When Andreas Haefliger conceived this unusual combination of concertos it was with the aim of putting into perspective three pieces, each a unique and highly expressive highlight from the composers’ output. That Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto fulfilled the requirements was a given: towards the end of his life Bartók wrote his most lyrically expressive concerto while Ravel, inspired by the qualities of the left hand register, wrote a piece full of dark yearning and grotesquely fauvistic dances.

En este trabajo se presentan por primera vez, a nivel mundial, algunas de las composiciones de dos maestros del Siglo XVIII, el primero Francisco Hernández Illana que desarrolló los magisterios de la Catedral de Astorga, del Real Colegio del Corpus Christi de Valencia y de la Catedral de Burgos, y por otro lado de un italiano Francesco Corradini, que desempeñó su carrera musical en la península primero en Valencia y posteriormente en Madrid…

The delicious voice of soprano María Luz Álvarez may in itself be enough reason to purchase this album for those who have encountered it before. It's a stunning instrument in small-group Baroque chamber music, with impressive control over both pitch and dynamics, all combined with a good deal of Spanish smoke. If that were not enough, Álvarez here takes up a repertoire that remains almost unknown outside of Iberia: the so-called tonada humana, which was the first generation of Spanish Baroque song to show Italian influence, departing from the strophic and semi-popular songs associated with the venerable zarzuela genre. The music here, by Sebastián Durón and a variety of still more obscure composers, is a gorgeous fusion of Spanish and Italian (although all of it is in the Spanish language).