Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Ramón Ortega Quero combines dazzling technical and musical expertise with an infectious love of music-making; once on stage the audience is soon in his thrall.He took 1st prize at the 2007 ARD Competition and can already lay claim to two ECHO Klassik awards.The solo oboist with the BRSO, he is also pursuing a parallel international career as a sought-after soloist and chamber player.His Berlin Classics debut CD features J.S. Bach’s oboe sonatas.Luise Buchberger on the Baroque cello and harpsichord Peter Kofler offer support; his wife Tamar Inbar is second oboist on the Trio Sonata BWV1039.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

At the tender age of nine, Felix Klieser dreamed of being able to play Mozart's horn concertos. Today, 18 years later, that dream has finally come true and Felix Klieser now performs on the world's foremost concert stages, playing the very works which are part of any horn player's core repertoire. Yet he took his time before recording all four of Mozart's horn concertos: only after releasing three successful albums and winning an ECHO Klassik award and the Leonard Bernstein Award did he go to Salzburg, in September 2018, to record them with the famous Camerata Salzburg ensemble. Now, the results of that labor are presented on this stunning release.

Mozart, W.A.: Piano Sonatas - Nos. 8, 10, 11

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Peter Damm, who is one of the 20th century’s leading horn players, has built up an impressive discography in the course of the last three decades. These naturally focus upon his instrument: the horn. The present Edition brings together many of his recordings for the Eterna label. It illustrates the history of horn music through a large and varied repertoire such as is only rarely to be encountered. From chamber music to the great horn concertos, from the music of the 17th century to twentieth-century works, the spectrum is immense. Peter Damm was born in Meiningen (Thuringia) in 1937. After learning the horn at the College of Music in Weimar he began his artistic career in 1957 as solo hornist with the Gera municipal orchestra. In 1959, Damm was appointed solo horn with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, which at that time was making numerous Gramophone recordings. Damm’s first solo recording was in 1961 with the Gewandhaus horn quartet, playing Robert Schumann’s Konzertstück op. 86 for four horns under the baton of Franz Konwitschny; he first appeared on a chamber-music recording in 1964. In 1969 Damm was appointed solo hornist with the Staatskapelle Dresden. His cantabile style of playing placed Damm firmly in the Dresden tradition and became the hallmark of the Dresden wind section for almost forty years. During those years in Dresden Peter Damm was involved in more than 100 studio recordings with the Sächsische Staatskapelle. Famous international conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink and Giuseppe Sinopoli were fascinated by Damm’s horn playing at first hearing. Peter Damm would always champion new music and the rediscovery of forgotten works from all eras in his work as a soloist on record releases. This applied in particular to the works of the Dresden court composers. Peter Damm celebrates his 80th Birthday on July 27th, 2017.

Claire Huangci proves herself to be a vividly expressive interpreter of Chopin, the first since Artur Rubinstein to offer a complete cycle of the Nocturnes by Frédéric Chopin. During her background research work into Chopin’s oeuvre she repeatedly came across poems by French authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Tristan Corbière. She began to form associations and found a poem contemporary to each of Chopin’s nocturnes. You will find the links between poetry and music in the booklet. Claire Huangci herself explains: “They may add a further dimension to your listening pleasure, so that everyone can conjure up an image of what I see as I play. I do hope that these lovely verses will act as an impetus to allow listeners’ fantasy to take flight and to create their very own Chopin diary.” This approach is proof of Claire Huangci’s artistic maturity – an approach that will open up new avenues in our appreciation of Chopin. Frédéric Chopin was a special pioneer in Claire Huangci’s eyes. The child prodigy became acquainted with his works at a very young age and grew up with them. They were decisive to her personal development and artistic career, which took off at an early stage on an international level thanks to concert performances, arts grants and a host of awards. This resulted in a virtuoso life of short-distance and long-haul flights, juggling appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Osaka’s Symphony Hall or the Gewandhaus in Leipzig with life at home in Philadelphia. She has played with a host of orchestras including the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart, the China Philharmonic Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony and the Moscow Radio Symphony. Accompanying her on her journey, so to speak, were not just her teachers, such as Eleanur Sokoloff, Gary Graffman and Arie Vardi, but the composer Frédéric Chopin: she owes her artistic breakthrough to his music. Time and again she has analysed, documented and profiled Chopin. Claire Huangci has brought together all of this experience and these insights on her new album, forming them into a “Chopin Diary”. The Nocturnes are the epitome of Chopin’s artistic work. They attest to the composer’s emotions on the cusp of the Romantic era and are simultaneously evidence of a restless life that hung between his artistic popularity, his dire state of health and an uncertain future. Composed in an atmosphere of domestic security, as night fell, they reflect his stimulating artistic day-to-day life. They are deemed to be perfect in form, combining all stylistically defining moods in a virtuosic form that to this day is unsurpassed. Some of the total of 21 Nocturnes form part of the standard repertoire for young pianists, yet Claire Huangci’s approach to them is a highly personal, unique one: “With her differentiated agogic approach and superior technique, Claire Huangci proved that she is now the most expressive Chopin performer of her generation", according to Gerd Kurat of the Südkurier newspaper. She rounds off the program with the Nocturne Oubliée and the Etude in C sharp minor, recorded together with cellist Tristan Cornut.

