2017

The women appearing before our ears throughout this programme range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare's Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines - the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 - 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on the suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world - Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes 'the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant', to quote Monteverdi's brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann - who also contribute instrumental solos - she here revels in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by this trio combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.

Fler förstagångsinspelningar av Amanda Maiers (1853-1894) musik. Första volymen som kom 2016, med musik av Sveriges internationellt erkända violinist och tonsättare, blev en stor succé. Maier var gift med tonsättaren Julius Röntgen och nära vän till Edvard Grieg, Johannes Brahms och många andra storheter. Hon var en viktig del av den tidens rika, internationella musikliv. På denna Volume 2 framför en av Sveriges ledande violinister, Cecilia Zilliacus, och pianisten Bengt Forsberg Maiers vackra violinsonat, samt Nio stycken för fiol och piano. Sopranen Sabina Bisholt debuterar på cd med fyra av Maiers underbara sånger. Världspremiär för åtta av skivans 17 spår!

Beethoven: The 9 symphonies (Daniel Barenboim) [6 CD]

Glass Philip: Complete piano etudes (Van Veen) [2 CD]

En fin digibook.

Potter John: Secret history 2017 [CD]

Hannigan Barbara: Crazy girl crazy 2017 [Digipack / CD + DVD]