Duron / La Grande Chapelle / Albert Recasens - Sebastian Duron: Music for Two Dynasties - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The chamber music works of Detlev Müller-Siemens presented here were created between 2002 and 2009. In them, the serenity and thoughtfulness of the form contrast with the inner turbulence that comes from a musical language that is Inchon it's ownInch and does not follow any pre-existing patterns.Müller-Siemens said about his InchString TrioInch which he dedicated to the Mondrian Ensemble InchThe first movement is torn, disjunct, often motoric, and in it's course characterized by sharply contrasting sections which are parts of several very different structural layers. In contrast, the second movement is more unified a fragile, hesitant, ascending melody upon which a 'presto-lamento' passage is briefly superimposed toward the end.InchIn the piano quartet Inchlost tracesInch, also dedicated to the Mondrian Ensemble, Inchthe music searches for traces in order to find it's way. It follows these traces, but loses them again, so that the music must pause, disoriented - moments in which the music seems to be entirely by itself and to have found itself - before taking up the search again.Inch (Müller-Siemens)

For over thirty years Carlos Patiño served Philip IV as Choirmaster in the Spanish Royal Chapel. The Spanish monarch was not the only one who held him in great esteem, for João IV of Portugal admired him as well and put together a collection of his works for the renowned Livraria. In 1634, after Mateo Romero had retired, Patiño became the first non-Franco-Flemish maestro de capilla in the Spanish Hapsburg court. Trained in the cathedral tradition in Seville under the tutelage of Alonso Lobo, he developed his own musical style which combined his interest in counterpoint with the use of multiple choirs. From his extensive corpus of Latin vocal music, widely disseminated throughout the principal ecclesiastic centers of Spain and America, Albert Recasens and La Grande Chapelle have extracted some gems. The selection of pieces, many dedicated to the Virgin Mary, not only manifest the quality and originality of Patiño's work, but also reveal a fascinating amalgam of compositional procedures which are invariably used to underline the meaning of the words.

This year, the outstanding Czech pianist and composer Karel Ružicka (1940-2016) would celebrate his eightieth birthday. To mark this occasion, Animal Music releases, four years after the artist's death, the last album recorded by Ružicka in 2010, which never came out during his lifetime. The recent discovery of the recording amounts to coming upon a precious treasure. In it, Ružicka returns to the sphere of solo-piano recording in which he first excelled in his album InchZahrada radostiInch (The Garden of Joy) in 1981. InchGarden of SilenceInch presents an astounding medley of moods in pensive and playful pieces by Ružicka which confirm his remarkable gift for melodies and his reputation as an unsurpassable performer and improviser