It’s the Roaring Twenties. That musical jack-of-all-trades, Sergei Koussevitsky, Director of Music with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-five years, commissions the orchestration of two world-famous works: Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky and the Études-Tableaux by Sergey Rachmaninoff. And who does Koussevitsky choose for this task? Why, none other than the two great composers Maurice Ravel and Ottorino Respighi. Their orchestrations lay the foundations for numerous other arrangements of those works. More than 80 years later, Dirk Mommertz, a member of and pianist with the Fauré Quartett, has arranged both of these works anew – this time for piano quartet. “A chamber-music ensemble, with piano and strings, is ideally suited to present the entire tonal spectrum,” explains Dirk Mommertz. Violinist Erika Geldsetzer, violist Sascha Frömbling, cellist Konstantin Heidrich and Mommertz at the piano have been an entity for over 25 years now and are justifiably acknowledged as one of the most influential piano quartets in the world. They are renowned for branching out into new territory; they are not afraid of leaving the well-trodden path, so it comes as no surprise that the Fauré Quartett have recorded for the first time their own arrange-ments of these works on one album. The mesh of relationships which binds Mussorgsky’s composition of 1874 and Rachmaninoff’s of 1911-1918 with Koussevitsky’s commissions to Ravel and Respighi, now ends 150 years later with the Fauré Quartett in the 21st century.

Classical Music

“Something new every moment.” If we are to believe Shunske Sato, leader of Concerto Koln and soloist on this sparkling new release of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” what is at the heart of this recording is the idea of freedom. Freedom, too, in more ways than one. True to the principles of historical performance practice, the ensemble delivers the vitality of spontaneous playing in Vivaldi’s music. Founded in Cologne in 1985 and at home on the great international concert platforms of the world ever since, Concerto Koln has developed a quite unique sound of its own, which is known and admired around the world. A major music magazine once wrote that the ensemble played antique rock and roll- “rousing, raw, and jovial.” The “Four Seasons,” are joined here by two other Vivaldi works, showing other aspects of the composer and rounding out our picture of him: the sad and sorrowful Good Friday music “Al Santo sepolcro” and the Concerto RV 156, which may be the most beautiful concerto Vivaldi ever wrote. This audiophile recording was made in the Paterskirche in Kempen, celebrated for its acoustics. There were no cuts, no stopping and starting, just one take, no compressors or artificial resonance. This recording simply documents an end-to-end performance by musicians at the highest level of concentration. This music sounds so natural and immediate, it’s as if one were hearing it live at a concert.

That is quite a coup! Sebastian Manz, ARD Music Competition winner and solo clarinettist of the SWR Symphony Orchestra, sums up the years he has devoted to the clarinet works of Carl Maria von Weber by presenting a complete recording of those works on a double album. Weber's two concertos for clarinet and orchestra, a Concertino, a Grand Duo Concertant, the Silvana Variations and a clarinet quintet represent some of the most important works for clarinet ever written, true masterpieces of the Romantic era. Weber's music also marks a milestone in the musical life of Sebastian Manz. In his youth, he heard a recording of the Second Clarinet Concerto - with jazzman Benny Goodman as soloist - and it was Goodman's energetic playing that convinced the young Sebastian Manz that nothing less than intensive engagement with his instrument would do. Like Goodman, who took a jazz musician's liberties with Weber's work, Sebastian Manz himself enhances the compositions with all the artistic devices at his disposal. In preparing for this recording, he made a close study of the score that belonged to Heinrich Joseph Baermann, the great clarinet virtuoso of his day, who kept up a close friendship with Carl Maria von Weber and was involved in the composition of the clarinet works from start to finish. The consequence was that Baermann prepared his own versions of the works, taken as standard by many clarinettists to this day. Not that Manz ever regarded that as an option! He has developed his own interpretations - resulting in an individual reading full of lightness and artistic invention. The comprehensive uniqueness on all levels of Sebastian Manz's recording has much to do with the circumstances under which it was produced. As solo clarinettist of SWR's Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart. Sebastian Manz was able to bring his own Stuttgart colleagues on board for the recordings - making a team that delves into the technical subtleties of Weber's works while also plumbing their emotional depths.

