This disc is a double tribute. The first work, Pictured Within, is a collective effort conceived as a major project to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins, whose reputation in new music and British music is beyond reproach. Following the pattern of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Pictured Within is a series of 14 variations on a theme, each of which takes up the character of the equivalent variation in Elgar’s work, the difference being that here 14 different composers have each contributed a variation in tribute to Brabbins. Also on the SACD is Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony, a fitting tribute to the composer, conductor and violinist who passed away in 2022. Illness left Jaakko no time to complete his work, so it fell to his brother Pekka – who conducts here – and Jari Eskola to finish it. The result is a powerful piece, full of familiar themes and melodies derived from Jaakko’s existing compositions, to which are added autobiographical extra-musical elements. The moving conclusion is a collage of fragmented phrases inspired by the signals emitted by lighthouses and ships, as if Kuusisto’s spirit had been sent out to sea.

How to express emotion through music from which words are absent? This album attempts to give an answer to this question. Through works by Italian composers from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the two members of Seicento Stravagante, David Brutti and Nicola Lamon, demonstrate the extravagant styles of early baroque music. During the decades surrounding 1600, the dominance of the human voice and of texts came to be replaced by the unfettered imagination of the composer/instrumentalists that allowed instruments to ‘speak’ on their own, and not only support a sung text.

Strong but delicate, deliberate but subtle, driven but supple, Masaaki Suzuki's 2005 recording of Bach's Italian Concerto and French Overture for harpsichord are quite convincing in their own distinctive way…

In 2007 Frank Peter Zimmermann was able to realize his long-cherished dream to establish a string trio, together with Antoine Tamestit and Christian Poltéra. Three individually superb string players do not necessarily add up to a top-flight trio - even if they all play on instruments by Stradivarius, as here - but Trio Zimmermann immediately made a name for itself at international festivals and prestigious concert venues. In 2010 the trio released its first recording – with Mozart's seminal Divertimento – to critical acclaim. More than 10 years later, that recording was the top recommendation in the Record Review series "Building a Library" on BBC Radio 3.

Voilà un album intelligemment conçu, avec un vrai projet éditorial. Loin de se contenter de pièces vocales cent fois enregistrées, la soprano Carolyn Sampson s’écarte un peu de ses succès mondiaux pour rejoindre Kristian Bezuidenhout, un pianofortiste discret mais très présent au disque et dans les concerts en tant que soliste ou comme partenaire des meilleurs ensembles de musique ancienne du moment. Ensemble, ils ont imaginé un programme très original fondé sur des chants de départ et de séparation du XVIIIe siècle, à une époque où l’absence pouvait durer très longtemps, voire toujours. L’occasion était belle pour ces deux esprits curieux de trouver des pièces inconnues et ravissantes de glorieux inconnus aux côtés de valeurs sûres et indémodables de Mozart et de Haydn.

Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, alongside Grieg the two giants in Nordic classical music, were both born in 1865. Both also received their first musical training on the violin, earning valuable insights when it came to writing for the instrument. Their respective Violin Concertos were composed some six years apart – Sibelius’ in 1904-05 and Nielsen’s in 1911 – and belong to the most performed works of either composer. They are nevertheless as different from each other as are the artistic temperaments of their makers. While retaining the traditional three-movement concerto form, Sibelius composed something closer to a Late-Romantic orchestral tone poem giving the orchestra unusual prominence. Nielsen on the other hand opted for an unconventional form, reminiscent of the Baroque concerto grosso: the spiky, neoclassical work is nominally in two movements, but with each movement having a slow and a fast section.

For a string player, Beethoven’s 16 quartets are of an importance similar to that of his sonatas to a pianist and for every composer of string quartets they remain a benchmark. The Chiaroscuro Quartet have begun their cycle of these works at the same place as Beethoven did, with the Op. 18 set which occupied him intensively for the best part of two years (1798 – 1800). The effort he put into these quartets was surely due to the fact that he had much to live up to – they would after all be measured against those of Haydn and Mozart.

With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios.

Very little is known about the origin of J. S. Bach’s seven Toccatas (BWV?910–916) or of their use. They are believed to have been written before 1717 or the end of Bach’s Weimar period – but it is quite possible that at least some of them were drafted before he arrived there in 1707, at the age of 22. The Toccatas are usually performed on harpsichord or piano – but even though they are ‘manualiter’ (intended to be played by the hands only) and do not call for pedal parts, they are also occasionally heard on the organ.

At the age of 21, Leonard Bernstein wrote what he described as a ‘Hebrew song’ using a text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Three years later the song became the final movement of his Symphony No. 1 and in January 1944 Bernstein himself conducted the première of the work. What is being lamented is the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, but according to the composer, he primarily wanted to convey the text’s ‘emotional quality’.

Luciano Berios Coro has been described as the work that exemplifies all the qualities that made him one of the leading composers of our time. The works full title is Coro for voices and instruments, and the 40 voices and 44 instrumentalists do indeed make up a single choir instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each singer paired with a particular player, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects. Composed in 1976, Coro is also a strikingly global work: Berios use of texts (mainly translations of folk poetry) attributed to peoples Peruvian, Croatian, Sioux turns the work into a chorus of cultures.

Following acclaimed recordings of concertos by Dvořák and Shostakovich, by Tan Dun and Josef Suk, the Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing returns to her roots in this Grieg recital, joined by Simon Trpčeski at the piano. Each of Edvard Grieg’s violin sonatas marks a decisive phase in the composer’s artistic development. He completed the F major Sonata at the age of 22, while still trying to break free from the heady influences he had received during his training at the Leipzig conservatory. The work still bears the stamp of German romanticism, but it also includes references to Norwegian folk dances and Hardanger fiddle techniques, features that were perceived as ‘a breath of fresh air’ when the work was premièred.

Before Felix Mendelssohn produced his Octet for strings in 1825, only Louis Spohr had composed for a similar combination of instruments. Rather than an octet, however, Spohrs work was a double quartet written for two equal but independent string quartets. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, treated the eight instruments as a single unit, collaborating in symphonic orchestral style, as he himself put it. He was only sixteen when he composed the Octet, full of a youthful ardour that has made it one of his most popular works. It is a farewell to the Mozartian style that had characterized Mendelssohns early production and at the same time a first step on the way to Romanticism.