Guild Records has been proving their pudding of late by releasing exceptionally fine yet little known repertoire in quintessential performances. They do so again with ‘Le Piano Français’. Pianist Timon Altwegg with conductor Gilles Colliard and the Chamber Orchestra of Toulouse...

The three musicians of the Absolut Trio have been building a repertory around “rare finds and forgotten pieces,” and the three works they perform on this Musiques Suisses CD are absolutely in line with this objective. Coming from the early and mid-twentieth century, each of the...

This album of Norwegian music for string orchestra from Lawo Classics was released in the fall of 2013. I put off listening to it for several months, mostly because the opening piece on the program, Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Op. 40, is a work not really aligned to the...

The music on this Grand Piano CD traverses twenty-three years from the career of Bulgarian composer Dimitar Nenov (1902-1953), a period that saw enormous changes to his compositional style. This of itself is not unusual; the fascinating thing is that he progressed backwards, as it were. Taking...

This album from the Music & Arts label titled “Exil” (Exile) is subtitled “Piano Music by Composers with Roots in Two Continents”. Each of the five composers represented fled Europe for the United States during the 1930s, among an exodus of some 30,000 artists and...

The three works on this CD span the entire career of Miklós Rózsa, from his String Trio, Op. 1 to his final work in the chamber music genre, String Quartet No. 2, Opus 38. The String Quartet No. 1 was written in 1950, roughly mid-way through Rózsa’s career. His compositional style,...

Karol Szymanowksi was Poland’s most celebrated composer from the first half of the 20th century. Titled ‘Exoticism’, this recent release on the Canadian Marquis label contains the composer’s significant works for violin and piano performed by Jerzy Kaplanek and Stéphan...

The discovery of lyrical and interesting music from the middle of the 20th century is always a gratifying one, especially when the composer writes with such a distinctive and alluring style as did Johannes Midelfart Rivertz. The title of this Lawo Classics album, Spill Og Dans, is also the...

While the early 20th century produced plenty of music that will scatter most randomly selected gatherings, there’s none of that in Reynaldo Hahn’s music. Hahn wrote beautiful music; his desire was clearly to charm his listeners. This CD is the latest in a series from Maguelone...

This is the third volume from the Grand Piano label of the complete piano music by Alexander Tcherepnin, performed by Giorgio Koukl. Grand Piano has been a clear leader in the exposure of piano music by curiously neglected composers, and this Tcherepnin series has been one of the most...

This recent release on the Capriccio label offers some rarely heard music for piano by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, including three world-premiere recordings. The two-CD set includes both of the composer’s piano concertos as well as an entire disc of solo piano works. The concerto recordings...

Of currently available titles, this release makes three on the Dacapo label which include music of Poul Rovsing Olsen. It is the first of his orchestral oeuvre, which is considered his finest area of output. There are three significant works here, Olsen’s Variations Symphoniques, Op....