The chamber music of Johanna Müller-Hermann is distinguished by its focus on pure melody, which often gives the music a lyrical character, but which she is quite willing to interrupt with stringent use of rhythm and contrast. The Austrian composer Johanna Müller-Hermann (1868-1941) was born in Vienna on January 15, 1868, to government official Alois von Hermann and Antonia Freiin von der Decken zu Himmelreich, who was eighteen years his junior. Known in her girlhood as Johanna von Hermann, she was the second of three children. The growing family enjoyed the life of the upper middle class in the inner city of Vienna. Johanna Hermann learnt the piano with Heinrich von Bocklet, who was later made Professor. She attended the Vienna Conservatory, studied musicology with Carl Navratil and historical counterpoint with Josef Labor, took violin and piano lessons, and participated in the exercises of Guido Adler.

Müller-Hermann also enrolled for the composition class of Josef Bohuslav Foerster. She published her first opus in 1903, “Seven Lieder for solo voice and piano”. The premiere of one of these songs the following year drew public attention to Müller-Hermann, and her Violin Sonata was first performed in 1905, attracting a good deal of positive comment. Critical interest was increased by the publication of her String Quartet op. 6, which celebrated its premiere six years later. The quartet was written during a period of instruction from Alexander von Zemlinsky. There is no known evidence of this teaching, nor are there any drafts, but the quartet is dedicated to Zemlinsky “in gratitude”. Public recognition came in 1917, when she was appointed Professor at the Vienna Conservatory in succession to her former teacher Josef Foerster. Her public profile benefited from her two orchestral works and even more from her choral works with orchestral accompaniment.

Brahms composed his “Geistliches Wiegenlied” in 1863 as a wedding present for two friends of his, the famous violinist Joseph Joachim and contralto Amalie Schneeweiss. Brahms and Joachim both loved the sound of the viola, a chamber instrument that was only just developing a concert repertoire.
This Classical composition was the starting point for the programme of the present CD, which combines original works for trio from three centuries in the formation voice-viola-piano, including two specially written vocal cycles by Sarah Nemtsov and Walter Zimmermann. The programme represents a kind of musical engagement with themes that are gaining new relevance today: persecution and expulsion, homelessness and homesickness. The texts and their settings sometimes enter into an unexpected dialogue.

Matthias Manasi is rated as one of the most sought-after and most outstanding conductors of his generation, earning himself a distinguished name both on the opera and concert podiums. With a diverse repertoire range he is recognized for his knowledgeable and insightful interpretations, encompassing the great symphonic and operatic repertoire, contemporary scores, and historically informed performances. He is celebrated for the extraordinary combination of precision and temperament of his conducting and the convincing depth of his musical understanding, The Austrian newspaper ‘Heute’ wrote after a concert: “Matthias Manasi delivered an outstanding performance in the legendary, heavenly acoustics of the Golden Hall of the Musikverein Vienna”. The ‘Factanet Rome’ wrote after a concert: “It was a great interpretation that added value to Manasi’s work and that proclaims him as one of the most important conductors of our time”.

For those pieces still missing from the complete recording, the Heidelberger Sinfoniker have been proceeding since Volume 25 in chronological order, to better chart the development of Joseph Haydn the composer. We are thus in the midst of a young, wild Haydn, a Sturm und Drang Haydn. “Heidelberg Haydn is a paradigm of dynamism, freshness, wildness, humour and constant surprise. I am glad we are continuing the journey, completing the cycle. My musical encounters with the Heidelberger Sinfoniker have always been journeys into happiness. Idealism, love of music and technical perfection join forces here with the will to create something really special. Which is exactly right for the symphonic world of Joseph Haydn. I look towards the future in eager anticipation!” - Johannes Klumpp

Johanna Senfter (1879–1961): Works for viola and piano – In the male-dominated world of the time, in which women who performed and composed required special assertive skills, Johanna Senfter consciously refrained from a career in the wider world and limited her creative field to her birthplace of Oppenheim am Rhein near Mainz, not least because of her unstable health as a result of a severe bout of diphtheria in her childhood. This pragmatic self-limitation has given way to an interesting, decades-long debate, not least because her compositional legacy at the Cologne Musikhochschule is available to all interested researchers and musicians and has led to new editions or first recordings of her compositions.

