The surviving second and third acts of Catone in Utica, one of Metastasio's most dramatic libretti, premiered in Verona in the spring of 1737 in a setting by Vivaldi, contain some of his finest, most mature, and most original arias, and are published here for the first time. They evince a potential dramatic intensity that makes us regret all the more the loss of the first act. Only one aria of Act I can be definitely recovered from a surviving opera, but the rest has now also been successfully reconstructed by Alessandro Ciccolini, whose intimate knowledge of Vivaldi's working methods, combined with brilliant stylistic insight won universal acclaim for his work on Vivaldi's Motezuma and Ercole sul Termodoonte. Ciccolini has also composed cadenzas and da capo variations for all the arias, published here in an appendix.A complete recording under the direction of Alan Curtis is available from Naïve Records(OP30545).Press Quotes:'[For his completion,] Alessandro Ciccolini, who, mindful that Vivaldi frequently adapted vocal music for his instrumental works and vice versa, has composed the missing passages using themes from the concertos as his starting point. His arias dovetail beautifully with Vivaldi's scheme of things...' The Guardian'Ciccolini and Curtis deserve enormous credit for transforming an incomplete obscurity into a coherent and compelling opera.'Gramophone'The opera survives incomplete, but this is a fascinating and apt reconstruction and there is some marvellous stuff here.' BBC Music Magazine / Conducteur

Just as Serge Rachmaninoff's piano virtuosity ranked him among the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, his compositions for piano and orchestra won him an important position among modern composers. Among the works that ensure his reputation are the first three piano concertos, reprinted here from the authoritative full-score Russian editions.
Rachmaninoff wrote the stirring Piano Concerto No. 1 in the years 1890–91, while he was still a young student at the Moscow Conservatory, and revised it nearly three decades later in 1917, when he began to devote his life mainly to his international career as a piano virtuoso. The immense and enduring success of the Piano Concerto No. 2, completed in 1901, has made this romantic work one of the most performed and recorded in the concerto literature and one of the most familiar compositions in all of music. The powerful and expressive Piano Concerto No. 3 was composed for a concert tour of America, during which Rachmaninoff appeared with great success as composer, pianist, and conductor. Like the first two concertos, it remains a repertoire favorite in concert halls around the world.
All three acclaimed works are reprinted in this finely made yet remarkably inexpensive Dover edition. Musicians and music lovers will find it a convenient single-volume source from which to study intimately three major works of the twentieth century.
Reprint of the State Music Publishers, Moscow, 1965 edition. / Partitions classique / Ensemble et orchestre / Conducteur / DOVER

Par HARVEY JONATHAN. Bhakti was written in 1982, to a commission from IRCAM, Paris. It is in twelve short movements totalling about fifty minutes. There are 36 subsections - each one defined by a certain number of instruments playing a certain pitch cell. As there are only 12 types of subsection, each occurs (with variation) 3 times, thus making for repetitions over the course of the work. Scored for a chamber group fo 15 instrumentalists and quadraphonic tape./ Répertoire / Conducteur

Couverture Rigide. Par HAENDEL GEORG FRIEDRICH. Handel's 'Il pastor fido”, HWV 8a, is the most modest of his Italian operas: With over half of its numbers drawing from musical material of earlier Italian cantatas, the work deliberately reflects the pastoral style of the Italian serenata. In order to capture the simplicity of this approach to form, Handel made use of several different techniques, such as a consistent use of high vocal registers, an abundance of monothematic da capo arias, and an overall prevalence of held-back arias. 'Il pastor fido” did not lend itself particularly well for an opera adaptation: Reducing the original text to the scale of an opera libretto posed an immense challenge. With drastic cuts, Handel's librettist Rossi condensed five acts with eighteen characters into three acts with only six roles. The libretto – a paltry sketch of the complex original drama – was not well received. But Rossi had actually done his best to add a sense of coherence to the story while preserving at least some of Guarini's poetic language. This 'Halle Handel Edition' volume compares several sources that were not available for earlier editions. Amongst other things it presents the first modern edition of the complete overture, the complete stage instructions from the libretto, and an alternative ending for the duet of Mirtillo and Amarilli in the third act./ Répertoire / Conducteur

Par KNUSSEN OLIVER. '. . .a sumptuous piece, clotted with color, dense with incident, yet also transparent in its deisgn: it lets you know where you are.'Richard Dyer, Boston Globe, 7 August 1991/ Répertoire / Conducteur

Par BEATLES THE. In over one thousand pages, the complete music and lyrics, in full 'rock score' transcriptions, of all the 203 songs they wrote and recorded as The Beatles, plus nine by others which they covered on their early albums. All transcribed with separate staves for vocals, each guitar (in tab and standard notation) and all other instruments...the essential Beatles collection. / Niveau : Intermédiaire / Rép International / Recueil / Conducteur