Amy - Quatuor a Cordes 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

A beautifully programmed collection anchored by the strength of Ragna Schirmer's piano. Clara and Robert Schumann borrow from each other's compositions in the early years of their great love affair in two sets of playfully intimate variations. Twenty years later, the theme is woven anew into two more sets of variations a revisiting on the theme by Clara Schumann and one by her friend Johannes Brahms. Performing on an original Blu¨thner grand piano of 1856, Ragna Schirmer's long association with the music of both Clara and Robert deepens the sense of rediscovery of these rarely recorded works for the listener.

Emperor Quartet - String Quartet No 1 [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/24/2006

Harmonies of Devotion is both an exploration of the Italian motet repertory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and a celebration of the devotion to this sacred repertory displayed by English antiquarian collectors of the eighteenth century. Among the works recorded here for the first time are Giovanni Legrenzi's six-voice masterpiece Intret in conspectu tuo, which survives thanks to a copy made in London by Handel, a five-voice Crucifixus by Legrenzi's pupil Antonio Lotti, sent to London's newly formed Academy of Ancient Music, a grand Marian motet written for the Academy by Agostino Steffani, and music by Steffani's teacher Ercole Bernabei, again collected by members of London's antiquarian music clubs. The recording reveals lines of influence between teachers and pupils, and traces the lineage of the dramatic seconda prattica motet back to it's principal source and pioneer Monteverdi.