“The decision to record works by my great-grandfather was actually made some time ago. Back in 2006 I founded the Hohenstaufen chamber music festival, which takes place annually in September and of which I am the artistic director. We play chamber music from absolutely all eras at this festival, in a wide variety of scorings. This is how we came to engage with the chamber music of Robert Kahn and produce the first CD with hänssler CLASSIC in 2013. I was aware of Kahns´s composiotns at the end of the 1990s. Kahn was a senator of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Professor at the Musikhochschule in Berlin for chamber music and piano.”

For over 60 years, repeated efforts have been made to capture on recording Robert Schumann’s Complete Works for Piano solo, a fascinatingly broad and varied spectrum ranging from highly virtuosic pieces for the concert hall and valuable literature for teaching purposes. This attractive and yet challenging assignment was not always approached with the necessary intellectual rigor, quite apart from any purely artistic shortcomings, and so none of these sets can justly be deemed “complete”. Schumann had published a string of works in two more or less divergent versions, so that it is highly questionable whether an edition can be labelled “Complete Recordings” if it only contains one of those versions or worse still, makes a misguided attempt to combine two of them. Meanwhile, works that were published at remote locations or remained unpublished have hitherto been taken into account only in exceptional cases.

The first true complete recording of Robert Schumann’s works for piano solo on 17 albums (in 15 volumes), played by Florian Uhlig, seeks for the first time to offer imaginative compilations containing all original works for pianoforte written between 1830 (Abegg Variations op. 1) and 1854 (Ghost Variations) according to the newest critical editions and/or first editions. Several of these albums also contain premiere recordings, often of fragments that were amenable to completion. After the project was completed in 2021, it was evident from a further critical inspection of the five Studien- und Skizzenbücher held in the University and State Library in Bonn, and from the volumes of the complete piano works for two hands that have so far appeared in this comprehensive and groundbreaking edition, that there is a string of either very short complete or longer fragmentary pieces dating from about 1830 to 1837 that are worthy of attention.

The STUMM family stands alongside Schnitger and Silbermann as one of Germany’s most famous organ-building dynasties. It was founded by Johann Michael Stumm. He and five generations of his descendants built some 400 organs between Cologne and Karlsruhe, Luxemburg and Amorbach – a tradition unique in the history of German organ building. The oldest surviving organ by Johann Michael Stumm, in the Lutheran church in Rhaunen, dates from 1723. The latest findings show that it was built as early as 1715 – with Johann Michael working alongside his instructor Otto Reinhard Metzenius. The last instrument from the Sulzbach workshop was built for Niederhosenbach in 1895. The sixth generation of the organ-building dynasty includes Gustav Stumm, who had his last workshop in Kirn in the Rhineland-Palatinate. That was where he built the organ for the Catholic church in Rhaunen in 1893. He died in 1906, his final work for Traisen left unfinished.

Peijun Xu, born in Shanghai, is one of the leading violists of her generation. As a soloist, Peijun Xu has performed in renowned venues such as the Shanghai Concert Hall, the Laeiszhalle Hamburg or the Alte Oper Frankfurt. Her chamber music partners include Paul Rivinius, Evgenia Rubinova, Alexander Sitkovetsky and Veit Hertenstein. German violist Veit Hertenstein plays with “brigthly ringing, luminous and finly finessed sound (The Strad Magazine 2022).

Veit Hertenstein is Professor for Viola at the Musikhochschule Detmold, Germany since 2015.

