Of the two works on this recording, the major one, by virtue of the quality of the composition coupled simply with the revelation of its existence, is Passion Week by Lithuanian born Russian composer Maximilian Steinberg (major, too, because the piece takes up three-quarters of the total time...

The Polish composer Roman Statkowski (1859-1925) studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein and Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and in 1890 he began his teaching career in Kiev. He then spent about a decade managing various piano stores, and spent the rest of his career teaching...

If you’ve been following and collecting the splendid series of recordings being issued by Guild Records of the symphonies by Swiss composer Fritz Brun, you likely need little encouragement to acquire this most recent release beyond an awareness it exists. In this issue, Brun’s...

Having fallen into obscurity shortly after the composer’s death, the music of Salomon Jadassohn has enjoyed a re-evaluation in recent years. This cpo release was my first acquaintance with the German composer’s music and based on the merits of what’s to be heard here,...

In these two works by Danish composer Louis Glass, musical reflections of our natural world are unmistakable; the idyllic air of a bucolic life surfaces time and again. Glass provides both works with descriptive titles - the third symphony is subtitled “Forest Symphony” and...

If you missed this album of Scottish composer William Wallace’s orchestral music when it was first issued by Hyperion in the late ’90s, you have another chance to obtain it with this reissue on the label’s mid-price Helios line - at about half the price of the original....

This recording on Hyperion’s mid-priced Helios imprint was made in 1998. If you missed it the first time around, you can, and should, remedy that now. The music is performed by long-time Hyperion artist, Marc-André Hamelin, a pianist who time and again has exposed the extraordinary...

Much of the music of Joaquín Turina (1882 – 1949) is reasonably well represented on disc, including his songs, pieces for solo piano and for guitar, and some of his orchestral works. In the area of chamber music, however, aside from a few of his most popular pieces, little has been...

Italian composer Francesco Cilea is best known for his operas, Adriana Lecouvreur and L’arlesiana, but his success in the opera house was spotty. His final opera, Gloria, premièred in Milan in 1907 under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, was poorly received and withdrawn after only two...

This Cypres CD contains two rarities from the late Romantic repertoire by French composers Alfred Bruneau and Claude Debussy. The Bruneau work is his Requiem, first performed in London in 1896. The music of Debussy comes by way of Romanian-born French composer Marius Constant, who was one of...

The concert going public of 19th-century France was consumed by opera. While composers kept opera stages humming, it wasn’t quite enough and a new genre evolved, one which allowed audiences to get an operatic shot in the concert hall. The scene lyrique, in its ultimate form, was a series...

This splendid album, The Golden Age of Danish Partsongs, should be an obvious acquisition for any listener who enjoys Romantic choral music. It’s been released by the Danish Dacapo label and is performed by Ars Nova Copenhagen under the direction of eminent choral conductor, Paul...