David Maslanka (August 30, 1943 – August 7, 2017) was an American composer who wrote for a variety of genres, including works for choir, wind ensemble, chamber music, and symphony orchestra. Best known for his wind ensemble compositions, Maslanka published nearly 130 pieces, including ten symphonies, eight of them for concert band, over 15 concerti, and a full Mass.

This is a brilliant idea for a CD. Composed within a time-frame of 11 years (1917-28), at a similar geographical distance from the main cosmopolitan centres of music, and with similar stylistic overlaps between late Romanticism and modernism, these two pairs of quartets make for genuinely illuminating comparison.

My late, lamented colleague, Michael Oliver, would have exulted at the prospect of reviewing this hardly-ever-heard example of verismo, a genre (like so many others) of which he made a speciality. Ponchielli’s last opera appears never to have been recorded before, and has received few performances, even in Italy, after its comparatively successful première at La Scala in 1885.

This live recording of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony marks the birth on record of the ‘Sinfonia Grange au Lac’, an orchestra created in July 2018 on the occasion of the Rencontres Musicales d’Évian, the prestigious festival created by Mstislav Rostropovich in 1985 and revived since 2014. A musical ambassador intended to promote the excellence of its parent festival worldwide, the Sinfonia Grange au Lac consists of musicians from leading European orchestras (in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, London, Lucerne, Munich, Paris, Salzburg, Valencia and Vienna) as well as existing groups such as the Trio Karénine and the Quatuor Ébène. And it was a stroke of genius to manage to secure the services of Esa-Pekka Salonen.