The Alla Turca fashion made its way into Turkish operas after the final siege of Vienna and the Turkish defeat. Since the early 17th century dozens of arias, operas, and instrumental works have been composed in this style. This project, Carneval Oriental, is inspired by these cultures, celebrating carnivals as it was most likely held in the 16th and 17th centuries. Images of caftans and turbans, Turkish drinks, and hookahs are brought to mind. The Pera Ensemble and L’arte del mondo teams up on this recording to bring us a quality performance of Baroque music from Italy and France laced with oriental spice.

Haydn Opera Rarities with Top Stars! Although Joseph Haydn is still regarded above all as a master of instrumental music, he was also a contemporary of the future as an opera composer. For a not unsubstantial length of his life, he chiefly devoted himself to this genre as the opera director of Prince Esterházy, he headed over a thousand opera productions in Esterháza including the ‘hits’ of the time as well as stage works of his own. It is unusual and a pointer to the future that women take control in both operas presented here. In addition, these female protagonists are people of flesh and blood, strong and pragmatic the spirit of the Enlightenment can be sensed.

In the field of entertainment music, Ziehrer’s name was soon a quality brand in Vienna, especially as Carl Haslinger, Johann Strauss Jr.’s publisher, provided him with valuable assistance. Unlike Strauss, Ziehrer came from the piano, so he was not a standing leading violinist, but availed himself of a baton. He wrote countless orchestral compositions, above all waltzes, but also marches and polkas, including many that would be termed ‘hits’ today, as well as more than twenty stage works. Most of these operettas are almost forgotten today, and merely Die Landstreicher (1899) comes to mind. It is a merry and graceful work in a popular tone and with a slightly sentimental mood. This recording is another juwel for the Capriccio Operetta Edition who takes care of these unjustly forgotten composers and pieces.

The pairing on this album is unquestionably apt, bringing together as it does works by perhaps the two most famous “aitas” (priests) in Basque music: Father José Antonio de Donostia and Father Francisco de Madina. Whatever the similarities and differences between the two men, the former born twenty-one years earlier than the latter, both composers succeeded in incorporating, with exquisite elegance, a profound sense of local folk traditions into their music, creating works that have since earned classic status in Basque culture. The soprano Arantza Ezenarro was born in San Sebastián in the Basque Area of Spain. With this Album she presents most sensitiv songs of her homeland.

The cellist Harriet Krijgh and pianist Magda Amara present a program of Rachmaninov pieces that sensitively reflect and capture his genius with this release. Along with well known Rachmaninov repertoire, the CD also includes Sonata for cello and piano op.19 which evolved after a lengthy period of depression and compositional despair catalyzed by the critical failure of his Symphony Nr. 1 and requiring therapeutic treatments to end. Some have said that after emerging from this creative black hole, Rachmaninov’s humility and compassion produced works that were richer than was the case previously. This release makes a convincing argument that this was indeed the case.

The great niece of the largely unsung early-mid 20th century Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer whose book "Die Wasserfalle von Slunj" brought him rare recognition and was conceived as a novelistic counterpart to Beethoven's 7th Symphony, this premiere of Johanna Doderer's 2nd Symphony 'Bohinj' is an artistic memorial to Lake Bohinj in Slovenia, around 300 km away from the Croatian waterfalls her great uncle wrote about to great effect. Doderer has said she "was fascinated above all by the superb scenery. In the course of time, I found out what happened there during the First World War. In short, the idyll utters a silent scream. My three-movement work also touches on this sound." With the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz conducted by Ariane Matiakh, the release also features teh soprano Anne Schwanewilms as well as the violinist, Yury Revich and is an excellent introduction to U.S. audiences of this prolific and much commissioned contemporary composer.

Following on from their most successful album “sound escapes” (Capriccio C5239) the young, aspiring Signum Quartet address Bohemian music culture. Beside Antonín Dvorák’s famous String Quartet Op. 106 and Josef Suk’s Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale ‘St. Wenceslaus’ (1914), an impressionistic offering on the beginning of WWI, is the 1923 composed Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, which experiments with dance forms and provides a most virtuosic challenge. “… the Signum Quartet, which must already be counted among the best ensembles of its generation…” (Pizzicato)

Both the music and the figure of Austrian composer Karl Ignaz Weigl remain largely unknown to most listeners. Before fleeing to America from Austria in 1938, Weigl had become an established figure in the musical landscape of Vienna by the early 1920s. Written between the turn of the 20th c. and the 1940s, the twenty-seven Weigl Selected Songs on this Capriccio release, arranged for solo voice, vocal duet and piano or string quartet, are performed by soprano Sophie Klußmann, baritone Sebastian Noack, pianist Oliver Triendl and soloists of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

‘It is with certainty one of the most virtuoso pieces of all’, Stefan Vladar says about Maurice Ravel’s piano suite Gaspard de la nuit, constituting, so to speak, the main work on this Capriccio release. The pianist has worked the suite’s three movements diligently for more than two decades and also consistently studied Ravel’s other piano compositions, works that reflect completely different aspects of pianistic technical virtuosity and compositional aims. The journal Fono Forum has spoken of this Austrian pianist and conductor as “one of the most remarkable pianists of our age.”

