The Armida Quartet is holding an unusual kind of rehearsal, skimming through three Mozart string quartets with musicologist and Henle's publishing director Wolf-Dieter Seiffert. The focus this time is not on sound quality, musical character, or developing an extended formal overview- all qualities for which the Armida Quartet is well-known- but on achieving a good match between philological accuracy and practical music-making. Seiffert is working on a new edition of the Mozart string quartets for his publishing house in Munich, and has sought out direct contact with the members of the Berlin string quartet to clarify doubts regarding dynamics, ties and tempi. When a case is truly difficult, the most technically feasible or desirable alternative helps him decide which variant will ultimately figure in the new Urtext edition: will it be a variant from Mozart's autograph, or from the first printed edition? This method is particularly productive when an editor can work with ensembles as well-versed in historical performance practice and aesthetics as the Armida Quartet.

Classical Music

Classical Music

In Juon's piano trio we plunge into the most profound recesses of the soul. Everything acquires existential significance. This is where our performers find a bridge that connects Juon's kaleidoscopic tone poem with Pjotr Tchaikovsky's colossal Piano Trio, op. 50, a musical epitaph for pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had been Tchaikovsky's friend and mentor. Rubenstein had ensured that the young Tchaikovsky was allowed to enter the newly founded Moscow Conservatory while taking him up as a resident in his own home. "He looked after my every need like a child's nurse," Tchaikovsky wrote. Rubinstein not only made sure that Tchaikovsky wore appropriately elegant clothing, but he took him to the opera and to concerts while introducing him to his circle of colleagues and friends, playing out his connections to draw their attention to his prot�g�'s compositions. His unexpected passing in 1881 must have profoundly shattered the young Tchaikovsky, who dedicated the only piano trio he ever wrote to his late friend, adding the subtitle 'A la memoire d'un grand artiste.' The work consists of two monumental, thematically related movements. Beginning with a heartfelt cello cantilena, the first one is an extensive elegy or Pezzo elegiac: an immense variety of musical ideas flow together in this sonata form with exposition, development, and reprise. The second movement consists in a seemingly endless set of variations. Today, the work is regarded as one of the milestones in the genre of chamber music with piano.

Classical Music

Josef Tal was an Israeli composer- and a student of Paul Hindemith- who is considered one of the founding fathers of Israeli art music. His catalog, which consists of more than 100 works, is not very well known. The viola works especially are almost unrecorded, and are here released as a testimony of music written during World War II through the present day. Not only is Harmut Rohde an extraordinary viola player and conductor, he is also Professor at the Royal Academy in London as well as a worldwide traveling artist. He writes: "I met Josef Tal when he was 94 years old. Our encounter was like a journey into an unsettling past, marked by a great number of hardships and upheavals he had personally endured. It also offered a revealing glimpse into the outlook of composers in Israel, as well as previously in Germany- even into compositional approaches from many eras he did not live through himself. Throughout our collaboration, Josef Tal proved to be a great thinker: not just an analyst, but also an interpreter who consistently sought to bring out the emotional aspect in music. He ascribed a decisive role to that which lies "between the notes." I like to call such an approach Durchhoren, i.e. "hearing through the music." It can open many marvelous avenues for the performer, particularly in music which does not seem emotional or Romantic at first glance."

On these three albums I am thrilled to present seven highly gifted young pianists who gave their d�but performances at the Ruhr Piano Festival 2019 -promising artists from whom we can expect and are sure to hear much more in the future. The most recent volumes of our Ruhr Piano Festival Boxed Edition mainly featured work of the 18th and 19th centuries, in accordance with each Festival edition's chosen themes; this year, however, we can feature Baroque und Early Classical repertoire on almost two entire albums. On the third we then plunge headlong into the Romantic 19th century with major challenging works by Brahms and Liszt... (Excerpt from the forward by Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, Director)

Markus Sch�fer writes of his new release: "A musical interpretation should always strive to breathe new life into a composer's legacy by making it audible and understandable in accordance with the here and now. In this new recording we have once again dared to open up our performance experimentally to the sort of effects that emerge from spontaneous improvisation. Faithfulness to the original begins with a willingness to decode, decipher, and interpret the score; it is not achieved by staring fearfully in awe at the manuscript. To the contrary: we are fully aware that any confrontation with a masterpiece of the past can only be justified if we recreate it anew while maintaining a fragile balance between faithfulness to the musical work and faithfulness to the "text"."

In Hamburg, 1775, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, by then an internationally celebrated and well-connected figure, was surely aware of the genre’s popularity. After all, his half-brother, the London-based Johann Christian, was central in promoting this new culture of domestic piano playing. Responsive to the market demand, C.P.E. came to an agreement with the London publisher Bremner to publish the following year Six Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte accompanied by Violin and Violoncello (Wq. 89). Despite the title, Bach referred to these works at times as Trios, at times as Sonatas, and sometimes even as “Trios (which are also Solos)”. Business acumen aside, these works reveal C.P.E. Bach at the height of his career and are full of invention, expression, and shocking surprises that at times surpass what even Beethoven might dare to do. Despite their 10-year career that includes winning many high-powered awards around the world, this is the Linos Piano Trio’s debut recording.

