Sylvia Heermann - Heerman Sings Handel Soir - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

If the career of the Bohemian composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, had not been cut cruelly short by his death resulting from a fall from a carriage, his name might be a good deal better known today for he was an accomplished composer.

Guido Alberto Fano's vocal chamber works form an important part of his musical output and mark the three crucial phases of his artistic growth. His earliest songs date from the last years of the 19th century, during his period of training and the start of his musical career in Bologna, using texts by local poets such as Angelina de Leva, Luigi Arturo Bresciani and Giuseppe Lipparini. Then, during the first fifteen years of the 20th century, his most InchexperimentalInch years, Fano began to draw inspiration from some of the most distinguished names in Italian poetry, including Boccaccio, Carducci and Pascoli. Finally, his last creative period, after the 1930s, saw a return to the vocal genre with seven pieces on poems by D'Annunzio and one by Carducci, all written in 1945. Fano usually calls his vocal compositions InchcantiInch, a choice often shared by his colleagues of the so-called Inchgeneration of the eightiesInch. On the whole, Fano's music reveals a commitment to avoid stereotypes and surrendering to the vestiges of easy appeal, demonstrating the composer's sensitivity in responding to the ethical demands of modernity, with that determined solicitude which characterised the inner workings of the great composers of the early 20th century. - Vitale Fano

Acclaimed as ‘one of the best opera composers of the moment’, American composer-librettist Mark Adamo has also ventured into symphonic composition and other fields in each of which his theatrical sensitivity, political commitment and musical mastery are equally evident. The vivacity of his Overture to Lysistrata accentuates the play’s anti-war theme, while Alcott Music rethinks the music from his hit opera Little Women. Regina Coeli pays tribute to the Queen of Heaven and Late Victorians is dedicated both to the memory of those who have died and to those who have survived AIDS.