Smetana Trio BEETHOVEN Piano Trios

PIANO TRIOS

 

Collegium Marianum / Jana Semerádová ZELENKA Immisit Dominus Pestilentiam - Attendite et Videte - Deus Dux Fortissime

                                             IMMISIT DOMINUS PESTILENTIAM

Jana Semerádová / Erich Traxler CHACONNE FOR THE PRINCESS

                                                  CHACONNE FOR THE PRINCESS

i Flautisti – The London Recorder Quartet DOUCE DAME JOLIE

What can be encompassed in music within 60 minutes? Africa, Japan, Germany. London, Vienna, the Balkans ... Four virtuoso recorder players, i Frautisti, will guide you through this one-hour odyssey. Since their getting together in 2009 at the Royal College of Music in London, the female ensemble have given premieres of a number of pieces, directly written for them. The composers who have created music for them include such celebrities as Tarik O'Regan and Nathan Theodoulou. i Flautisti have appeared at renowned festivals and led master classes in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. Their live performances have also enchanted BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4 listeners. The present recording serves to mark the ensemble's 10th anniversary, featuring ten pieces that have earned them enthusiastic responses at concert venues. The album organically blends the Middle Ages and Baroque with torrential Balkan rhythms and the contemporary world. Yet you should not approach the modern tunes with trepidation: i Flautisti present (for the most part in world premiere) music that is beautiful, comprehensive, often catchy even. The ensemble's great forte - also the common denominator of the recording - is an engrossing musicality, vivacity and passion. You will definitely want to take the hour-long trip again and again.

From the Middle Ages to the present time – from Africa through Japan to the Balkans; a thrilling musical journey with a virtuoso recorder quartet.

Jirí Barta / Schola Gregoriana Pragensis DIALOGUES

The renowned ensemble Schola Gregoriana Pragensis and the leading Czech cellist Jiri Barta have been pursuing dialogues on concert stages for a number of years. They share abundant experience of music both early and contemporary, improvisation and seeking. The fruit of their encounters is a recording that is a multilayered dialogue between the sonorous sound of the cello and the male voice, a dialogue between the chorale and medieval polyphony and the creation of the past few decades, music written and improvised. The idea of "mirroring the past in the present" is the overarching theme connecting pieces by contemporary composers. Peter Graham's Suite for Cello Solo reveals his having been inspired by Bach solo suites. The contemporary musical phraseology and the Gregorian tradition are originally interconnected in the meditative composition Miserere by the Polish creator Paweˆ Szymanski, while the structure of Arvo Part's famous piece Fratres is a sort of reminiscence of medieval polyphony.
The music, in places verging on silence, affords the listener scope for inner soothing and perception of fine nuances that often remain concealed to us in the turbulent world around. (Supraphon 2010)