![Francisco Fullana – Through the Lens of Time (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/02/04/eaqlug0qw9igc_600.md.jpg)
Francisco Fullana – Through the Lens of Time (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Young Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana will release his debut recording in March 2018 (Orchid Classics). Entitled Through the Lens of Time, the recording brings together four modern perspectives reimagining the Baroque tradition: a dialogue that prompts both composers and performers to explore musical giants of the past and place them in their own lives. Francisco Fullana has recorded the CD together with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Izcaray as well as with pianist David Fung.
![Francisco Fullana – Bach’s Long Shadow: The Chaconne Files (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/02/04/fnq0q8s6m1uja_600.md.jpg)
Francisco Fullana – Bach’s Long Shadow: The Chaconne Files (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Spanish-American violinist Francisco Fullana has taken the Partita No. 3 in E Major by Johann Sebastian Bach and built around it a programme of interlinked yet contrasting works, resulting in an original and intricately constructed album. Johann Sebastian Bach’s output has had a far-reaching impact, casting the “Long Shadow” that gives this album its name. Fullana uses gut strings, a baroque bow and historically informed ornamentation for his performance of Bach’s E major Partita, creating a pared-down, immediate interpretation.
Ysaÿe was inspired to write his Op. 27 Sonatas after hearing Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. Yet whereas Bach’s music demands restraint from the performer, Ysaÿe’s encourages virtuosity. There is darkness in this Sonata, too, and Fullana performs the work with electrifying energy. Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo was dedicated to Ysaÿe, and Fullana feels a special kinship with Kreisler: he plays Kreisler’s first Guarneri violin, the 1735 “Mary Portman” Guarneri del Gesù.
The recital culminates in Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Two Violins. Ysaÿe wrote the work to perform with Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who gave her name to a violin competition that was most recently won by violinist Stella Chen, Fullana’s duo partner on this album.
![Fedor Rudin, Boris Kusnezow – Heritage (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/30/o3xqm21cq72ra_600.md.jpg)
Fedor Rudin, Boris Kusnezow – Heritage (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]
On this fascinating new release, violinist Fedor Rudin and pianist Boris Kusnezow perform works by mid-20th-century Russian composers Edison Denisov, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, including previously unpublished music. French-Russian violinist Fedor Rudin explores and pays tribute to his heritage via this rich collection of works, including his own arrangement of Denisov’s orchestration of Debussy’s Prelude and Duo, which comes from Debussy’s unfinished opera, Rodrigue et Chimène. Other gems include Denisov’s rarely-heard Three concert pieces for violin and piano (1958), and his previously unpublished Sonatina (1972), which marks a return to his melodic youth after the musically experimental interim years. Those years are represented here by Denisov’s dodecaphonic Sonata (1963). We also hear an unfinished Sonata by Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Hopak from his opera Sorochinsky Fair, and Prokofiev’s unusually theatrical Violin Sonata No. 1.
![Francisco Fullana – Bach’s Long Shadow (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/02/04/w87jefdknwx8a_600.md.jpg)
Francisco Fullana – Bach’s Long Shadow (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Spanish-American violinist Francisco Fullana has taken the Partita No. 3 in E Major by J.S. Bach and built around it a programme of interlinked yet contrasting works, resulting in an original and intricately constructed album. J.S. Bach’s output has had a far-reaching impact, casting the “Long Shadow” that gives this album its name. Fullana uses gut strings, a baroque bow and historically informed ornamentation for his performance of Bach’s E Major Partita, creating a pared-down, immediate interpretation.
![Francisco Fullana, Alba Ventura – Spanish Light (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/09/04/unyoa7kyl58wa_600.md.jpg)
Francisco Fullana, Alba Ventura – Spanish Light (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana returns to Orchid Classics with a recital of Spanish music for violin and piano. Described as ‘an amazing talent’ by Gustavo Dudamel, Fullana has a natural affinity with this repertoire, which includes dazzling virtuoso pieces by the great violinist-composer Pablo de Sarasate, as well as the evocative ‘Sonata Española’ by Joaquín Turina. The recital also features works by several composers from the Catalan region: Enrique Granados, Eduardo Toldrà and Joan Manén, all of whom subtly combine characteristic Catalan folk styles with harmonic influences from France.
