All of the Estudios sencillos represent, in a few lines of music, the stylistic evolution of Leo Brouwer throughout his compositional itinerary. The first series of ten pieces, conceived as a pedagogical study of particular difficulties, was written in 1971 and still embodies the Cuban influences of the early Brouwer. Starting with the very first, which had been largely sketched in the early Sixties, and in which the study of syncopations against a bass is joined to a typical South-American rhythm, all of the Studies focus on the challenges which the students may face when confronting a style markedly different from that of the simple tunes or regular arpeggios found in the teaching methods hitherto used – and which dated back from the early nineteenth century; this does not apply, of course, to the concert etudes written for the professional performers.

The name of Astor Piazzolla is fatally linked to the Tango, although his artistic parable is much more complex than it appears to a superficial look. Many encounters influenced his musical life. Thanks to the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, he became a pupil of Alberto Ginastera, whom Piazzolla kept acknowledging as the greatest Argentinian composer of his century. After this educational experience and that in the orchestra of Annibal Troilo, Piazzolla encountered European music through Nadia Boulanger with whom he studied. He then began an experimentation of his own, becoming – as he said in the Sixties – a vanguardista of the tango.

Bach loved to collect and gather his best works in series, normally constituted by an elegant number of works. Six was a number he particularly prized: in fact, there are six English Suites, six French Suites, six Partitas for keyboard instruments, six works for unaccompanied solo violin (three Sonatas and three Partitas), six Brandenburg Concertos… to cite but a few examples. Each of the series cited above represents a true collection of masterpieces, and many of them represent one of the summits of the literature for a given instrument or ensemble. This is certainly the case with the six works for solo violin and with the six Suites for solo cello.Together, these Suites do indeed build an itinerary exploring all the moods and feelings of the human soul, and, possibly, they also constitute a musical “history of salvation”, from the original innocence of the first Suite to the resurrection of the D-major Suite, after experiencing suffering, joy, death and hope. Dance here becomes life, and, possibly, it also becomes prayer.

The Piano Sonatawas composed between 1800 and 1801 around the same time of the First Symphony and published by Cappi in Vienna in 1802. Beethoven dedicated this work to his patron Karl von Lichnowsky. Named after its third movement “Marcia Funebre sulla morte di un eroe” (Funeral March on the Death of a Hero) it is one of the few cases in which the name was chosen by the author himself. Scholars made various assumptions, but the person Beethoven had in mind remains unknown, probably a mere literary device. The Sonata’s immediate inspiration was probably a visit to Vienna in 1800 by the German-born, London-based piano virtuoso Johann Baptist Cramer, whose playing of his own works and those of his teacher Muzio Clementi caused quite a storm. Beethoven felt the need to compete with this virtuosity and wrote a number of works that began to break away from the more classically oriented sonatas of the 1790s, towards the mature second-period style.

The idea of collecting in an album some hitherto unrecorded works by Robert Casadesus results from my aim to bring to light the wonderful music by this composer, whose fame as a creator was overshadowed by that as a pianist.
Born in 1899, after obtaining his diploma at the Paris Conservatoire, Robert Casadesus cooperated with composer Maurice Ravel writing the catalogue of the latter’s works, and he gave recitals, sharing the stage with his friend, in France, Spain and England. Many recordings document his concert activity and his art, while recordings of his work as a composer are scanty. He wrote numerous pieces for solo piano, for ensembles, for voice and orchestra. A refined interpreter of French classicism and impressionism, he frequently played in duo with his wife Gabrielle L’Hôte (aka Gaby), and also with his son Jean: for them he wrote works for two or three pianos. He taught for many years at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau, and he lived in America during World War II.

This Da Vinci Classics album not only offers a savoury experience of piano works written by some of the most important American composers, but also helps the listener to understand the links and connections among the featured composers. Non man (or woman) is an island, and this is especially true for musicians. Whilst great composers always have a more or less prominent element of originality, this is never entirely severed from a relationship with artists of the past and with living colleagues. This relationship, of course, may be of proximity or opposition; new ideas are born both from imitation and from rejection.

There is a handful of composers, in the history of Western music, whose name is inseparably and indissolubly associated to just one work, and frequently that work is an opera. This happens, for instance, with Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, with Giordano’s Andrea Chénier… and with Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Yet, each and every musician cited in this list may have achieved immortality thanks to his one absolute masterwork, but contributed valuable compositions to the history of music; and if it may happen that just that one work is truly outstanding, normally the others are at least very interesting, and at times genuinely beautiful.

Today, the label of “classical music” covers an enormous timespan, and, within it, a variety of genres. In some cases, one could say that a particular work was a “Classic” since its premiere, or even since its conception. Arguably, Beethoven imagined his Ninth Symphony as aiming at the status of “Classic” well before it was ready for performance. His standing at the time, his unquestionable genius, and the efforts he put in its creation were just as many guarantees for the Symphony’s reception and for its lasting appreciation.Such works were conceived from the outset for public performance; they may require a large ensemble of professionals in order to be played, and a large venue to be enjoyed. In a way, these are the “classics of classical music”.However, today the umbrella of “classical music” covers also a great number of works which never aimed at such a status. They were works conceived for private performance, for “immediate consumption”, so to speak, and for the delight of their players more than of their listeners (if listeners were at all present).In other words, works which were intended as the “light music” of the past have become now, by virtue of their age rather than of their intrinsic qualities, part of “classical music”. This includes also their displacement from the private home to the concert hall (or to the recording medium).

