Beethoven / Erdi - Piano Sonatas 1 / 14 & 17 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Boxberg worked as an organist in Grossenhain from 1692 to 1702. From here he worked simultaneously as a singer, opera director, opera composer and also as a librettist, in Leipzig and at the courts of Wolfenbuttel, Ansbach and Kassel, and later as an organist in Gorlitz. The cantatas he composed do not follow the model common at the time in terms of form and instrumentation, with choirs, solo arias, recitatives and chorales, with an orchestra consisting of strings, wind instruments and continuo. A large part of the works are chamber music with a singing voice and two melody instruments, plus bassoon and organ. Formally, many of the solo cantatas consist of a dictum (Bible text appropriate to the Sunday of the church year) and an aria, usually four verses long. The name of these works is InchConncert con AriaInch. Another cantata form uses psalms and chorales in it's content. In formal terms, these cantatas can be assigned to the earlier, motet-like style.

We may wonder whether the violin was a northern Italian invention, for the instrument was also to be heard in the great cities of southern Italy at an early stage, from the beginning of the 17th century onwards. Certain southern Italian composers had clearly understood that the instrument was unequalled in it's ability to express emotion allied to virtuosity, including Montalbano in Palermo, Pandolfi in Messina, Falconieri and Trabaci in Naples, and Leoni in Rome. They wasted no time in channeling the freedom and expressivity of the violin into rare, fascinating and original works, some of them recorded here for the first time.

Parisian, Emma Boynet (1891-1974) studied with Isidor Philipp at the Conservatoire and became an established part of the local music scene in the 1920s and 30s. She was one of the few French pianists to find success in the USA, travelling there for the first time in the company of her former teacher in 1934, and as a result, made several albums for Victor in New York, including a five-disc 78rpm album entitled 'French Piano Music'. Her career seems to have faltered in the 1950s but not before she made two highly regarded (but now rare) Faure LPs which have become collectors' items. We are delighted to reissue them here.