![Elena Urioste – The Jukebox Album (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/05/rvc6u8azzbrob_600.md.jpg)
Elena Urioste – The Jukebox Album (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
When the pandemic struck early in 2020, violinist Elena Urioste and pianist-composer Tom Poster responded by channeling their creative energies into #UriPosteJukeBox, a portmanteau of their surnames and a nod to the retro feel of the jukebox with its eclectic selection of songs to be chosen by the listener. The original intention was to produce one video of the duo performing together for every day of the lockdown (which at the time was anticipated to be relatively brief). What followed was a project that took off in ways the pair had never dreamed of, capturing the imaginations and hearts of listeners across the globe, embracing requests that traversed many musical genres, featuring commissions by contemporary composers, and entertaining followers with increasingly elaborate costumes, props, additional instruments, and multi-tracking.
![Elizabeth Llewellyn, Simon Lepper – Heart & Hereafter: Collected Songs of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/06/ev4p4yzbi05jc_600.md.jpg)
Elizabeth Llewellyn, Simon Lepper – Heart & Hereafter: Collected Songs of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Known for her vivid portrayals and full, distinctive voice, Elizabeth Llewellyn has established herself internationally as a dramatic and vocal artist of distinction. She has chosen to offer listeners something new by devoting her debut album to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, much of it never recorded before. To poetry by Christina Rossetti, Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs and A Lament are almost all world-premiere recordings.
![Edna Stern – Hélène de Montgeroult (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 88,2 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/03/5060189560639_600.md.jpg)
Edna Stern – Hélène de Montgeroult (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 88,2 kHz]
The rediscovery of Hélène de Montgeroult’s music, notably her Complete course for the instruction of the pianoforte (more than 700 pages, including 114 Etudes, varied themes, fugues, and a fantasy), which can be found in several of the world’s great public libraries, brings to mind Georges Perec’s short story The Winter’s Journey, in which a young man unearths a long-forgotten book that seems to anticipate Symbolist poetry avant la lettre, a book of “plagiarism by anticipation” that will vanish for good later in the story. The difference is that today, Hélène de Montgeroult’s work, still extant, is asserting itself as the missing link between Mozart and Chopin. Her personality, doubtless too modern for her contemporaries – who struggled to understand her audacious chord progressions and her rich and complex polyphony – now sheds light on the French music of the nineteenth century prior to Berlioz, as it touches listeners who are now familiar with the language of Romanticism. She sunk into oblivion soon after her death. However, it is hard to imagine any of the great Romantics (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, even Brahms) not having studied the piano on the basis of her method, who was popular at the time and was graced with a fourth reprint in Germany around 1830. And indeed, who would not think, for example, of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude” (Op.10/12) while listening to Montgeroult’s Etude No.107 …
![Edna Stern – Schubert on Tape (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/03/09/danm60o5al7ya_600.md.jpg)
Edna Stern – Schubert on Tape (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]
Pianist Edna Stern offers her interpretations of the music of Schubert via a refreshing and personal method of recording, using analogue tape to record single takes of each piece in order to present the most honest and immediate performance possible. This ethos grew out of early experiences of hearing her own recordings: “I was shocked to encounter an interpretation that I myself could never have played or even imagined”, and it was this that prompted Edna Stern “to go back to a mode of recording practice that would more faithfully do justice to the music and Schubert’s humane masterpieces in particular”.
![Escher String Quartet – Terra Incognita (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/09/21/mw46vmmhnq6rc_600.md.jpg)
Escher String Quartet – Terra Incognita (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Pierre Jalbert’s music immediately captures one’s attention with its strong gesture and vitality. Rich in instrumental color and harmonically engaging, its narrative is dramatically compelling yet always logical in its flow. In the orchestral Chamber Symphony, big sky, and Fire and Ice, and in numerous chamber compositions, he synthesizes an array of current musical resources into bold, deeply satisfying, personal statements that surprise and delight.
![Matilda Lloyd, John Reid – Direct Message: 20th & 21st Century Works for Trumpet & Piano (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/12/20/t8somvhggkrea_600.md.jpg)
Matilda Lloyd, John Reid – Direct Message: 20th & 21st Century Works for Trumpet & Piano (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Matilda Lloyd is a fast-rising star of the trumpet world, having won the BBC Young Musician of the year Brass Final as well as the Eric Aubier International Trumpet Competition, and having made an impressive solo debut at the BBC Proms. Matilda’s debut album reflects her desire to broaden the trumpet repertoire, with no fewer than three works recorded for the first time, by composers Giles Swayne, Deborah Pritchard and Alex Woolf. Also included on the recording are forgotten works of the 20th and 21st centuries by Jacques Castérède and Raymond Gallois Montbrun alongside staples of the trumpet repertoire, such as Enescu’s Légende and Peter Maxwell Davies’s impressive showpiece, Sonata for Trumpet and Piano Op.1.
