Joly Braga Santos was Portugal’s greatest orchestral composer, and this recording presents eight world premiere recordings including his very first work for orchestra, the Symphonic Overture No. 1.

One of the giants of music-making in the 19th century, Louis Spohr excelled as a composer, violin virtuoso, conductor and teacher.

Although Polish-born virtuoso and composer Karol Józef Lipiński embraced the innovations of Paganini and other 19th-century virtuosos, he disdained ‘empty’ technique devoid of musical depth, preferring the artistic ethos of Spohr, Tartini and Viotti.

With a European reputation second only to Haydn’s during his lifetime, Muzio Clementi was highly regarded by Beethoven as a composer and his impact on music in general and the piano in particular as a performer, publisher and innovator cannot be ignored.

Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is a complex, epic narrative that moves from a simple opening melody to the triumphant apotheosis at its conclusion.

Carl Czerny found a continuing source of inspiration in the music of his teacher Beethoven, even after he had established himself with a series of influential pedagogic works, piano exercises and studies.

Circumstances including an overwhelming preoccupation with opera at the expense of instrumental music, two world wars and the rise of a Fascist dictatorship, resulted in a generation of Italian chamber music composers born between the 1880s and early 1900s whose music seemed to vanish without trace.

In the last two decades of his career Eugene Zádor, whose music fused Classicism with Romanticism to universal acclaim, wrote a series of works that reflected his Hungarian roots.