"Credo - a profession of faith. belief, confidence and trust in a time that is challenging for all of us. Faith in the power of music, in art and in the ability to rise up and persevere. These duet recordings were created with these thoughts in mind, making their way through Handel's opera and oratorio duets, right up to the final creative phase of his life."
Anna Korondi and Zvi Emanuel-Marial

Kubelík’s star began to wane in the years before World War I. Some felt he had gone off the boil but it was more a question of his public turning to new idols, Elman and Vecsey. In 1915 he retired to take composition seriously, not resuming his concert career until 1920. He toured Britain 20 times from 1900 to 1934 (packing the Royal Albert Hall with 7,000 people in 1926) and the U.S. many times up to 1938 (6,000 heard him at the New York Hippodrome in 1920-21). He commanded a wide range of music and in Central Europe he is remembered as a great musician. He died in Prague on 5 December 1940. The main fruits of Kubelík’s five-year break were his first three Violin Concertos, published in Prague in 1920. Of the eventual series of six, Pavel Šporcl says: ‘They are technically very demanding and musically extremely interesting.’ The First Concerto in C major, which he plays here, is a melodious Late Romantic work, well tailored to a front-line virtuoso’s strengths, and it should not have fallen out of the repertoire. Kubelík emerged from his purdah to première it at the Grosse Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 29 January 1917, Nedbal conducting the Tonkünstler Orchestra.

In 19th-century Vienna (where Brahms spent much of his professional life), the practice of writing “music for the home” (which should in no way be pejoratively construed as a retreat into carefree seclusion) experienced a boom that reached as far as the imperial court of Franz Joseph I. The music-making in many Viennese households was on a par with public performances and boasted enormous variety. Special reference to this recording: on the evening of May 11, 1895, Johannes Brahms played this very CD-programme at the Vienna home of the culture-loving Fellinger family, with whom he was very well acquainted, having received from Simrock the galley proofs of the rearranged versions of the op. 120 sonatas for violin and piano. His partner for this soirée was the violin virtuoso Marie Soldat-Roeger, who was one of the eminent female musical figures of the 19th century, on a par with the likes of Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn), Pauline Viardot-García and others. Soldat-Roeger was the first Austrian woman to gain prominence in European concert halls. So Brahms had made just the right choice for the domestic context of this soirée, as have the two performers on this release: in making this recording, they have brought a piece of historical performance practice from the salons of the 19th century into the living rooms of our time.

The starting point for the recording of the album ROOTS was a concert in which Shirley Brill performed Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Sonata for the first time and was deeply moved by its overwhelming emotional power. Being Jewish herself, she resonated deeply with the rich Klezmer folkloric elements expressed so intensely in this Sonata. This experience ignited her passion to explore the integration of national sentiments into classical music, with a particular focus on the neighbouring countries of Germany and Poland.

In ROOTS, Shirley Brill has curated a collection of pieces that demonstrate a masterful integration of folkloric elements, exuding pride in original folk music and a healthy sense of national identity. Yet, this aspect also belongs to the folklore within the music that is heard here: over the course of the 100 years in which the recorded works were composed, an excessive embrace of radical ideologies has slipped into dangerous nationalism.

Weinberg's life and his Clarinet Sonata composed in 1945 serve as a poignant reminder of the catastrophic consequences of such extremism. The range of works presented on the album ROOTS sheds light on the delicate balance between the celebration of cultural heritage (as in the music of Schumann and Lutoslawski) and the intrusion of the destructive forces of nationalism (Weinberg). ROOTS testifies to the power of music to promote unity while simultaneously cautioning us to remain vigilant against the pitfalls of extremist doctrines.

This new release features poignant soul music for moments of contemplation. Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary's suffering as Jesus Christ's mother at his crucifixion and has been set to music by many Western composers. This 4 album box presents timeless interpretations of the most important compositions of Stabat Mater. Soloists featured on the release include Margot Guilleaume, Ingeborg Danz, Marta Benackova, Elisabeth Höngen, James Taylor, Thomas Quasthoff and many more.

Music and lyrics by women and men. It is only natural that the spirit of the Romantic era should embrace, envelop and encircle the male and female composers and lyricists on this album in their depiction of wistful longing – the omnipresent theme of the era. But this is not the only point of reference behind this concept. The deeper one delves into the life stories and works of these artists, the more complex and far-reaching the network of associations proves to be.

“In Relation” is an invitation to plunge into the associative field of 19th-century words and music and it shows that the connexions between the two arts and their male and female practitioners were more extensive than one might imagine.

