From Norway to Spain, France to Russia, Masterpieces of the Romantic Piano offers a veritable smorgasbord of European piano music from the 19th century and its outlying decades. Traversing a broad spectrum of emotion and style, and featured in several modern film and television soundtracks, the keyboard gems heard on this recording will be familiar friends to the ear.

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Check the volume level of your speakers before pressing play on Symphonic Studies by 20th century English composer Alan Rawsthorne. This work from 1939 begins with a blast of sustained sound from the full orchestra, reminiscent of the melodramatic opening-title tracks from film scores of 1940s and '50s cinema, a few of which Rawsthorne himself composed.

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Raised from the age of ten by his organist older brother after their parents died in 1694, J.S. Bach grew up to be a prolific organist and composer, creating some of the Baroque era's most intellectual and simultaneously forcefully expressive works. Combining musical intellect with the expressiveness of the human voice are the over 200 cantatas for singers and orchestra that Bach composed throughout his life, three of which are featured on the Naxos release Favourite Cantatas.

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Feeling aristocratic? This collection of chamber works by Beethoven is sure to delight without offending, promoting only the most dignified sense of gentility. Written by Beethoven in his late twenties, at the time when his career as a composer was beginning to take off, these three chamber works are persistently proper.

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In an unrelenting, heady mixture of flux and inertia, Alan Hovhaness's Celestial Fantasy presents a somber conversation between the four sections of the string orchestra. Written at the age of twenty-four, during a time when Hovhaness was destroying large numbers of his early compositions, Celestial Fantasy captures via musical expression the inner dialogue of a conflicted young artist.

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Hitch up alongside cellist Gabor Rejtoa and pianist Adolph Baller and enter the emotionally charged world of Brahms's Cello Sonatas. Take pleasure in the warm sound of these two longing-infused works: one as it suffers through the pain, the other as it basks in the heat of heartache.

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The flute has a true champion in Antonio Vivaldi, perhaps the fieriest of all of Western Europe's Baroque composers. Known as the Red Priest, Vivaldi was an accomplished violinist and conductor, and these flute concertos draw on the musical style he developed while acting as music director at an all-girl Venetian orphanage. The resulting music is alternately playful and serious, light-hearted and pensive, and each of the seven concertos featured on this recording are performed with an invariable warm, mellow sound from Hungarian flutist Béla Drahos, joined here by the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia.

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Russian composer Vladimir Ussachevsky, pioneer in the realm of American electronic music, paints a bleak but nonetheless compelling picture in these two 1960s film scores. Setting the scenes for a film version of Sartre's play No Exit and Lloyd Williams's avant-garde Line of Apogee, these scores consist entirely of tape manipulation, at times sounding organic, at others completely alien.

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Written shortly after the first world war, English composer Sir Edward Elgar's four-movement Cello Concerto is an unapologetic missive of innocence lost. The opening movement, unorthodoxly marked "Adagio" ( Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85: I. Adagio - Moderato ), mourns this affliction with particular poignancy. One can almost hear Elgar's heart break as the solo cellist begins the piece alone, declaring a troubled melody punctuated by stormy double stops, in which two notes are bowed savagely at once. Tentatively at first, yet becoming gradually stronger, cellist and orchestra swoon together in a mixture of Continental Romanticism and that mysterious, lambent presence unique to Britain.

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Western Europe's Classical forms find themselves tastefully draped with the warm and refreshing colors of Brazilian aesthetics in the compositions of Heitor Villa-Lobos, colors that are worn with elfin flare in this collection of short piano works performed by Brazilian-Slavic pianist Sonia Rubinsky.

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