Matthew Larkin plays the organ of St. Paul’s Anglican Church Music by Couperin, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, Reger, Howells, Willan, Duruflé, Messiaen, MacMillan, Jongen, Jarrett, Ager and Mallory ATMA Classique ACD2 2857 (two CDs) ★★★★✩ This two-disc recital by the British-born Ottawa organist Matthew Larkin covers a vast stylistic territory but sits you squarely in the centre of a resonant Canadian church – St. Paul’s Anglican in Toronto, to be precise. Many Casavant instruments have a majestic sonority but Op. 550 of 1914, also called the Blackstock Memorial Organ, is particularly admired for its “scope and beauty,” to quote the title…

Soleil noir. Arias written by and for Francesco Rasi Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; I Gemelli Naïve V 5473 ★★★★✩ Francesco Rasi (1574-1620) is generally characterized as a tenor of the Florentine school who dabbled with some success in composition and poetry, created the title role of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and beat a murder rap thanks to the protection of the Gonzaga family – a troubling biographical detail that links him to another killer, Carlo Gesulado, in whose service Rasi might actually have done some singing. In this recital Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, a Swiss tenor of Chilean descent, combines some melancholy and…

Brahms: Piano Sonatas Op. 1 and Op. 2; Rhapsodies Op. 79 Garrick Ohlsson, piano. Hyperion CDA68344 ★★★★✩ Most of Brahms’s published output is familiar through repeated performance. Oddly, his first two Piano Sonatas – Op. 1 in C Major and Op. 2 in F Sharp Minor – are generally ignored, though their only crime as evidenced by this valuable recording is a failure to rise quite to the level of the altogether admirable Sonata Op. 5 in F Minor. The veteran American virtuoso Garrick Ohlsson renders both the heroic first movement of Op. 1 (where the influence of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier”…