Andreas Scholl writes of his new release The Family Songbook: “When my wife Tamar first introduced me to her family in Israel, her aunt Etui took the initiative and invited all her children and the rest of the family to a Shabbat dinner. That way, her niece's new boyfriend was able to get to know the whole family. I took the Shklarskys straight to my heart; at that first meeting we laughed so much, ate so much and such good food, and I was welcomed to the family with open arms. Music plays a big role with the Shklarsky family, just as it does with my family in Kiedrich. Everyone sings or plays an instrument, and after the meal, we all went down to the music room in the basement, where there is a piano and there are various guitars and electric guitars too. Since that first Shabbat dinner we have met up many times in Ramat Gan and about two years ago, after a few glasses of wonderful red wine from the Golan Heights, the idea came to me of making a recording with the Shklarskys which would capture the atmosphere and the joy of making music together and would bring future generations of our families closer together.”

The chamber combination of trombone and piano is unusual and charming. On Sapphire, Peter Steiner and his pianist partner Constanze Hochwartner give an insight into how this combination can work, thereby exploding the myth of commonly-held preconceptions about what the trombone is capable of. It is not just the instrument that shall sound on the Day of Judgment; it can sing tenderly and sweetly, producing a myriad of timbres that sparkle like a sapphire. With his trombone, the solo instrument that is rarely featured in the field of classical music, Peter Steiner is at home all over the world. After studying at the Mozarteum and the Juilliard School in New York, the young Austrian not only won three solo instrument competitions staged by the International Trombone Association ITA as the first trombonist ever to achieve the feat; he went on tour round the world, from Brazil via the USA to Japan. In 2017 he got to know the young pianist and organist Constanze Hochwartner, with whom he recorded the album Sapphire in Columbus/Georgia, USA. The programme of the album combines arrangements of works by Mozart and Puccini with melodies by Bernstein and complements contemporary trombone literature with film music from the movie "The Godfather.” Peter Steiner wishes to illustrate how versatile his instrument is, and the sounds he produces are indeed astounding. Soft sounds that range through all the registers alternate with catchy and powerfully mesmerizing musical concepts.

Classical Music

RAVEL:ORCHESTERWERKE

Why Francesco Geminiani is not mentioned these days alongside other great masters of the era of Baroque music is a bit of a mystery. Together with Corelli and Handel he was one of the composers who made a great career for himself in eighteenth-century Great Britain. Concerto Koln has not forgotten him, on the contrary: the ensemble pays homage to him as one of the true greats. And now the musicians have chosen their favorite pieces from his entire oeuvre and called it Geminiani’s Quintessence. He was a composer, virtuoso violinist and itinerant artist, as well as being a dealer and collector of art, a musicographer and musicologist. Francesco Geminiani’s life, and in particular his travels, do not read like the typical story of a more or less sedentary Baroque composer. In comparison with Johann Sebastian Bach, who hardly went beyond a 200 km radius in his entire life, Geminiani was a globetrotter who journeyed to Rome and Paris and as far as Dublin. It would seem that this restlessness is reflected in his music. Things that are hard to imagine nowadays were common practice back then: works by other composers as well as composers’ own works were re-worked and arranged for other solo instruments or orchestra. In the case of Geminiani, however, the large number of arrangements of his own and other works led to a reputation of being unoriginal and lacking in imagination. As a result of his method of constantly composing and arranging, Geminiani’s entire output can be divided into four categories: his Concerti Grossi and arrangements of them, arrangements of his sonatas as Concerti Grossi, and arrangements of sonatas by other composers as Concerti Grossi. Concerto Koln has chosen works from all four categories for this project, with bassoonist Lorenzo Alpert taking a leading role in selecting those rare works “which we think are the loveliest and most accomplished of his compositions.”