chromatic passages, and general complexity can also be seen as "ghastly but gripping." Gesualdo was wealthy enough that he never had to depend on a patron; he could therefore write whatever he pleased, in whatever, far-out (to this day), experimental style he chose.

Tomás Luis de Victoria’s OFFICIUM HEBDOMADÆ SANCTÆ is one of the most compelling examples of creative genius in a composer, a toweringly poignant and masterpiece on the Passion of Christ, a pure but infinitely subtle creation, Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

In Minas Gerais, a region which still enjoyed great opulence in the late eighteenth century thanks to the discovery of gold there, Antonio dos Santos Cunha practised a vivid style of composition, with all the hallmarks of Baroque rhetoric combined with musical resources deriving from Italian opera, and spiced with a tropical ‘Sturm und Drang’, thus adding his own dramatic and intense setting to the canon of Passion music.