As a winner of numerous national and international youth competitions, Robert Neumann (born 2001) was awarded with the International Classic Music Discovery Award 2017. In 2018, the Jury of the SWR (radio broadcasting corporation in Southwest Germany) chose Robert as the"SWR New Talent". For his debut CD at SWRmusic, Robert was awarded the OPUS KLASSIK Young Artist of the Year 2021. The young pianist made his orchestral debut with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra when he was eight, and since then he has appeared with other orchestras, including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, German State Philharmonic Ludwigshafen, Stuttgart Philharmonic, Liechtenstein Symphony Orchestra, SWR Symphonieorchestra, Praga Philharmonic Camerata and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. For his second album, Robert Neumann chose two works which can easily be placed side by side and that are both close to the pianist’s heart. Robert Schumann‘s Kreisleriana is about a character from several tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition describes walking from one work of art to the next. Both are programme music pieces with somewhat comparable ideas but, as Neumann puts it: „One idea deals with a real character, the other one doesn’t […]. And I think both show in an exemplary manner how flawlessly and also in different ways a great Romantic cycle can be structured, formed.

"A beautiful, rich, exciting brass sound...a fine tribute to one of the UK’s best brass bands." -- BBC Radio 3

When the American composer Jack Stamp was appointed International Composer-in-Association to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in 2019; he conceived a recording project focused on works specifically written for the GCB; including compositions by himself and Liz Lane; the other GCB Composer-in-Association; alongside other pieces which have played a prominent role in the Band’s recent activities. The kaleidoscopic range of styles to be heard here displays the extraordinary virtuosity of one of the world’s best-known brass bands.

Christian Sinding might be thought of as a Grade-B composer. That’s not a dismissal, merely an assessment to adjust the expectations. He’s not the symphonic Grieg we’ve been missing, nor a Nordic Brahms that’s been overlooked. He’s an – essentially German – symphonist of the second rank who wrote very pleasing works that we will sadly not hear in the concert halls, but which can enliven our musical diet on record if we need to take a break from the usual suspects. To unfold their inherent fervour, his compositions are dependent on sensitive and enthusiastic interpretations, but that’s exactly what they get from the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Karl Heinz Steffens, for whom Sinding has become a composer close to his heart.

The first recording of another monumental work for piano by the composer of Opus clavicembalisticum and Sequentia cyclica.

Kaikhosru Sorabji tended to discourage performances of his music, feeling that most musicians not only lacked the technical equipment and dedication to conquer his vast scores, but also that they would not satisfactorily grasp their spiritual content. Born in a London suburb of Parsee origin, living for much of his life on a remote Scottish island, Sorabji died in 1988, and only in the last two decades have advances in digital publishing enabled his many unperformed and intimidatingly large pieces to be transferred from manuscript, and then taken on by dedicated performers such as the British pianist Jonathan Powell, whose first recording of the eight-hour Sequentia Cyclica won widespread praise on its release by Piano Classics: Sorabji’s ‘most inclusive and revealing major statement’ according to Gramophone, ‘a wilful yet engrossing challenge that, in Powell, has met its match.’ Composed in the mid-1950s, the Toccata terza had been thought lost until the score turned up in 2019, and Abel Sánchez-Aguilera has produced his own critical edition in order to make this first recording: a monumental labour of love and skill. The Toccata is cast in ten sections, including a 50-minute Passacaglia – one of Sorabji’s favourite forms – and the kind of thorny counterpoint and mountainous climaxes which will be familiar to followers of his music. There are four extant Toccatas: ‘They seem to look back to the examples of Bach and Busoni,’ as Sánchez-Aguilera remarks in his booklet introduction, ‘reinvented in Sorabji’s personal language and expanded to monumental proportions. Notwithstanding their complexity, several features make them particularly effective and accessible to the listener. They make use of familiar procedures – such as the variation and the fugue – and thus establishing clear links with tradition.’

No Sorabji collector will ignore this major new release of his music, and searchers for rarities in the hyper-virtuoso piano repertoire will discover a new treasure.

Founded in 1841 under the participation of Constanze Mozart, the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg today enjoys the highest reputation worldwide for its lively and style-conscious Mozart interpretations. In numerous ways it connects the Viennese Classical period to the music of the 19th/20th and 21st centuries. The orchestras constant preoccupation with his core repertoire also shapes its approach to the music of later periods. Thus chamber-musical transparency, articulatory clarity and nuanced sonority are a trademark that makes the Mozarteum Orchestra special and recognizable, also when playing the music of other composers. The Mozarteumorchester Salzburg proves once again its unrivaled position as interpreters of the Mozart stylistic and uses the organ sonatas as a departure into other stylistic periods. It Includes two world premiere recordings of Henze‘s "Konzertmusik" and "Three Mozart Organ Sonatas".

The only collected survey of George Benjamin’s
piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist
who specialises in new music and has worked
closely with the composer.
Benjamin was an accomplished pianist as well
as composer from his early years, and it seems
natural in retrospect that his first published
work should be the Piano Sonata he composed
in 1977-8, as a prodigious student of Olivier
Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. Certain harmonic
touches may mark the sonata out as the work
of ‘a Messiaen pupil’ but the unsettled, leaping
gestural sense of the piece is particular to
Benjamin. So much of Benjamin’s later music is
fascinatingly prefigured here, including a sense
of timing for a gradual accumulation of tension
(‘stormy eruptions’ and ‘savage violence’ in
the composer’s words) that marks out his first
major orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat
Horizon. Underlying that sense of timing is a
feeling for dramatic gesture which has found
its natural expression in a series of operas
written during the last 20 years.
Dedicated to Loriod, Sortilèges (1981) makes
clear its French heritage in the notes as well as
the title, while the three subsequent Studies
for piano, composed over the next four years,
find Benjamin working out intricate rhythmic
problems and their solutions. Even the
Relativity Rag takes a quirky, sideways look at
its superficially familiar material. The next
piano pieces had to wait until 2001, and the
Shadowlines which Benjamin wrote for PierreLaurent Aimard. This set of six canonic preludes
takes Benjamin’s inclination to distill and pare
back to a new level, while the piano writing
itself is richer and more unselfconsciously
informed by the heritage of piano literature.
Finally, there are the Piano Figures of 2004,
written for students of the piano and
accordingly pitched at a technically lower level
than the other pieces, but no less preoccupied
with the rhythmic games and sudden swerves
of thought that are hallmarks of his most
complex music. All these pieces have been
recorded, but never by the same pianist,
making Erik Bertsch’s new collection unique,
and indispensable for any collector of new
music.

The Schumann Quartet dedicates its latest studio production "1923" to that year in which new musical paths were sought, found, or questioned, and at the same time, the birth of radio heralded a new age for composers and the dissemination of their works. The CD program combines selected quartet music by Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, Erwin Schulhoff, and Leoš Janácek.