Eugène Goossens (1893-1962) was an English composer whose work was initially held in the same high esteem as contemporaries such as Walton, but who has since faded into obscurity. He worked across the UK, US, and Australia, and helped lobby for the Sydney Opera House to be built. He was knighted in 1955. His music helped incorporate French impressionism into English Romantic music. Kaleidoscope is…

Par SENFTER JOHANNA. The number of well-known clarinet quintets is quite small. The only major composers whose clarinet quintets are relatively widespread are Mozart, Brahms, Weber and Reger. The composer Johanna Senfter (1879-1961) from Oppenheim admired the music of Johannes Brahms and of Max Reger who was her teacher. Her chamber music œuvre conveys a certain closeness to the clarinet. She even…

In Powhatan County and Song of the James. Par HOSAY JOHN. Powhatan County, Virginia was named after the great Native-American Chief Powhatan, whose confederacy of tribes once dominated the costal Virginia plain. He is most remembered for being the father of Pocahontas. His people are best known as the Native Americans who helped the Jamestown colonists survive. Several of these original tribes sti…

Par . The musical appeal of the Blues, as they began to be heard in the early twentieth century, was so infectious that musicians with open minds and ears were drawn to it as soon as they heard it. And that appeal crossed the racial and ethnic divides that characterized American society. So it was, that even before African American guitarists were recorded playing fingerstyle blues guitar, their w…

Tango Guitar Duets. Par GARDEL CARLOS. Gardel's tangos remain classics, which no performer who aspires to be taken seriously can ignore. For this album Argentinian Tango specialist Diego selected some of Gardel's most popular tangos and arranged them for two guitars. The timbre of this instrument is exceptionally well suited to evoking in sound the musical riches of an impoverished community of im…

The surviving second and third acts of Catone in Utica, one of Metastasio's most dramatic libretti, premiered in Verona in the spring of 1737 in a setting by Vivaldi, contain some of his finest, most mature, and most original arias, and are published here for the first time. They evince a potential dramatic intensity that makes us regret all the more the loss of the first act. Only one aria of Act…

Par SCHLEE THOMAS DANIEL. A suite whose movements always deliver something other than what they seem to promise. But throughout, the two instruments and respectively their players act like two people in very specific situations: I.: The opening movement is reserved for the piano; the initially earnest, solitary cantilena intensifies creating expectation. Suddenly II.: the violin sounds. Its movin…

During the visit to Brive-la-Gaillarde in 1940, Poulenc sketched a little piece for the children of his cousins: Sophie, Sylvie, Benoit, Florence and Delphine Périer, Yvan, Alain, Marie-Christine and Marguerite-Marie Villotte, and their two friends Marthe Bosredon and André Lecoeur. This took the form of a musical background to Jean de Brunhoff's popular illustrated children's story about Babar, a…

24 Pieces For Piano. Par WOLF PETER E.. Péter Wolf (a doctoral graduate of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest) has composed a number of large-scale compositions in recent years which have had success at the hands of distinguished performers: these include two piano concertos as well as concertos for oboe, clarinet, and violin. By entitling his newest set of pieces for piano Wolf-temperie…

This composition is in its own way meant to be a tribute dedicated to Paquito D'Rivera showing the author's appreciation for this musician as an exponent of Cuban music of the past and present century, who represents a stronghold and example for all musicians - in particular for saxophonists and clarinetists - not only in his capacity as a performer and composer but also as a cultivator of both so…

Claude Debussy: Valse romantique - arranged for clarinet and piano by Zoltán Kocsis.Zoltán Kocsis, who died recently, was not just a phenomenal pianist. He is mourned also as a musical polymath, whose genius embraced the activities of a composer, conductor, editor, and not least instrumentalist and arranger. In the last capacity, he added some 150 works to the symphonic, chamber, song and piano re…