Brilliant Classics

One of the lesser-known composers of the mid 18th-century, Turin-born Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer relocated to Paris, where he earned a reputation as a formidable harpsichordist. He was in the service of Louis XV for many years, and wrote many operas and ballets for the court at Versailles, later becoming administrator of the Concert Spirituel....

Here's a genuine rarity: Ferdinand Rebay (1878-1953) has been hitherto unknown outside a small circle of guitar connoiseurs, but that should change thanks to this attractive set of sonatas and dances, all receiving their first recordings at the hands of two talented young Italian musicians. Rebay was Viennese born and bred. In 1901 he entered the...

Finnish-born composer Bernhard Hendrik Crusell (1775-1838) became famous as one of the greatest clarinet virtuosos of his time, playing both his own compositions and those of contemporaries Krommer, Mozart, Beethoven and Lebrun. He was said to have had a beautiful cantabile tone and a particularly soft pianissimo. He spent most of his life in...

These choruses are not (or not entirely) the tub-thumping exercises in blatant jingoistic rabble-rousing that you might expect, but contain many moments of poetry that make them secular rivals to earlier works by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov which draw from Russia's great Orthodox tradition of choral music. In Stalin's Russia such an option was...

An unusual juxtaposition of the original and the "arrangement". These two CD's offer an interesting combination of some of the Medieval Carmina Burana and Carl Orff's interpretation.The original Carmina date from the 12th en 13th centuries and deal with rather down to earth subjects such as drinking, love, adversity, the return of Spring. In no way...

Born in Magdeburg in 1681, Georg Philipp Telemann rejected a vocation in law, insisting that music was to be his focus. An organiser of concerts and a publisher of musical scores, he was a highly versatile entrepreneur as well as a throughouly 'modern' musician, one who remained at the forefront of musical innovation throughout his career. Today he...