Flanders Recorder Duo: The name of the ensemble rightly suggests that it emerged from the Flanders Recorder Quartet, which ended its incredibly successful international stage career in 2018. Already the FRQ amazed with the expressiveness of its "only" 4 recorders. The Flanders Recorder Duo now takes this to the extreme. Really only two musicians are to be heard here, but often one hardly believes this when listening to the debut album, which is simply called "FR2". A highlight is certainly the world premiere of a suite by Vaughan Williams. But the other performances from various eras also give listeners plenty of opportunity to enjoy and be amazed.

In the Art of the Fugue, his last great work, Bach brings to bear all conceivable contrapuntal artistry and inventiveness, and sets the result in a planned architectural layout. The new recording was made by Samuel Kummer on the magnificent Baroque organ of the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg, built in 1746 by Zacharias Hildebrandt, at whose acceptance Bach had been present as an expert. Never before has this instrument been captured so convincingly in terms of sound, and for the first time the sound of the organ can now be enjoyed in a multi-channel surround recording.

Music has always been used throughout the ages to convey certain states, emotions. Especially in the music of the 19th century, it was important for composers to express inner states - landscapes of the soul - in their music. They seek nature as a counterpart to the human soul and in the expression of music nature serves as a background, to express the most diverse emotions. When thinking of images, landscapes, impressions of nature, which are closely connected with the world of the Romanticism of the 19th century, then actually a literary image immediately comes to mind: the Blue Flower, which Novalis conjures up in his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" as an ideal fantasy image, so to say as a utopian ideal state. And that, after all, is the goal: to find one's way out of the various wanderings and confusions of the landscapes of the soul to a destination that can never be reached. Hence this general term Die Blaue Blume. For his first album on the Aeolus record label Martin Schmeding has chosen transcriptions of works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and the famous Sonata by Julius Reubke. He plays the new organ (2017) of the Friedenskirche, K�ln-M�lheim (Cologne), a fascinating instrument that was built by Woehl Orgel Projekte in the German romantic style.

Onward and upward! Andreas Böhlen's interpretation of Giuseppe Sammartini's rarely played recorder sonatas (Vol.1, released in 2020) was not only veritably celebrated in the early music scene, but he has now even been appointed professor at the famous Schola Cantorum in Basel. Listeners can therefore expect the highest standards from this second and final volume of Sammartini's sonatas. This music played is from manuscript sources, for there is no comprehensive modern edition of these scores. Sammartini's music often surprises with unusual ideas, and Andreas Böhlen, who also performs as a jazz saxophonist, amazes again and again with sovereign improvisational playing. The rich continuo sound is provided by international specialists from Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.