Formed in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London, the Belcea Quartet has recorded the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók and Britten. For this new Alpha release it has chosen two works by one of the leading composers of twentieth-century chamber music, Dmitri Shostakovich.
The Quartet no.3, of historic importance, was initially censured by the Soviet regime, then revised by Shostakovich for its first performance in 1946; the refined playing of the Belcea Quartet brings out all its contours. The Piano Quintet is among its composer’s most famous works and significantly contributed to his success on the international scene and with the Soviet authorities. The Belcea Quartet performs it in the company of the Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski: the result is a musical encounter at the highest level of excellence.

《傅聪亲自指挥及演奏莫扎特协奏曲No.21》是国际知名的中国当代最伟大音乐家傅聪，亲自演奏及指挥瓦索维亚交响合奏团，合力演绎巨匠级作曲大师莫扎特《C大调第21钢琴协奏曲K467》及《降B大调第27钢琴协奏曲K595 》。傅聪与乐团合拍非常，两者出色的合奏令两首乐曲更加扣人心弦！

This box gives you a chance to admire some of the most glittering jewels left to us by the Baroque era. Its fifteen discs outline an exciting panorama of musical Europe during that period, an inspired heritage performed by the finest soloists and ensembles: Vivaldi’s Gloria by Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet and his Four Seasons by Gli Incogniti and Amandine Beyer; Bach’s B minor Mass by Pygmalion and Raphael Pichon, the Solo Cello Suites by Bruno Cocset, the Brandenburg Concertos by Café Zimmermann and the Goldberg Variations by Céline Frisch; Charpentier’s Te Deum by Le Poème Harmonique and Vincent Dumestre; Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas by MusicAeterna and Teodor Currentzis; Rameau harpsichord pieces by Blandine Rannou; Albinoni sonatas by Ensemble 415 and Chiara Banchini; and much else. A veritable treasure trove containing the indispensable works of the Baroque by today’s leading artists.

A native of Munich, Karl Amadeus Hartmann (b. 1905, d. 1963) ranks among the leading German composers of the twentieth century. A substantial portion of his œuvre, which includes eight symphonies and chamber works, had its origins in one of the darkest periods in world history – from 1933 to 1945 – when the Nazis were in power. This period, in which Hartmann gradually withdrew from public life and which eventually culminated in his own innere Emigration (inner emigration), represented a decisive turning point in his creative development. Before that time, Hartmann had adopted a playful, neoclassical style influenced by jazz and Dadaism with which he had hardly distinguished himself from his contemporaries. With no prospect of a performance of his work in sight, he subsequently created a musical language which, besides bearing the influences of Bach, Bruckner and Beethoven, was also highly indebted to those composers whose music the Nazis had banned, such as Mahler, Berg, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartók. He employs this language not only in his symphonies and many of his chamber works, but also in his opera Simplicius Simplicissimus, based on the 1669 novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. The full title of the second version, presented here, is Simplicius Simplicissimus: drei Szenen aus seiner Jugend.