In the 12th and 13th centuries, the clavichord evolved from the Greek monochord, an instrument that consisted of a soundboard above which a string was stretched and divided into the desired lengths by means of a moveable bridge. A more developed form was the polychord, which was fitted with several strings to allow for the simultaneous production of more than one note. The addition of keys to the instrument heralded the birth of the clavichord. With his knowledge of music history, Friedrich Gulda was of course aware that the clavichord was Bach's favorite instrument alongside the organ and so it seemed fitting for him to perform Bach's works on the clavichord. The first part of this recording presents Gulda playing a Widmayer clavichord, which has an intimate, refined sound, whereas the second part features a Neupert, which sounds more like a concert instrument.

Since Marina Baranova first played Clair de Lune as an eager nine-year-old a question had stayed with her: Was there another side to Debussy's music, one influenced by his turbulent private life and tempestuous relationships? "When you think of the great impressionist painters, you think of light, and hope, and love," she says. "But Debussy adored the darkness of Baudelaire, and was heavily influenced by Wagner. The titles he gave his pieces also hint at hidden meanings, so I thought it would be interesting to explore this 'shadow' side and my feelings towards it." Now Marina Baranova's album Unfolding Debussy will be released to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Claude Debussy's death in March 2018. Despite being "absolutely in love" with Debussy, Baranova had also grown tired of playing his work in the common, classical way. Coming back to his music, she resolved to discover new ways of playing while exploring this darkness, and set about deconstructing some of his best loved pieces. It was here she had a vision, and the concept of "unfolding" his work took shape. To emulate the richness of Debussy's original compositions, Baranova sought a broader palette and different textures. "Every instrument has it's own color," she says, and so a number of different pianos and keyboards were employed to help to weave her magic. An Una Corda, a Fender Rhodes, midi keyboards and a C. Bechstein grand piano all feature, as do a number of delays and arpeggiators; anything to match the mood and the colours she could see in her head. Unusually for a classical pianist, she took it upon herself to both write and sing lyrics for various tracks, something she claims "wasn't a decision, but an intuition. At the start, this wasn't my intention, but the words just came."

Felix Klieser first began to take a serious interest in the Horn Trio of Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) at the age of thirteen. Back then he was just a junior student at the College of Music and Drama in Hanover. He bought several different recordings of the work, including one featuring the hornist Peter Damm, whom he was later to meet at a master class in Dresden. “I picked up quickly that Felix was extraordinarily talented. He was able to elicit from the horn a soft, warm sound, a distinctly Romantic horn tone,” says the former horn-player of the Dresden Staatskapelle in high praise of Klieser in the booklet text to the young musician’s new CD entitled “Horn Trios”, released on the Berlin Classics label on September 29, 2017. “The Brahms Trio is the pride of the horn literature,” according to Peter Damm, a view he shares with Felix Klieser. That led him to seek out other such works, perhaps even unknown literature from the horn trio genre. He came across the French composer Frederic Nicolas Duvernoy (1765–1838), who was hornist at the Paris Opera, Faure pupil Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) and the Mannheim-born Robert Kahn (1865–1951) who was hounded by the Nazis. The result is a programme of works spanning nearly 100 years of development of the horn trio, which bring Felix Klieser a further step towards his goal: to place the horn centre stage as a colourful and profoundly Romantic instrument. Such a plan requires the right chamber music partners, whom Felix Klieser has happily found: at the piano sits the outstanding and sensitive Herbert Schuch, while the violin is played by the Ukrainian ARD competition winner Andrej Bielow. “It was a wonderful experience for us to learn these pieces, some of them quite new to us, thereby expanding the scope of the chamber music genre in an exciting way,” enthuses Felix Klieser.

Interest in the Schumann Quartet ignited long before the release of the ensemble’s last album, Landscapes. The combination of Liisa Randalu, Erik, Ken and Mark Schumann represents youthful vigor combined with intelligent circumspection and vision. With the release of Intermezzo they forge a link to their previous album by presenting an equally charming and sensitive choice of repertoire linked to their namesake, Robert Schumann. Their point of departure and focus is his String Quartet no. 1 in A minor. The Schumann Quartet musicians concentrate unconditionally on the vocal part-writing, and rather than merely overcoming the technical challenges choose to simply ignore them. The music of Felix Mendelssohn is suffused with what Schumann envied as “ease” or “facility”. The String Quartet no. 1 in E-flat major was written in the late summer of 1829, when the younger composer was not yet 20. The correlations, corresponding references and tributes are all in evidence – Mendelssohn’s string quartet is the perfect match for Schumann’s equivalent work. Schumann and Mendelssohn provide the framework into which Aribert Reimann then sets “his” Schumann. Reimann is one of today’s most successful composers and is linked to the composer of the Romantic era born in Zwickau, Saxony, by more than music. The Adagio zum Gedenken an Robert Schumann (adagio to the memory of Robert Schumann) based on two unfinished chorales without words was composed as a result of intensive and personal cooperation between the quartet and Reimann. In Reimann’s arrangement of the 6 Gesänge op. 109, the ensemble succeeds, in harmony with the soprano Anna Lucia Richter, in fulfilling Schumann’s wish for an “additional, fully-formed accompanying instrument”. Reimann’s skill in handling the original brings out the fine features and nuances of the lyrics. The quartet and singer complement each other so effortlessly that the unusual combination sounds like a quintet that has been working together for many years.

