Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 18

Souvenirs du Louvre. Alain Planès here concludes his recording of Debussy’s complete solo piano works, combining incidental music for the stage, isolated and occasional pieces with acknowledged masterpieces such as the suite Pour le piano. The portrait of ‘Claude de France’ comes into sharper focus, revealing a creator frequently racked by doubt and a ‘curious urge never to finish a piece’: many relatively early scores (Danse bohémienne, Rêverie, Mazurka) were never published during the composer’s lifetime, including three Images from 1894, not issued until 1977!

Penned for the concert hall but brimming with the sounds and rhythms of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, this all-GERSHWIN program features American pianist Jon Nakamatsu in the Piano Concerto in F and the Rhapsody in Blue. For an orchestral encore, Jeff Tyzik leads the Rochester Philharmonic in an exuberant reading of the Cuban Overture.

Magma, composed in 1971 and inspired by the work of the painter August Puig, provides the overall title for this homage to Guinjoan on the occasion ot his seventieth birthday. These five pieces, recorded live, reflect three decades in the work of one of the outstanding Catalan composers of the present time, who is linked to the 'Generación del 51' and who can make both his own personality and the Mediterranean character tangible in his music.

Il Zazzerino (with works spanning 1577 to 1609) is mostly from the early music era "La Nuove Musiche" or the New Music, by Italian composer and tenor, Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first operas, Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600). The music is luscious and warm, and Andrew Lawrence-King's harp is a beautiful counterpart to Ellen Hargis, who unfurls a sensitive but powerful expressive voice for each piece. Fans of early opera will be pleased by the recording.

I discovered Il Zazzerino while looking for more work by Lawrence-King, after finding his work on the new recording of the first opera performed in the New World, by Spanish composer Torrejón y Velasco: La Púrpura de la rosa, which I also highly recommend. Another high quality early music opera.

Mary Hodder, Amazon.com

The swansong of Heinrich Schütz. In the early 1660s, Schütz, now relegated among the faded glories of the Dresden court, began to prepare for the idea of his own death – he was now more than 65 years old . . . He embarked on a setting of all 176 verses of Psalm 119, without necessarily expecting the resulting work to be performed: his swansong was conceived for all eternity. Ten years later, this Opus ultimum had assumed the form of 11 motets for double choir. Since the manuscripts were dispersed after his death, it was to be another three centuries before the work was reconstructed – and then sung!

First held in 1962, the Van Cliburn Competition has established itself as a joyous festival dedicated to the discovery and celebration of the world's finest young pianists. Every four years, the Van Cliburn Foundation offers the opportunity for a select group of outstanding musicians to showcase their talent while challenging themselves to reach new standards of artistic excellence.

The sophisticated elegance of trouvère poetry is wedded to the stark simplicity of peasant dances in these works by the 12th-C French abbot Gautier de Coincy. Using 10 voices and a variety of instruments from medieval fiddles to bagpipes, The Harp Consort directed by Andrew Lawrence King performs with its renowned mix of expert scholarship and inspired improvisation.

Three major artists of the harmonia mundi label invite you to share in a moment of intimacy: if the lied is the incarnation of German Romanticism, the works of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms – but also Beethoven, Dvorák, and even Korngold in the twentieth century – are its finest jewels. With no pretension to exhaustiveness, this set entitled Lied offers you a chance to get to know some of the cycles that have marked the history of the genre.

A large-scale portrait of a large (and great) choir. There is indeed scale and grandeur aplenty in this adventure in sonorities! Here is a rare occasion to relive five centuries of choral polyphony, from the forty (different!) voices of Thomas Tallis’s famous motet Spem in alium to the admiring tribute to it by Anthony Pitts, appropriately named XL – as in forty voices, but also as in ‘eXtra Large’…