For many years, and still for many people, Stanford’s name was synonymous with music for the Anglican Church. In this role, he expressed an easy, trusting, but not smug or complacent, relationship with the Christian faith. The natural assumption is that Stanford the man held such a faith. Yet the truth is that we know nothing of his beliefs beyond what we may infer from the music. In the previous CD in this series, Stanford, in the Triumph of Love cycle, entered perfectly into the spirit of his friend Edmond Holmes’s belief in reincarnation while, in Die Wallfarht nach Kevlaar, he set Heine’s reworking of a Catholic Marian legend with total empathy. On a larger scale, we must note four Mass settings (two lost), a Requiem and a Stabat Mater. “Songs of Faith” is very far from a concert room equivalent to the well-known Bible Songs with organ accompaniment. Published as two mini-cycles, the first has texts by his friend Tennyson, for whom “There is more faith in honest doubt … than in all the creeds”, the second draws upon Walt Whitman. Stanford had already raised eyebrows back in 1884 with his Elegiac Ode, a cantata setting of Whitman’s lines “Come, lovely and soothing death” from his Elegy to Abraham Lincoln. Whitman’s belief in an afterlife was more complex than Holmes’s vaguely Buddhist creed, and Stanford seems once again perfectly at his ease.

For over two decades now, acclaimed pianist Erato Alakiozidou, artistic director of the Municipal Conservatory of Pylaia-Hortiatis, has been occupied with giving prominence to Greek composers, paving their way to the international scene. The first spark was ignited back in 2000, when she took part in Thessaloniki’s “Ihosygkyria”, while her work began bearing fruit in 2011, when Subways Music released an honorary album on the work of her mentor, Nikos Astrinidis, a prestigious maestro, pianist and composer.

Cyro Delvizio is one of the leading guitarists, composers, and researchers of his generation. Having devoted his multiple skills to spreading Brazilian classical music

Francesco started his music studies at the age of 7 with Michele Corbu and completed his undergraduate study at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica in Bologna, Italy in 2003. He then studied with renowned guitarists Michael Lewin and Timothy Walker at the Royal Academy of Music in London and was awarded the Postgraduate Diploma in Guitar Performance with distinction and the LRAM in teaching in June 2008.During his two years at the Academy, he won the Blyth Watson Award and the Foundation Award and was very highly commended in the Julian Bream Prize by the maestro itself, getting the 2nd place.Francesco has played in important venues such as the Duke´s Hall and the Bolivar Hall in London, Amnesty International in Perugia and the Teatro degli Avvaloranti for the 4th Right Profit Guitar Festival in Citta´ della Pieve organized by the "David and Maria Russell" Right Profit Association, where he gave a very successful performance of the Concerto in D by Castelnuovo-Tedesco with the Tokushima Bunri University Orchestra from Tokyo conducted by the famous Italian conductor Tonino Battista, followed then by his highly-acclaimed Asian debut in Japan in November 2008 and in Hong Kong in December 2008.

Besides Liszt and Erkel, Mihály Mosonyi was the most significant composer of the Hungarian Romantisicm. His native village can be found in the county of Moson of the former Kingdom of Hungary: Boldogasszony ( Frauenkirchen in German). This place of pilgrimage is known sincet he fourteenth century and has belonged to the Austrian Burgenland since 1921.

It is a sad irony of history that Tomaso Albinoni is universally known for a piece he never wrote. The average music lover, prompted by the word “Albinoni”, will normally answer: “Adagio!”. But the exceedingly famous Adagio, played at weddings and funerals, and heard in countless soundtracks, is in fact a fake realized by Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto in the twentieth century. Still, the fake Adagio has the undeniable merit of having attracted global attention on the figure of this Venetian baroque composer, who fully deserves to be numbered among the greatest musicians of his era. And this claim is not unsupported: we may in fact assume that a composer whose works were adopted as models by Johann Sebastian Bach had something to say. Bach in fact employed themes excerpted from Albinoni’s Opera I and built some of his finest Fugues on them; moreover, he also proposed Albinoni’s music to his students as a compositional model. In fact, we have Bach’s handwritten corrections on a pupil’s realization of the continuo part of an Albinoni Sonata.

There are numerous red threads weaving together the works recorded in this Da Vinci Classics album. As is well known, the term sonata literally means “something to be played”, in Italian, while its cognate term cantata means “something to be sung”. Along with toccata (“something to be touched”, i.e. to be played on a keyboard instrument) these three genres are among the leading creations of Italian Baroque music, and would inspire countless musicians both in the Peninsula and abroad. None of these genres was one of Vivaldi’s favourites: at least numerically, the Red Priest clearly preferred Concertos to Sonatas. However, his extraordinary knowledge of the secrets of violin playing, largely derived from his long and assiduous frequentation of concertos, could easily translate into skillful and creative works in the genres of the Sonatas.