Dvořák composed the Biblical Songs op. 99 in 1894 during his time in America (1892-95), working as artistic director and professor of composition at the New York Conservatory of Music. His 9th Symphony, appositely termed ‘From the New World’ was to be followed by a further symphony, but Dvořák opted instead for treating the Biblical Songs, which, in their austerity, hardly allow scope for an American scent but rather are possibly reminiscent of the composer’s Czech homeland. Dvořák, the Catholic, had long demonstrated his faith with numerous works of fervent piety: Stabat Mater (1876), Requiem (1890), the Mass in D major as well as the pieces for solo voice and organ, for instance, the works that can be heard on this CD - Ave Maria, Ave Maris Stella and Hymnus ad laudes in festo Sanctae Trinitatis (1877-79) as well as the organ preludes and fugues of 1859 by the then 18-year-old composer.

Arnold Schönberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances in November 1918 “to give Arnold Schoenberg the opportunity personally to carry out his intention of providing artists and art lovers with a veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music”, as Alban Berg described in a leaflet in 1919. Chamber music, solo pieces and songs saw performance, and to a great extent, properly arranged for the available means, original large-scale orchestral works of topical and artistic high-quality were also produced. In the autumn of 1921, Schönberg embarked on an arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which, however, he broke off in the middle of the first movement. The continuation was to be taken over by Webern, but this did not happen, evidently as a consequence of the end of the society. It was only in 1982/83 that the German composer, conductor and musicologist Rainer Riehn (b. 1941) was prepared to continue what had been begun.

Henri Dutilleux, named the “van Gogh of classical music” (Die Welt), was a maverick, a dreamy and stubborn man searching for his own style between tradition and modernism, oriented toward his great paragons Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel and Albert Roussel. “I compose colors,” he would always point out, admitting to his great reverence for van Gogh. His colorful music finally found for him much late success, especially the orchestral works. This CD offers the rarely performed First Symphony, two almost unknown orchestral songs set to poems of Jean Cassou and finally the far better known Métaboles.

After the successful album release “Slavonic Souls” (Capriccio C5039) the Vienna State Opera Singer Zoryana Kushpler, accompanied on the piano by her partner and twin sister Olena, offer a rich recital of famous Spanish songs by the likes of Granados, de Falla, Mompou, Rodrigo and Montsalvage, including some choice rarities by these composers. Born in Lvov, Ukraine, Ms. Kushpler made her debut at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2007 as Adelaide in Richard Strauss’s Arabella. She has also been heard there in the operas of Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach and Johann Strauss.

Henning Mankell (1868-1930), whose grandson and namesake has become one of Swedens most successful authors of crime novels, was himself a modest person, not very interested in a public career. Mankell earned his livelihood as a private teacher of piano and music theory in Stockholm, as a music critic and as a member of the board of the Academy of Music. If Mankells life was a tranquil one, his compositions were all the more colourful, at least those from the last two decades of his life. His works were given labels such as Impressionism or Futurism by the critics of the age. He was probably interested in French Impressionism, but he did not identify with it. Many of Mankells works, and especially the bolder ones, remained unpublished for a long time, but were still occasionally performed by musicians who recognized their value. Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966) had an obvious talent both for pictorial art and music. He had a lifelong fascination for the sea and loved to be among fishermen, sometimes even taking part in their work at sea. Two composers had a special influence on him in Paris: Stravinsky and Honegger. For a few years, Nystroem used dissonance extensively, influenced by the style of The Rite of spring. Nystroem followed Vincent dIndys historically oriented teaching, which was of great importance to him, but his most inspiring teacher in Paris was the Russian music theorist Leonid Sabaneyev, with whom he worked for several years. The composer later declared himself to be both a great lover of absolutely pure music and an incurable romantic, a description that is relevant for this recording and also for his instrumental music in general.

‘I am an EU singer’, Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of ‘E’ and ‘U’, i.e. in ‘serious’ and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.