In a series of 3 albums, the Beethoven Trio Bonn explores the confrontation between one of Beethoven’s standard works for piano trio with a further “house music” arrangement of one of his orchestral works. More than providing an interesting pairing, the Beethoven Trio Bonn was keen on interpreting an original work for piano trio alongside an arrangement of an orchestral work “downsized” to piano trio format. This new concept delivers surprising, unforeseen results. Composers and publishers in Beethoven’s day sought to indulge the pleasures of the middle class: dozens of arrangements and transcriptions of orchestral works were in wide circulation for domestic use. Haydn, Mozart and many others had always tried to provide access to the wonders of symphonic music for those members of the population who could not gain entrance to the grand concerts of the upper classes. Up to the 1930s, music publishers continued to commission composers to arrange and transcribe symphonies and other orchestral works, in order to make them readily available as chamber music; no composer found the task too lowly, since such work was a good source of steady income. Vol. 2 presents the young fresh Symphony No. 2 in Beethoven own trio arrangement coupled with the less known but definitely beautiful Trio No. 6. It sounds as if the Symphony was a trio in its original form, natural and favorable. Also in this arrangement, the piano carries the main load of all the orchestral voices. “BTB”, the Beethoven Trio Bonn is mastering this major challenge again and makes also this Vol. 2 to a little diamond and enjoyable CD. Thanks to BTB there is a fascinating, committed tempo and clarity, a major portion of musicality and joy in the performance.

Classical Music

Well known pianist and conductor Vladimir Stoupel writes of his new album: “For me it has been a great joy to conceive and record the programme featured on this [release]. The idea that inspired it was twofold: on the one hand, it is made up of variation cycles (with the exception of the Rondo brillante on a theme from Bellini’s opera ‘I Capuletti ed I Montecchi’). On the other hand, the programme’s chronological order not only traces the fascinating evolution of Glinka’s composition technique, but also the manner in which his successors used what he had invented: the “Glinka-type variation” where the theme and/or structure are usually not modified, but the accompaniment is subjected to a great variety of transformations. Glinka was held in high regard as the “father of Russian music.” Many Russian composers made his variation technique their own and developed it further- for example, Tchaikovsky in the Finale of his 4th Symphony. I therefore decided to include two further works that refer to Glinka: the Paraphrase on Glinka’s Song ‘The Lark’ by Mily Balakirev, and Variations on a Theme by Glinka by Anatoly Lyadov.”

... o night of love, descend upon us... That motif from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde sets the musical and lyrical mood for the selection of pieces and poems in the Feininger Trio's programme, performed for the first time at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival. Love and death: the goal in selecting the poems was to find a mood similar to Schubert's Notturno and Chopin's Piano Trio Op. 8: texts that could establish a lyrical dialogue with those pieces. How can we grasp the great subject of love and death? How can we associate language with music, but without relegating language to a subordinate role? How can a series of poems tell their own story while at the same time highlighting the expression conveyed by the music, which is still the precondition for this musical-poetical programme? Following Schubert's Adagio (later renamed Notturno), the theme of love is addressed in Ingeborg Bachmann's poem Erklar mir Liebe ("Explain love to me") and in Rilke's Liebes-Lied ("Love Song"), which features metaphors associated with string music. Allegro con fuoco is the tempo marking of the first movement in Chopin's Piano Trio, Op. 8. It is paired alongside Elke Lasker-Schuler's poem Du spieltest ein ungestumes Lied ("You played me a wild song").

Tanja Tetzlaff writes: "We come to hear Bach's works differently because Encke's unfamiliar sonorities startle and disturb us. Inserted between the suites, Encke's pieces open up an entirely different world of sound. With his two pieces, Encke builds bridges among the three suites and refers to them directly in his music. I find that the two works are quite different in character: Cracks is loud and noise- fragile, as well- whereas Clouds is more melodious at the onset... Both pieces feature powerful, incredible drama within a small space. Both pieces are threatening, but also gorgeous. While you are out on the thin, dangerous ice, you can survive if you manage to enter into the right sort of vibration. You can go on gliding in that beautiful ice-skating rhythm without falling through..."

Of all the major Russian composers, Reinhold Gliere is one of the least well-known in the West. His life spanned a vast period from the Czar's reign to Soviet dictatorship, and he made it through the Stalin era relatively intact by mostly avoiding conflict without losing face. Such dilemmas were to haunt the lives of Gliere's pupil Prokofiev, and especially that of his colleague Shostakovich, 30 years younger, but they were not yet current in 1900, when 20 year old Gliere, still a student, injected all of his youthful verve into composing his String Octet in D Major Op. 5. The work soon gained immense popularity in Russia. Shostakovich's Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11 let us look back upon the beginning of an outstanding musical carer that was overshadowed by harsh difficulties. These two pieces with the headings Prelude and Scherzo are from the period when Shostakovich was still a student. Reynaldo Hahn was a student of Maurice Ravel at Paris Conservatoire. He studied composition with several professors including Jules Massenet. He gained considerable renown with his song cycles, operettas, and ballets. His Piano Quintet in F Sharp Minor is a rhapsodic work in the lineage of French Late Romanticism.