Various Artists - Forgotten Recordings - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Franco Gulli was one of the most prominent and active Italian violinists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He began his studies with his father (a pupil of Ševcík and Marák at the Prague Conservatory), then went to Arrigo Serato in Siena and later to Szigeti in Switzerland. His varied and significant career included leading the Orchestra of the Pomeriggi Musicali, Milan, for several years, after which he took up a similar post with Virtuosi di Roma. Gulli's activities included a considerable volume of teaching and he was well-respected in this rôle, giving masterclasses all over the world and sitting on the juries of several international competitions including those in Brussels, London, Genoa, Munich, New York, and Indianapolis. He was a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, the Accademia Cherubini, Florence, and the Reale Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, as well as holding a Professorship at Indiana University. The present features newly remastered live recordings surveying forty years of Gulli's career.

Compositions attributed to him stretch across the centuries, from the beginning of the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, and into the early stages of the Baroque period. His music was by turns spiritual and secular, romantic and raucous, traditional and forward-looking. She was equally at home writing Gregorian chant, songs for troubadours, and instrumental dance music. He assimilated elements from both Western and Eastern cultures, tapping into musical traditions from England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Greece, North Africa and beyond. You name it, she could write it. Needless to say, we know virtually nothing about him. No artist sketched his features. No poet sang her praises. No registrar listed his birth.

Following up it's widely acclaimed reissues of the Juilliard Quartet's complete Epic and RCA Victor albums - originally issued between 1956 and 1960 - Sony Classical is excited to present a new box set collecting the earliest albums of this august American ensemble. Made between 1949 and 1956 in Columbia's studio on Manhattan's 30th St., these landmark recordings are mostly new to album. When William Schuman founded a string quartet at New York's Juilliard School in 1946, he envisaged an ensemble not only to teach the elite New York conservatory's students but also, in it's own public performances, to Inchplay the standard repertoire with the sense of excitement and discovery of a new work and play new works with a reverence usually reserved for the classics.Inch From it's first appearances in New York, the Juilliard Quartet was identified as a champion of modern music. It's first recordings for American Columbia, all included here, were dedicated to the works of Alban Berg and Béla Bartók (only recently deceased), as well as to Arnold Schoenberg (still very much alive), and to active American composers including Schuman himself.