Capella Antiqua Munich's recording of the century is once again available. Recorded in 1974 in Aicha vorm Wald in Lower Bavaria, it brings the indescribable beauty of those old sacred chants to life, not just as a high-quality audio document, but as proof of present-day intensive analysis of over 1000 years of music-making. Gregorian chant composed for the most significant festivals of the church year - Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide -here represents the cream of what is viewed as the origin of Western music. The recording by Capella Antiqua Munich under Konrad Ruhland has long since become a classic - because it represents a milestone in the endeavor to portray the topicality of Gregorian chant's timeless art form. Antiqua Munich was formed in 1951 as one of the forerunner ensembles of the Early Music movement. Under the direction of Konrad Ruhland (1932-2010) the group established itself, before disbanding in 1981, as a top-flight ensemble for medieval music through to the early Baroque.

In July of 1960 Dmitri Shostakovich composed his famous String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 in the small spa resort of Gohrisch in ''Saxon Switzerland'' national park. The quartet is the only work Shostakovich composed outside the Soviet Union. To commemorate the visit by Shostakovich, in 2010, exactly 50 years later, the International Shostakovich Festival in Gohrisch was established. Since then, the festival has attracted concert-goers from around the world to the spa resort near the Elbe River. The Sachsische Staatskapelle Dresden played an important role in initiating the festival and performs in Gohrisch with well-known concert artists - and in the first year of the festival already received high praise from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: ''At an authentic setting and with the support of enthusiastic music lovers, unique festival programming was created with a balance of works that would normally be expected at established festivals such as in Salzburg or Bayreuth: a judicious and deftly concentrated concept performed by renowned artists, and refined by the charm and spirit of the location.''

Music pervaded by so many different influences, modern and yet rooted in tradition, assiduous and extremely cool. A Bernstein Story is an album which deals with Lenny's music the same way in which he dealt with music itself without being frightened to cross borders or snub someone. Classical Clarinettist Sebastian Manz and jazz musician Sebastian Studnitzky approach the great Leonard Bernstein in a way that illuminates every facet of his career and life. The two musicians have come to Bernstein in their own individual ways and from their respective fields- Manz as the classically trained artist, Studnitzky as a jazz man. The album they have produced, A Bernstein Story is meant to mirror the composer himself remote from any formal categorization, pluralistic in style, eclectically colorful, located somewhere between classical and jazz.

Dance is more than movement to music. Dance is passion and pure lust for life. Celebrations call for dancing. That was as true in the palaces and the taverns of the 18th century as it is today in the techno temples of the new era. This is the surging river that ECHO-Klassik winners Spark have set out to bridge in their project 'On the Dancefloor.' The Classical Band throws an arch from the spirited ballet music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to the chamber techno penned by contemporary composer Sebastian Bartmann, finding that two seemingly contrasting worlds actually fit very well together. The question is: what can a gavotte of 1778 and a techno piece of 2017 learn from one another? In the view of Spark, the Classical Band, quite a lot. Mozart in his day knew how to build wildly throbbing structures so as to create this trance-like state that today's dance-mad club-goers still live for. On the other hand there is scarcely a techno piece that does without baroque or classical figurations. This sets in motion a stimulating, lively dialogue between yesterday and today, between the ultimate Classical maestro and the trend-setters of the contemporary composing circuit. The two centuries and more that separate Mozart from Bartmann and his contemporaries are brilliantly illuminated by Spark. The musicians have consciously chosen to keep jumping back and forth between these worlds, sparking direct connections between them. So you sense intimately how timeless dance is and how similar are the emotions aroused by the dances of quite different times and genres. There is always this boundless delight in going wild to music, feeling utterly alive and letting the rhythms stream through your body - complete surrender, total immersion in the intoxicating whirl of sound. That is just what Spark would wish for all listeners to this album: nights of wild dancing through all the ages of music!

