An album of Joseph Haydns (17321809) eight delightful early keyboard sonatas by Tuija Hakkila performed on two fortepianos. The current consensus is that there are about 60 surviving authentic Piano Sonatas by Haydn, while contemporary sources point to as many as 80. The earliest of these probably date from Haydns youth in the 1750s; the last one was completed in summer 1795. Some of the lost Sonatas are works that Haydn simply gave away as a young man, and they have never been heard of since. In mid-18th-century Vienna music was mainly distributed in the form of manuscript copies made by copyists. Haydn did not publish his first collection of six Sonatas until 1774. Of the Sonatas selected for this project, Haydn wrote all of these over a period of about 15 years before his 40th birthday.

Mozart's view of the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was wonderfully contradictory: he observed that Bach's music would be considered old-fashioned in his own time, but that "he [Bach] was the father, and we are the children." This set of six CPE Bach symphonies from the early 1770s gives listeners the opportunity to think more deeply on Mozart. Mozart might easily have heard these works, and if music moved in the direction of lightness and grace from Bach's style during Mozart's creative lifetime, one can still hear a lot of CPE. The six symphonies here are not representative of Bach's "Sturm und Drang" style; all but one are in major keys, and even the gracefully chromatic middle movement of the Symphony in B minor, Wq 182/5, is extremely Mozartian.

This new recording contains the four grand piano sonatas by Carl Maria von Weber. Written in the early 19th century these works mark the transition from the Classical to the Romantic style. Weber infused the classical sonata form with his own lyrical and dramatic, sometimes even theatrical, elements. The pianism is of the highest order, finding orchestral timbres and colours, as well as pianistic novelties in the virtuoso textures. As valuable additions to the four piano sonatas the famous Invitation to the Dance and the Rondo brillante are included. Michelangelo Carbonara finds drama, passion, wit and elegance in these wonderful, still underrated works. Carbonara studied at the famous Lake Como Academy, where his teachers included Dimitri Bashkirov, Leon Fleisher, Alicia de Larrocha, Claude Frank and Menachem Pressler. He won several international competitions, including the Schubert International Piano Competition in Dortmund.

This new recording presents three Cello Concertos originated from the two Capitals of classical music at the time: Naples and Vienna.

Boris Giltburg has set out to study and film all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas by the end of 2020. The project started as a personal exploration, driven by curiosity and his strong love of the Beethoven sonatas. These performances display Giltburg’s customary spirit and technical finesse, and also convey the electric atmosphere of the live recording.

By far the best opera based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, is Verdi's Falstaff. But the lazy, cowardly, greedy, overweight, alcohol-soaked, sexually predatory, and somehow (despite everything) endearing antihero is big enough for more than one opera. Salieri's Falstaff is much simpler and smaller in scale than Verdi's, less inventive and energetic. But this is a sophisticated, funny, brightly performed treatment of Falstaff's attempt to woo two married women with identical love notes.

The performance of this High Baroque piece in a Classical guise would not be worth mentioning at all if it had not contained the spark for the next folia, the Twenty-Six Variations on La Folia di Spagna of 1815 by Eybler’s teacher, Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). A recording of this instrumentation treatise in sounds, with a scoring enhanced by three trombones, bass drum and, above all, a harp, was included in the third album in our series Beethoven’s World.

Axur, re d'Ormus is an operatic dramma tragicomico in five acts by Antonio Salieri. The libretto was by Lorenzo da Ponte. Axur is the Italian version of Salieri's 1787 French-language work Tarare which had a libretto by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Axur premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 8 January 1788, the title role being sung by Francesco Benucci, Mozart's first Figaro. It became one of the most famous operas in Vienna, being performed much more frequently than Mozart's Don Giovanni, which was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1788.

The violinist Midori has been a celebrated performer for more than 35 years, this recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, complemented by his two Romances for violin and orchestra, marks the composer’s 250th birthday in December 2020. Midori plays with the Lucerne Festival Strings in a recording made in Switzerland shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the cancellation of a planned concert performance and international tour. “Beethoven guided my colleagues and me,” says Midori, “his work focusing and inspiring us, our concentrations heightened, enveloped together in our musical efforts … I am reminded that he was a man of strong beliefs … who took firm stands on many major issues of his day … Beethoven's determination still provides a model for humankind.”

This is the first project in a seven-volume series exploring the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement, which swept through all art forms in the between the early 1760s and 1780s. The purpose of this movement were to frighten and perturb through the use of wild and subjective emotional means of expression.

Eine bunte Mischung aus bekannten Stücken wie dem "Musikalischen Spaß" - aber auch unbekannten Perlen wie dem Kontretanz "Der Sieg vom Helden Koburg". Das Ganze wird auf unnachahmlich charmante Art vom Orpheus Chamber Orchestra präsentiert.

Listening to these fluent, expressive performances, it’s difficult to see how even Cramer—one of the great virtuosos of his day—could have matched the effortless mastery so characteristic of Howard Shelley’s pianism.

The ensemble's latest recording of Mozart string quartets left critics agog: "I doubt that these particular works have ever been recorded with such astonishing command as by the Hagen Quartett. The players' corporate intonation is almost impossibly true . . . A disc whose rare brand of perfectionism is rather special." (CD review by Julian Haylock, The Strad)

The Seraphim Trio makes a welcome return to ABC Classics with an album of Beethoven's piano trios. Beethoven's trios are amongst the finest works in the chamber canon, taking the form spawned by Mozart and Haydn and developing it into a musical genre which reached symphonic proportions in its musical language and virtuosity.

The Pianist Chika Inaoka was born in Hyogo, Japan. She began learning piano at the age of three. She graduated from Kyoto Horikawa high school of music and Tokyo college of music in a Piano Performance Course. From 2000 she studied at Mannheim University of Music and Performing Arts with Ok-Hi Lee and Prof. Rudolf Meister. She completed her postgraduate studies course with the highest honor in 2003 and her “Konzert Examen Solist Course” with the highest honor in 2005 by the special support of the German government scholarship (DAAD: German Academic Exchange Service).