Chopin shaped his two extended cycles of études into a pianistic cosmos that has a unique place in the literature for piano. The études for solo piano feature many technical possibilities composed with an accomplished sense of style. However, the main focus in each of the compositions is musical expression. Mechanical passages are nowhere to be found. The rich timbres of Chopin’s virtuosity thus emerge as the basis for a nuanced tonal world blending Romantic sensibility with a manneristic stylistic approach. All in all: Chopin's études constitute a separate musical domain. They go beyond their own limits, reflecting on numerous other works by the composer in order to establish themselves as “stylistically anchored pillars” within his piano aesthetics. Chopin redefined the genre. Without his pianistic and tonal innovations, the originality of later études – one need only think of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Debussy and Ligeti – would probably be unimaginable.

Three Vienna-born composers and four elective Viennese performers come together in four challenging and deeply layered compositions that span 120 years of Viennese musical history. The significance and impact of the works, however, radiate far beyond Vienna itself. At the same time, the live recording also reflects a moment in contemporary history, as the concert, originally planned to take place before a live audience, eventually took place on 17 May, 2021 solely as a streaming event at Vienna's Arnold Schoenberg Center, due to the restrictions enforced by the COVID 19 pandemic. The title of this recording, Viennese Transfigurations, is ambiguous. Three pieces are arrangements of earlier compositions for a quartet with the rather unusual line-up of violin, piano, clarinet and double bass, while the other was written for a trio of clarinet, violin and piano. Two arrangements are by the composers themselves, and two are by violinist Maxim Brilinsky. Each of the works has the facility to arouse the curiosity of the listeners right from the beginning, and all end softly.

Within the realm of Romantic piano music, where new discoveries are constantly just around the corner, the contribution of Robert Schumann has always played a major part. True, he cannot rival the aura of Chopin’s works, of which Ignaz Friedman asserted that not only had Chopin opened the piano with them, he had closed it again. (Schumann paid his own tribute in his reverent review of Chopin’s op. 2 of 1831, the Variations on Mozart’s “Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben”). Nor did Schumann embed in the history of piano playing such milestones of technical mastery and manual dexterity as Liszt who – inspired by Paganini’s concerts and enabled by the double-escapement action developed by Sébastien Erard in 1821 – had practically reinvented the instrument by the time he wrote his Etudes d’exécution transcendante in 1837. And neither the sprightliness of Felix Mendelssohn’s keyboard idiom nor Charles-Valentin Alkan’s exaltation of virtuosity are characteristic of Schumann’s piano music, even if he proves in his Abegg Variations op. 1 (1830) and his Toccata op. 7 (1832) that he brilliantly commanded both approaches to the instrument.

On six albums, this new release features great musical moments for all admirers of Brahms and fans of choral singing at its very best! The program leads the listener through Brahms´ essential vocal works and a splendid set or artists grant highest quality of interpretation. The recordings included are taken from the Haenssler catalog and were recorded over the course of the last few decades. Featured artists include Donna Brown, Ingeborn Danz, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lioba Braun, Gilles Cachemaille, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Kammerchor Stuttgart, and more.

SET CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), Op. 45 • Liebeslieder Waltzes (18), Op. 52 • Neue Liebeslieder Waltzes (15), Op. 65 • Vier Ernste Gesänge (4 Serious Songs), Op. 121 • Deutsche Volkslieder (49), WoO 33 (excerpts)

In his Mass in A flat, Schubert set himself the great task of composing a “Missa solemnis”, as he later entitled the work. As with the Mass he wrote in the last year of his life, he severed the bonds imposed by tradition on the four earlier works of 1814-16. His highest ambition for the effect it might have on the world (there is evidence of his early intention to dedicate it to the Emperor Franz and his consort) is linked in the A flat major Mass with a deeply personal confession, the formulation of his own faith, of “true devotion”, as he put it in 1825. There can scarcely be another work upon which Schubert worked so long, so intensively and with such revision: begun in November 1819, the Mass was not finished until September 1822; given one performance at the end of that year and possibly another in 1823 in the Alt-Lerchenfeld parish church in Vienna, it was by no means “finished business”, being modified by Schubert by 1825.