Claudio Boh�rquez has established himself as an experienced chamber musician and concert soloist. For the past 30 years he has been playing the cello, teaching at the famous Hanns Eisler conservatoire in Berlin and travelling the world. Now the moment has come for him to attend to his discography. "The time is right," as he says. He learned early on, from colleagues he trusted and admired, how important it was to take one's time. No snap decisions - musical ideas needed to mature, interpretations had to be based on personal experience, and self-awareness was essential. He begins where he first started. The Sonatas for piano and cello opp. 38 & 99 by Johannes Brahms loom large in the life of each and every cellist. Like others before and since, he tackled these works at an early age. In the Hungarian pianist P�ter Nagy, he has found the perfect musical partner. Brahms was especially fond of the cello: we know that from the countless themes, leading lines and heartfelt melodies that the composer entrusted to the instrument. In his youth, he had "played the fiddle a bit, but my instrument was the cello," as Brahms told the Viennese music critic Herberger. The Hungarian Dances, serving as a foil - almost as an encore - to the two sonatas, were written at a time when Hungarian refugees were settling in Brahms's native city of Hamburg. The demand from the aspiring middle classes for sophisticated but playable music, suitable for domestic performance, was one of the secrets of success for the Hungarian Dances. The arrangement by Alfredo Piatti is the currently preferred version for piano and cello. The musical starting signal has rung out. Claudio Boh�rquez is not stopping at Brahms, he has much more to give us.

The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the city's glittering new landmark, opened in January 2017. "Light & Dark" is the world's first recording of a solo organ recital in the Grand Hall. Featuring a range of appealing contemporary works, the album showcases the wide tonal spectrum of the Elbphilharmonie's organ. Built by the Bonn-based firm Klais, the organ is an instrument of superlatives. 4,765 pipes extend over five rows of seats, their lengths ranging from just eleven millimeters to an imposing ten meters. Thanks to the very open structure of the hall's "white skin" around the organ, audiences can actually look inside the instrument and some of the pipes have been coated such that they can be touched without leaving any marks. The organ fits perfectly into the spectacular architecture and has a very impressive sound. "There's nothing this organ can't do," Iveta Apkalna enthused. "It's warm and rich, with many beautiful fundamental tones that sound from everywhere, and from the depths. The sound embraces the audience." With it's modern selection of repertoire, seemingly tailor-made for both the organist and the instrument, the album compellingly draws listeners into a fascinating world of sound. At the heart of the recording is the work that gives the album it's name - Sofia Gubaidulina's "Light and Darkness", a piece of great extremes that penetrates every fiber of the body. Two composers, Aivars Kalejs and Lucija Garuta, hail from the organist's native Latvia, and the album also includes works by Leo� Janacek, Gyorgy Ligeti, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Thierry Escaich. Iveta Apkalna has made an album that brings to life the qualities of this organ with a modern and extremely diverse selection of works. Iveta Apkalna is one of the world's most famous organists and, as titular organist, knows the Elbphilharmonie instrument like no other musician. She is fully committed to seeing the glittering beauty of the organ better represented in concert halls. Iveta Apkalna is a cultural ambassador of Latvia and dedicates this album to her country.

The songs and ballads written by Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) for the radio play Kalifornische Ballade (California Ballad) are among his least known works and are presented here for their first release ever. Started in Berlin in 1932, the exiled composer's work was eventually completed in London in 1934 and was broadcast for the first time on December 7 of that year, albeit in a foreign language: the Brussels radio broadcaster recorded the work sung in Flemish by Ernst Busch on lacquer discs that were recently rediscovered in a Belgian archive; they were made during the second transmission of the narrative radio play in 1935, and are now being offered to the public on record for the first time. Just 18 months after this second broadcast, Ernst Ottwalt, a friend of Eisler and author of the text to California Ballad, was arrested in Moscow in 1936, during Stalin's Great Purge; he died in a Siberian gulag in 1943. Following the events of 1933 that had suspended the writing and public performance of California Ballad, this depressing turn for the worse may have deterred the composer from contributing to a revival of the work in subsequent years.

Fabian M�ller was given Brahms's complete piano works on an album as a child, and he would sit in the back of his parents' car on the way to vacation, enraptured by the music of the Hamburg composer. Nothing has changed in his attitude since then. Fabian M�ller has embarked on a promising career which has already been full of thrills and continues to progress very favorably. In 2017 he was the first German pianist in this millennium to win a second prize at the ARD Music Competition as well as being awarded both the Audience and Busch prizes. He gave his debut at New York's Carnegie Hall in the spring of 2018, and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in September that year. The Bonn-born pianist demonstrates Brahms's calm, introverted pianistic approach in his recordings of the Ballades op. 10, the Piano Pieces op. 76 and the Intermezzi op. 117. This is an unusual choice for such a young artist: M�ller's playing style eschews sensational pianistic virtuosity, instead evincing heartfelt musicality, especially in the soft tones. In "piano expert" Stefan Kn�pfer, who is known from the film Pianomania, he has found the perfect technical partner, who knew exactly how to react to his ideas and wishes. The result is a sound that is almost inimitable. On his debut album for Berlin Classics he can be heard inviting listeners to totally immerse themselves in the music. "This is music that I wish to hear when I am old and perhaps ailing, because despite their sadness they emit such warmth and comfort, characteristics that I have found in no other composer."

