Sofi Paez is a pianist and composer born in Costa Rica but based in Berlin. She experiments with piano, voice and electronic elements in search for new ways of expression in her roots, using both the Spanish and English language. Sofi's pieces are often inspired by daily life and the nature that surrounds her.

Recorded by Antonio Palomares, March 26th and 28th, 2001. Soundfield microphones. Remastered by Sean Murray 2024.

Amy Aileen Wood is unaccustomed to the spotlight, which is very much by design. A calming presence in any room and a force behind the drum kit, Wood meshes her astute listening skills with an undeniable ownership of the music at hand, as illustrated in her work on Fiona Apple’s 2020 record Fetch The Bolt Cutters, which Wood co-produced.

Jose Iturbi’s father built and tuned pianos as a hobby so the young José had access to an instrument from a very early age. He was one of four children and his sister Amparo (1899–1969) also had a career as a pianist. At the age of eleven Iturbi was studying piano at the Valencia Conservatory with Joaquín Malats, a friend of Albéniz. The Spanish composer heard Iturbi and gave him part of his new work Iberia to play. When Iturbi was fifteen, the people of his home-town collected money to send him to study at the Paris Conservatoire with Victor Staub.

The Passio secundum Joannem or St John Passion[a] (German: Johannes-Passion), BWV 245, is a Passion or oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach, the earliest of the surviving Passions by Bach. It was written during his first year as director of church music in Leipzig and was first performed on 7 April 1724, at Good Friday Vespers at the St. Nicholas Church.

Renowned as the teacher of Christian Ferras and Jean-Jacques Kantorow at the Paris Conservatoire, René Benedetti was one of the great French violinists at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Cenci (1951–52) is Havergal Brian’s operatic realisation of Shelley’s gruesome tale of incest and parricide in Renaissance Italy. The score calls it simply ‘Opera in Eight Scenes’, but it rarely goes in for grand tunes; instead, its dark colours reflect Shelley’s fascination with the struggle between good and evil. Stylistically, it is an unusual but highly effective hybrid: a music-drama focused on the intense delivery of Shelley’s text, with the declamatory style of the vocal lines echoing such recent oratorios as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, and the freewheeling orchestral writing producing something of a vocal symphony.

Born in Bonn around 1620 to Veronese parents, Massimiliano Neri was choirmaster at the Ospedaletto and organist at St. Mark's in Venice, where he published his first volume of Sonatas and Canzonas. He presented his second collection of Canzonas and Sonatas to the Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna in 1651, later becoming Kapellmeister to the Prince-Elector of Cologne in Bonn in 1664.

Having already mastered such French concertos as Poulenc’s on record, the French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie and Edward Gardner now explore with the BBC Philharmonic the vigorous and progressive world of Camille Saint-Saëns, offering the first of two volumes to contain his complete piano concertos.

All the pieces included here are by French composers who lived during the impressionist period. D’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français is a sort of hybrid work, a mixture of a symphony and a piano concerto.

The Salieri Requiem is a forgotten work which Salieri composed for his own funeral ceremony 20 years before he actually died. This is a world premiere recording. Beethoven and Schubert were students of Salieri and were present at his funeral where the Requiem was first performed.

Herreweghe has wonderful way with Beethoven: his performances of the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony combine clarity and richness, great energy and profound emotion. So, too, with these performances of Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7. I have been eargerly awaiting more releases in what I hope is to be a cycle. I ache to hear what Herreweghe does with the Eroica or with the 1st. Oh, well, with the 5th and 6th - all of them.

I was born in Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1975 and began my special relationship with music at an early age: my grandmother, Sara Guzmán, was a concert pianist and composer and taught my father to play. I spent my musical childhood practising and improvising with him. It was during those years that I learned the most important lesson: music is something more than the score – it’s a living creature and so needs to undergo constant change.

Le Tombeau de Couperin (The Grave of Couperin) is a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel, composed between 1914 and 1917. The piece is in six movements, based on those of a traditional Baroque suite. Each movement is dedicated to the memory of a friend of the composer (or in one case, two brothers) who had died fighting in World War I. Ravel also produced an orchestral version of the work in 1919, although this omitted two of the original movements.

The acclaimed The Frahm-Lewis Trio entices with LA MORTE DI DUSSEK. Contrasting the works of Mozart with the lesser-known Ferdinand Ries and Philip Antony Corri, it is a veritable declaration of love to the Classical era. One would be forgiven to think that the only star of this album would be Mozart, with his befittingly performed sonatas. Or perhaps its Beethoven’s student, Ferdinand Ries?