Núria Rial / Fahmi Alqhai / Accademia del Piacere MUERA CUPIDO

Catalan soprano Núria Rial is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque music, particularly in the works of Monteverdi and Handel, and she is well-versed in European art songs. She attended the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona, where she earned diplomas in voice and piano, and advanced to the City of Basel Music Academy, where she studied with Kurt Widmer and received the solo vocalist diploma. In 2003, she received the Helvetia Patria Jeunesse Foundation Prize from the European Foundation for Culture. Rial has performed with many period ensembles and chamber orchestras in repertoire that encompasses Baroque and Classical opera, and the vocal music of France, Germany, Spain, and her native Catalonia. She has appeared as a guest artist at many festivals in Europe and South America, and sung in operatic productions at the Innsbruck Theatre, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the Grand Théâtre in Geneva. Rial has recorded with Sony Classical, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Mirare, and Glossa. (Blair Sanderson)

Nuria Rial / 8 Cellists of the Sinfonieorchester Basel VOCALISE

The two-time ECHO classical winner Nuria Rial is not only one of the most important singers of early music, but has long been thrilled with her velvety and expressive voice also with compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries. These are on the program of their album "Vocalise" with the renowned 8 Cellists of the Sinfonieorchester Basel. 

At the center: Astor Piazzolla's famous cycle "Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas" ("The Four Seasons of the Port", meaning that of Buenos Aires), but also one of Villa-Lobos' Bach homages, "Bachianas Brasileiras", in particular the selected elegiac-ariose No. 5 belongs to the most popular compositions of the Brazilian. 

From the Catalan home of Nuria Rial you can hear the legendary folk song "El cant dels ocells" (song of the birds). Legendary because cellist Pablo Casals thus always ended his concerts in exile (after the Spanish Civil War in 1936). Another highlight is the world premiere recording of the work "Vocal Ice", an impressive composition by Spaniard Bernat Vivancos.

Christina Pluhar / L'Arpeggiata MEDITERRANEO

This release by the early music group L'Arpeggiata and its leader, lutenist Christina Pluhar, seems to encompass two separate goals, only partly laid out in the handsomely illustrated booklet notes. First is an illustration of the idea that, as the notes put it, "the sea does not separate cultures, it connects them." Jordi Savall and others have released albums that cut across a wide swath of Mediterranean lands from Turkey to Spain (and around to Portugal), finding in them a traditional music that responds well to improvisatory practice, shows the continuing influence of musical practices from the Arab and Ottoman worlds, and reflects a lyric impulse and a tendency toward accompanied vocal song. Pluhar adds different singers and musicians onto her core group according to the national origin of the music, a noteworthy and innovative practice that gets the listener to hear commonalities and differences in a fresh way. The second goal is more unusual: Pluhar and company explore the common roots of these practices in Greek music, demonstrated by the persistence of the Greek language and a large repertory of orally transmitted song in southern Italy, on the Salento peninsula on the east coast of southern Italy, and also in Calabria. These songs are sung in a language called Griko, essentially an Italian dialect of Greek. This music, and even the language itself, is sufficiently obscure to attract attention to the album by themselves, and "Greco-Salentino" songs, with everything transliterated and translated in the booklet, are lovely. The album's perhaps of a bit more interest to speculative world music fans than to serious devotees of old Mediterranean song: Pluhar's female vocalists don't have quite the power needed to take command of the material. But the instrumental group L'Arpeggiata is a remarkably flexible, breathing instrument, and the entire project gets major points for sheer originality. (James Manheim)