![Daniel Kurganov, Constantine Finehouse – Rhythm & the Borrowed Past (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/12/04/t4fr5w4tgucwb_600.md.jpg)
Daniel Kurganov, Constantine Finehouse – Rhythm & the Borrowed Past (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]
Soviet-born American Violinist Daniel Kurganov and Russian-American pianist Constantine Finehouse perform a stunning program of contemporary and 20th-century music by Lera Auerbach, Richard Beaudoin, John Cage and Olivier Messiaen. As Richard Beaudoin argues in his booklet notes, this program is characterized by the powerful sense of rhythm shared by these composers and the performers themselves.
![David Bendix Nielsen – J.S. Bach & Arvo Pärt: Organ Works (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 192 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/07/27/rllpz0aau428b_600.md.jpg)
David Bendix Nielsen – J.S. Bach & Arvo Pärt: Organ Works (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 192 kHz]
Young Danish-Hungarian organist David Bendix Nielsen makes his solo album debut with a recording that weaves the music of J.S. Bach and Arvo Prt into a rich recital. By combining composers with such apparently different musical approaches, Nielsen sheds new light on both, so that listeners hear unexpected parallels between the music of the German Baroque and that of 20th-century Estonia. One characteristic shared by both composers is that of a deep spirituality, as heard in chorale preludes and fugues by Bach, or in Prts hypnotic tintinnabulation in Spiegel im Spiegel. There is secular music, too, in the form of Bachs organ transcription of Vivaldis Concerto in D minor. David Bendix Nielsen is the organist of St. Marks Church in Copenhagen and teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He won the Lonie Sonning Talent Prize in 2018, and from 2022 to 2023 was a recipient of the Young Cultural Elite scholarship from the Danish Arts Foundation.
![Callum Smart – Transatlantic (2020) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/11/03/wvdn5hngnp5ga_600.md.jpg)
Callum Smart – Transatlantic (2020) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Callum Smart returns to Orchid Classics with an album described by the violinist as: “American and English music from past and present … music that has influenced me from the two countries and cultures I’ve lived in all my life…”
The album features music by Edward Elgar, who wrote that his Violin Sonata is “full of golden sounds”, and the Romance by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was championed by Elgar as “far and away the cleverest fellow going”. Smart also plays the taut, energetic Three Pieces by London-based composer Kate Whitley, while the American side of the programme is represented by Amy Beach in her tender Romance, and by the exciting Road Movies by John Adams. Smart’s recital concludes with his own arrangement of the famous Anglo-American hymn, Amazing Grace.
![Coco Tomita， Simon Callaghan – Origins (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 192 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/04/04/qiiwzp3ifhfpc_600.md.jpg)
Coco Tomita， Simon Callaghan – Origins (2022) [FLAC 24bit, 192 kHz]
Winner of the Strings Final of the BBC Young Musician in 2020, Coco Tomita’s stunning debut album features a varied program, including works by Enescu, Poulenc, Boulanger, Hubay, Ravel and Debussy.
The choice of repertoire for her debut recording was entirely Tomita’s own: “Having complete freedom over what I wanted to share with the world was amazing, and put simply, I love all the pieces I’ve chosen deeply. They’ve resonated with me over the years, and I found really interesting connections between every piece and composer. The program also relates to key figures of the 20th century, especially female violinists I hugely respect”. Those violinists include Ginette Neveu, the driving force behind Poulenc’s Violin Sonata, and Jelly d’Aranyi – taught by Jeno Hubay, whose Carmen is one of the pieces on the album that Tomita played to such acclaim during the BBC Young Musician. She is particularly fascinated by the Poulenc and Ravel Sonatas, which are at the heart of the album: “there’s just so much to explore and express”.
![Chelsea Guo – In My Voice (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/11/12/lr90qesb1d0tb_600.md.jpg)
Chelsea Guo – In My Voice (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
Chelsea Guo is a musical polymath who brings her dual gifts as pianist and soprano to this, her debut album. Hailed as a Chopin specialist during her prizewinning performances at the 2020 Chopin Piano Competition, Guo performs solo piano works that show all facets of the composer’s style, including the Barcarolle in F-sharp minor, Op. 60 and the four Op. 33 Mazurkas, in which Chopin took existing folk styles to new heights with his nuanced, ground-breaking approach. Chelsea Guo’s unique talents are to the fore in the three songs on this album, in which she simultaneously sings and plays; the programme also includes Chopin’s complete 24 Preludes, Op. 28, an extraordinary set composed in every available key.