We are standing in a picture gallery of music. All around us we can hear snippets of the great works for string quartets, along with unfamiliar things to delight the ear; it is truly a music-lover's paradise. "Chiaroscuro" forms the conclusion of a rather special trilogy of albums by the Schumann Quartet and at the same time marks a journey's end. After searching for their own roots in "Landscapes" and engaging with their namesake Robert Schumann in "Intermezzo", the four musicians complete their trilogy with the album "Chiaroscuro", which in itself represents an equally exciting journey through time and temperament. By way of Mozart's arrangements of five selected fugues from Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier II" they look left and right into very different musical rooms. There are two early pieces for string quartet by Shostakovich, Philip Glass's "Company" string quartet, a short fugue by Felix Mendelssohn, and the six Bagatelles op. 9 by Anton Webern. The whole promenade culminates in Janácek’s last work, his Second String Quartet. "A few years ago we were even more inclined to do things 'the right way', or to fulfil other people's expectations of us." In recent years, the young musicians have progressively released themselves from these demands. And perfected their own. "We want our music to exist in the immediate moment, as we lose ourselves in it. For that to succeed, each of us must transcend their individual ego." Their focus is on the concert, and that is the way they have approached "Chiaroscuro": "We recommend everyone to listen to the whole album from beginning to end without a break." "Chiaroscuro" – Italian for "light and dark" – is the name of the programme. The Schumann Quartet combines works that could not be more different. They aim to show that despite the contrasts, the differences and discontinuities between such pairs as Mozart and Webern, Glass and Janácek, there are glimpses of common elements and evidence that many of the composers on display are brothers in spirit. It is a question of the "unity that the album forms", perhaps not in spite of, but just because of the contrasts. And when at the very end of the album, at the very end of the whole trilogy, we hear Gershwin’s "Lullaby", we cannot shake off the feeling that all this is such stuff as dreams are made of.

The Golden Violin - Music of the 20s is Daniel R�hn's tribute to one of the most prolific cultural eras of recent history. Daniel R�hn brings the jerky flickering images and the high spirited, extravagant hurly-burly to musical life with romantic sounds from Rachmaninoff through the evergreens of Kurt Weill to the jazzy echoes of Gershwin. "That era was a positive melting pot of creativity and inventiveness," explains R�hn. Jazz was emerging. Silent movies were being replaced by the talkies. And while Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse was taking his first steps in 1928, the dream factories in Berlin and Hollywood were doing a roaring trade thanks to Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin. The violin virtuoso is focusing on a topic that has recently been in the public eye, not just as a result of popular TV productions. R�hn's personal role model, the patron of violinists Jascha Heifetz, is both the inspiration and the godfather of The Golden Violin. Absolute perfection, paired with unique creative energy and an inimitable touch. "When I was six year old, I could just about (standing on a box on tip-toe) reach Vol. 1 of my father's Heifetz collection. And that volume contained the complete acoustic recordings of 1917-1924, full of straight-to-the-heart arrangements and popular melodies." It is precisely those melodious evergreens that he has now recorded with the W�rttemberg Chamber Orchestra under it's American principal conductor Case Scaglione. R�hn and the WKO are in perfect harmony on this recording. Most of the works were newly arranged especially for this formation.

It is no understatement to say that the accordion is one of the most underrated instruments in the world of music. This exciting instrument is often reduced to the stereotype squeeze box employed by itinerant musicians to play old favorites on crowded streets, or the frequently derided oompapa music of Alpine legend. Nikola Djoric is not an artist who wants to shatter such preconceptions. He has no need to do that; it happens quite automatically. The world lies in his hands, as it were, whenever he straps the instrument with it's host of buttons to his chest. The two buttonboards on each side have a similar range to that of a piano. By using a swaying movement of the bellows the tone can be varied much as it can on the cello. This is augmented by the metal reeds set in motion by the circulation of air from the bellows and the various registers for bass and treble. Nikola Djoric is fascinated by the fact that the accordion combines the characteristics of keyboard, string and wind instruments. A fact which he exploits to paint the tonal pictures of his performance programmes. He has dedicated his debut album for Berlin Classics to two of the great Russian masters: Modest Mussorgsky and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His approach is very simple. "I play exactly what is in the original score." No arrangements, just everything as Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky wrote it. It is this interplay - original score played on a new instrument - that informs Nikola Djoric's performance and which astounds the purists and experimenters alike. He applies his personal view to the images and to the music. At the same time, it is his aim to provide every listener with a personal sense of access to the music. Djoric is sure that "if Mussorgksy and Tchaikovsky had been more familiar with this instrument, they would have been fascinated by it."