Nino Rota was not only the man who wrote film scores for Fellini (La strada etc), René Clément and King Vidor. He was also a twentieth-century great composer.

With 38 known works, Carl Stamitz is one of the most important composers of concertante symphonies. The Sinfonia concertante was a hybrid form between symphony and concerto popular in the 1760s and 1770s. One model may have been the baroque concerto grosso, in which a group of soloists alternated with the orchestral tutti. In the sinfonia concertante, there are always at least two soloists facing the orchestra. The concertante differs from the symphony in the number of movements; many are only in two movements, but none in more than three.

"Paul Meyer celebrates the enchanting preciousness of the Mannheim School with immense brilliance and temperament," wrote FonoForum in 2019 on the release of the first CD of clarinet concerto recordings by Carl Stamitz. Now Vol. 2 has been released with Concertos 1, 6 and 8 (numbered after Friedrich Carl Kaiser) and they also prove to be immensely virtuosic and effective.

Acclaimed bassist & vocalist Nicki Parrott is joined by sax player Houston Person, pianist John di Martino along with a host of competent musicians for this album dedicated to songs of the Winter season including several Christmas tunes. You'll find such songs as "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Blue Christmas", "June In January", "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm", and of course, "Winter Wonderland".

If the form of the piano concerto is present throughout the whole of Mozart’s creative process - from the simple childhood adaptations of Johann Christian Bach’s sonatas to the final austerity of the 27th concerto of 1791 - it is striking, as Jean-Victor Hocquart notices, that Mozart almost never composed piano concertos during the periods in which he composed operas. It is as if the piano concerto and the opera were in reality, each in their own way, « responding to one and the same fundamental requirement: the theatrical requirement ».