Agrell / Paradiso - The 12 Keyboard Sonatas - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Alongside his celebrated performances of the classical repertory, Håkan Hardenberger is also renowned as a pioneer of significant new trumpet works. The three works on this album were all composed with him in mind, and illustrate his many-faceted musical persona. The most recent of them, 'True Stories' by Betsy Jolas, was written in order to give Hardenberger and Roger Muraro occasion to perform together. It's title springs from the fact that the work forms the composer's first attempt to work with sounds selected from daily life and either 'tamed' through stylization or left quasi crude. Sally Beamish found inspiration for her concerto in Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities which, in her own words, 'reflects aspects of city life the organized architecture but seeming randomness; the sparkling though shabby beauty, in contrast to the dark, sordid underbelly - rusting pipes, waste, squalor.' Finally, in... miramondo multiplo... , Olga Neuwirth incorporates stylistic and melodic references, for instance from her own works and the music of Handel, but also to the performance style of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, lending each movement a musical atmosphere of it's own. As a result, the concerto has been described as 'a sequence of five very different musical stories'. The conductor in all three works is Martyn Brabbins, whose credentials in the field of contemporary music are impressive, having conducted hundreds of world premières across the globe.

Months after winning the 1960 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Maurizio Pollini signed an exclusive contract with EMI and recorded two albums dedicated to the Polish composer. While the first, featuring the Piano Concerto No. 1, was warmly received upon , the second, comprising the Études faced an uncertain fate. Pollini withdrew his approval during post-production, offering no explanation. For decades, this recording seemed destined to remain unheard. However, in 2011, it was finally approved by Pollini and released in an edited version. This new 2025 edition, the first to be remastered from the original tapes, not only highlights Pollini's technical brilliance but also reveals the touching sensitivity of the 18-year-old pianist.

Before coming to Sweden, the Italian-born harpsichordist Anna Paradiso knew little about Johan Helmich Roman, often called 'the father of Swedish music'. Here she soon realized that if Roman's music was Swedish, it was also Italian - and specifically Neapolitan, her own part of Italy The restlessness of the harmonic idiom, the continuous shifts from one melodic gesture to another, the absence of long and balanced phrases, the theatrical character. Roman had spent five years in London as a young man before returning to Stockholm to take up his duties at the Royal Court. Fourteen years later, 1735-37, he was once more able to sample the newest trends in music in person, during a two-year sabbatical spent travelling across Europe, with Ischia, near Naples, as his goal. It would seem that many, or most, of the twelve keyboard sonatas were composed around this time or later. Why he wrote them is not known, however, nor what instrument they were intended for. In 1746, shortly after he had retired, Roman assembled the pieces, each consisting of between three and seven movements, in a single manuscript. They remained unpublished, however, and as Roman did not provide any titles to them, they have since been referred to both as 'suites' and 'sonatas'. Whatever the tag, this fascinating collection is a testimony of a period of great stylistic diversity and change, as observed by a composer who, although geographically relegated to the outskirts of Europe, remained wide-open to new developments. On this, the first of two discs, Anna Paradiso emphasizes this aspect of the composer, performing the first seven sonatas of the set on three different instruments - a French and an Italian harpsichord and a copy of a clavichord built in Sweden in 1742 - with well-judged ornamentations and use of rubato.