Lopes-Graça wrote the works included on this new recording by Luís Duarte in the 1950s when he worked extensively on traditional music. As the name shows, the 'Glosas' are music over music.

This traditional English Christmas carol needs no introduction, and there are few choirs around today who can sprinkle it with the unbridled tinsel-bedecked excellence that Trinity Cambridge can. Stephen Layton and his expert singers capture the joyful spirit in buckets 🎄

Robert Schumann's 'Sängers Trost' ('The poet's comfort') is the first of a set of five lieder, Op 127, here arranged by Steven Isserlis for cello and piano.

Gently lyrical and puckishly humorous, Beethoven's Piano Sonata in G major, Op 14 No 2, is the antithesis of the tumultuous 'Pathétique'. Here, in the bucolic scherzo-cum-finale, the main theme cavorts impishly across the bar lines as Pavel Kolesnikov weaves his magic 🪄

Composer, pianist, conductor, lecturer, ethnomusicologist, political campaigner … over a long and productive life Fernando Lopes-Graça pursued a wide range of activities, by no means all necessarily associated with the esoteric world of mid-twentieth-century European modernism.

Czerny once described Beethoven's 'Appassionata' as 'the most perfect execution of a mighty and colossal plan', and it remained the composer's own favourite piano sonata until his Op 106. Andrey Gugnin's exquisite touch brings to life this performance from 2015 🥀

The shadowy scherzo of Britten's Cello Symphony is a technical tour de force which, in spite of its rigorously intellectual construction, has an unparalleled eeriness and intensity. Alban Gerhardt's performance in this clip is from 2013, with the RTVE Madrid and Carlos Kalmar 🎻

For his Hyperion debut, pianist Luís Duarte has chosen a selection of works by one of the major figures in twentieth-century Portuguese music—Fernando Lopes-Graça—exploring a wide range of styles, moods and influences.

Composed on vacation in 1924, Bloch's 'From Jewish Life' for cello and piano explores the entire range of the solo instrument. This performance of outstanding composure and poise from Natalie Klein and Yeol Eum Son at Wigmore Hall is utterly spellbinding 🪄

Published in 1915, the rousing 'O thou, the central orb' sets words by the Oxford clergyman and hymnologist Henry Ramsden Bramley, who wrote his Petrarchian sonnet so it could be used as a new text for Orlando Gibbons's 1619 anthem 'O all true faithful hearts'.

'In two words, it's bad.' The grumbling note which accompanied 'Rêverie' made clear the composer's feelings, but the piece was published anyway. Debussy needn't have worried though: the work's opening notes set the scene for a dreamlike musical world 💭

"We have been blessed to have in our midst for many decades the fascinatingly lyrical voice of Yehudi Wyner, now in his mid-nineties."

Over a hushed chorale for full choir, rich in added notes, curlicues of melody from two solo sopranos drift across the soundscape. The effect is quietly ecstatic, as the inimitable Trinity College Choir perform 'O salutaris hostia', by composer Ēriks Ešenvalds back in 2015 ✨

"A very simple string of expanding intervals, as well as eleven other series derived from it, is all Stefan Wolpe needed to build the monolithic edifice that is his 'Passacaglia'."