![Camerata Antonio Soler, Javier José Mendoza – El cielo y sus estrellas (2022) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/05/edmc8p1ely7jb_600.md.jpg)
Camerata Antonio Soler, Javier José Mendoza – El cielo y sus estrellas (2022) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]
For some years, I have been performing and recording eighteenth-century galant music from the viceroyalty of New Spain. This latest album with the Camerata Antonio Soler presents a sample of the instrumental soundscape, along with vocal works set to Spanish paraliturgical texts that were all performed in New Spain. Although some of the works included here were not written in the New World, every piece presented on this album is conserved in present-day Mexico and Cuba – they were undoubtedly a part of cathedral musical life. We have included works by Davide Perez, Luis Misón, and José Herrando; each having made their careers on the Iberian Penninsula. Also included are two Italians who served as chapel masters in present-day Mexico. Santiago Billoni and Ignacio Jerusalem worked in Durango and Mexico City respectively. Finally, Esteban Salas was born in La Habana, Cuba and worked at Santiago Cathedral.
![Camerata Tchaikovsky – Christmas Without Words (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 44,1 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/11/03/ll5na9g6ai6pb_600.md.jpg)
Camerata Tchaikovsky – Christmas Without Words (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 44,1 kHz]
After Camerata’s pre-Christmas concert at London’s King Place a few years back, where we played my arrangement of Silent Night as an encore, Matthew Trusler and I discussed the idea of recording jazzy arrangements of Christmas favourites. We came up with a programme which includes some of my own arrangements as well as those of a friend of mine, a brilliant violinist and arranger, Bjorn Kleiman. It also includes my orchestration of Take 6’s fantastic arrangement of O Come All Ye Faithful, taken from their 1991 album “Oh! He is Christmas”, as well as the 2nd movement of Winter from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky’s Melody, Op.42.
![Bucharest Symphony Orchestra, John Axelrod – Schumann 41/51 (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2023/10/24/n138mjwxp1osc_600.md.jpg)
Bucharest Symphony Orchestra, John Axelrod – Schumann 41/51 (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]
The Bucharest Symphony and Principal Conductor John Axelrod present a unique recording of both versions of Schumann’s 4th Symphony: the original version, composed and premiered in 1841 and published nearly 50 years later with the help of Johannes Brahms, and the revised 1851 version, completed three years before his untimely death, and defended and protected by his widow, Clara Schumann. The recording brings both side by side to show the different facets of Schumann’s character, as he himself put it: ‘Florestan the wild’ and ‘Eusebius the mild’. Principal Conductor of the Bucharest Symphony since 2022, John Axelrod explains that the focus of this project is to ‘delve deeply into Robert Schumann’s life, his love, and his long struggle with mental health. These two publications, one written during a manic creative year and the other in the depths of his emotional despair, provide for me the most telling representation of this radical romantic. I hope to share this musical discovery with my fellow musicians, our audience and listeners. Ultimately, we may learn something new about this extraordinary man.
![Barnaby Robson, Fiona Harris, Simon Chamberlain, Rebecca Chambers – 1 2 3 11 (2021) [FLAC 24bit, 48 kHz]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/23/t29e1pecwgfyc_600.md.jpg)
Barnaby Robson, Fiona Harris, Simon Chamberlain, Rebecca Chambers – 1 2 3 11 (2021) [FLAC 24bit, 48 kHz]
Clarinettist Barnaby Robson performs a rich program of 20th-century and contemporary music for clarinet and piano, including world-premiere recordings. The release opens with Barnaby Robson’s collaboration with BAFTA-winning sound designer Martin Cantwell: a recording of Steve Reich’s intricate New York Counterpoint, which involves eight pre-recorded clarinet lines (the forces of which are referenced in the album’s title.) Herbert Howells is celebrated for his choral music but his instrumental works are less famous; with pianist Fiona Harris, Robson performs the 1946 version of Howells’s Clarinet Sonata, never recorded before. Three further world-premiere recordings follow: Robson’s arrangement for clarinet, viola and piano of George Fenton’s Snow Leopard – music originally composed for the BBC’s “Planet Earth” – for which Robson is joined by Simon Chamberlain and Rebecca Chambers; Graham Fitkin’s mercurial Cusp for solo clarinet; and the witty Red Herring Blues for clarinet and piano by baritone-composer Roderick Williams. The recording is rounded off with two 20th-century French works: Poulenc’s Sonata for Two Clarinets (Robson has recorded both parts) and Debussy’s dazzling Première Rhapsodie for clarinet and piano.