The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and soprano Christina Landshamer present a Telemann monography, consisting of his cantata Ino and instrumental works composed in the same period. Despite, or perhaps actually thanks to, Telemann’s use of just one singer, Ino is highly dramatic, depicting a desperate woman trying to save herself and her son from her husband turned mad, eventually throwing herself off a cliff and then transformed into a goddess. Telemann composed it two years before his death, and the score is exceptionally rich and colorful. The cantata is combined with his Overture in D Major, Divertimento in E-flat Major, and Sinfonia melodica, each underlining the exceptional liveliness of this composer well into the ninth decade of his prolific life.

The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial Pentatone discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), Handel’s Concerti grossi Op. 3 and 6 (released in 2019 and 2020). Telemann’s Miriways (2020), Handel’s Messiah (2020), Haydn’s L’isola disabitata (2021) and Mozart Symphonies (2023). Christina Landshamer collaborated with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin on La Passione (2022), and also featured as Marzelline on Beethoven’s Fidelio (2021).

The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin launches a series of Mozart symphonies to appear on Pentatone, starting with the composer’s “Paris” and “Haffner” symphonies. On this first album, the works are coupled with his enchanting Oboe Concerto – performed by the ensemble’s first oboist Xenia Löffler - and the bold overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Mozart’s own woodwind arrangement. Taken together, these pieces demonstrate the rich palette and expressive power of Mozart’s music in the period between 1777 and 1783, during which he finally managed to spread his wings and leave his hometown of Salzburg.

The Akademie für Alte Musik is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial Pentatone discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), Handel’s Concerti grossi Op. 3 and 6 (released in 2019 and 2020), Telemann’s Miriways (2020), Handel’s Messiah (2020), Haydn’s L’isola disabitata (2021) and La Passione with Christina Landshamer (2022).

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin returns to Pentatone together with soprano Christina Landshamer, presenting La Passione, a collection of dazzling concert arias on love, longing and loss by Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, paired with the latter’s “La Passione” Symphony. Ranging from pastoral simplicity to exuberant outrage, the program offers some of the finest vocal writing around 1800, including some of Beethoven’s rare and little-known excursions to Italian bravura opera, as well as one of the most dramatic and expressive symphonies of the eighteenth-century.

The Akademie für Alte Musik is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial Pentatone discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), Handel’s Concerti grossi op. 6 (released in 2019 and 2020). Telemann’s Miriways (2020), Handel’s Messiah (2020) and Haydn’s L’isola disabitata (2021). Christina Landshamer featured as Marzelline on Beethoven’s Fidelio (2021).

The mass that Mozart composed in 1779 for the Easter service in Salzburg Cathedral is shrouded in legend. From the very first bar onwards, it exudes the stately tone that would, much later on, earn it the sobriquet "Coronation Mass". Soon after Mozart's death, it became the Viennese court orchestra’s favorite mass for coronation ceremonies.

This new release from BR-KLASSIK is a live recording of a concert, performed on May 21, 2022 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. That concert of sacred music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart included three other, lesser-known compositions that were also written during his time in Salzburg. Here they are woven in between the short movements of the Coronation Mass, and thus connected to the Mass in a way that might have been required by the practical performance conditions of a Salzburg church service.

In his "Vesperae solennes de Dominica", composed during the same year as the Mass, Mozart fulfilled the Salzburg prince-archbishop's demands for the greatest possible brevity in a tongue-in-cheek manner, by means of various compositional tricks as well as a particularly sonorous score. The album is rounded off by the "Epistle Sonata" for orchestra with obbligato organ in C major, K 329, written to accompany the "Coronation Mass", as well as by the solemn offertory "Alma Dei creatoris" for soloists, choir and orchestra in F major, K 277.

The first-rate cast of soloists consists of Katharina Konradi (soprano), Sophie Harmsen (mezzo-soprano), Steve Davislim (tenor) and Krešimir Stražanac (bass). The soloists and the excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus are accompanied by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, one of the most renowned orchestras in the field of historical and historically informed performance practice. The conductor is Howard Arman.

This new album rounds off the complete recording of the symphonies of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach that the musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin began over two decades ago. The final batch offers the quintessence of his art, revealing the full originality of Johann Sebastian's inspired son, whose freedom and inventiveness paved the way for Haydn and Mozart.