Boredom (in German: “long whiling”) is apparently what drove Wolfgang to compose one of his string quartets at the inn at Bolzano. And yes, he was doing well, as father Leopold assured Mozart’s mother in a letter dated 28 October 1772. How can we even imagine what boredom must have felt like for a 16-year-old genius? At any rate, it would be too Romantic to imagine that Mozart was writing an emotional diary with these string quartets, a sort of journal intime of his Italian journey. Still, by observing his son’s state of “boredom,” Leopold was indeed noting that Wolfgang was involved in a personal moment of forced leisure. Sitting at the table in the inn, he was processing and digesting the myriad cultural, social, and musical impressions he had gathered in his travels, creating music that he could soon try out with friends or colleagues, or that might be performed at an upcoming reception in high society.

The first authentic quartet and the first group of six were all written in Italy; the second set emerged in the context of a trip to Vienna; finally, the late, “Prussian” quartets are associated the last journey in Mozart’s life. In the midst of these, the six “Classical” quartets show the manner in which Mozart chose to position himself in Vienna – also in relation to Joseph Haydn, who, in Vienna and elsewhere, was regarded as the undisputed master of the string quartet genre.

Alexander Gadjiev writes: “This is a special album that exclusively features brief pieces taken from short anthologies or collections. For me it’s like a journey without a chronology: I just wanted to choose an interesting itinerary. All these pieces seem to evoke a “dark meditation”. Even in lively passages there is an underlying mood of brooding: it is the atmosphere of the early 20th century and the cultural milieu of Symbolism. These are brief, abstract visions of different worlds. You can sense that a single chord or series of sounds could escalate to evoke an entire universe.”

REVIEW

Even knowing what’s in store from Prokofiev’s Sarcasms doesn’t entirely prepare you for the sheer venom he unleashes at the opening, nor for the intelligence with which he moderates that attack thereafter. The set of five pieces is not just the epitome of Prokofiev’s grotesque and motoric manners; it is also underpinned by eeriness and fantasy, as Gadjiev’s own interview-note puts it and as his playing beautifully demonstrates. The coupling is pleasingly adventurous but also logical, given that the Eight Pieces by Tcherepnin fils are so thoroughly indebted to Prokofiev and that Prokofiev himself was not only taught (orchestration) by Tcherepnin père but also (exceptionally) expressed his admiration. That several of Alexander’s Eight Pieces could be interleaved with the Sarcasms and probably fool most listeners is a tribute to their craftsmanship and strength of character.

I shall certainly be returning to Nikolay Tcherepnin’s rarely heard Illustrations to Pushkin’s Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish. These may borrow extensively from Debussy but they also display a subtle sensibility all their own[.]

--Gramophone

For this release, Sheila Arnold and Alexander-Sergei Ramirez are concentrating on a short period of music- The Biedermeier. This is a very unusual combination of instruments that create charming music. The artists are using period instruments, a copy of a Biedermeier Fortepiano and the “Biedermeier guitar,” a special species with a smaller but more charming sound than the concert guitar. These instruments were built much more intricately and minutiously than their more voluminous siblings of today. Sheila Arnold and Alexander-Sergei Ramirez are married, meeting during their studies of these unique instruments.

Soprano Sheva Tehoval, accompanied by Daniel Heide, performs a beautiful selection of songs including works by Debussy, Rihm, R Strauss and Schonberg.

Rewarded in numerous singing competitions, Tehoval's artistry soon started attracting international attention. At age 23 she was the youngest laureate ever of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels; she garnered further prizes at the German National Music Competition (Deutscher Musikwettbewerb), the SWR Junge Opernstars competition (First Prize), and the Luitpold Advancement Prize at the Kissingen Summer Festival. Sheva has already performed on many European stages, including the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Theater an der Wien in Vienna, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, the Philharmonie in Cologne, and the Herkulessaal in Munich.

Apart from her success as an opera singer, Sheva has been frequently invited to give vocal recitals at a number of international venues: the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, the Schubertiada in Vilabertrn (Spain), SWR Festival Rheinvokal, the Bad Kissingen Summer Festival, and "Das Lyrische Salon" at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar; her most frequent duo partners at the piano are Christoph Schnackertz and Daniel Heide. Her interest in a wide gamut of styles is notable, ranging from Classical/Romantic opera and concert repertoire, including the world of artsong and naturally the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sheva's great curiosity to learn new repertoire is the driving force that leads her to embark on innovative musical paths.

Theo Plath writes: “I always found that the music of Impressionism and Late Romanticism was an object of longing for me as a bassoonist; Saint-Saëns was one of the few composers of his time who helped to expand the repertoire of “one of these otherwise so neglected instruments”. He was unfortunately rather alone in that endeavor – which I find all the more regrettable, since I regard the bassoon’s timbre as quite appropriate for the music of that period. With this album I have fulfilled my personal dream to revel in the music of Romanticism and Impressionism, an era otherwise mostly lost for the bassoon as a solo instrument. Art often depicts our yearning for what is lost in the past. Proust, more than any other author, evoked memory as a source of artistic inspiration in his multi-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, to which this album’s title refers.”

This is Vol. II of a longterm planned series of (unknown) Liszt songs. The pianist Daniel Heide discovered some of the originals and has put the program together. Konstantin Krimmel, not even 30 years old, is one of the top singers for lieder and oratorios; only recently he joined the Munich State operas team. It was during his studies with prof. Teru Yoshihara and Tobias Truniger that he developed a special love for the concert and lied repertoire, which he quickly expanded. He has since won numerous competitions, including the 2019 German Music Competition as well as 1st prize at the International Helmut Deutsch Lied Competition, 2nd prize at the International Singing Competition ‚Das Lied‘ in Heidelberg and the Gian Battista Viotti International Music Competition. Daniel Heide certainly is one of the top partners for singers at the piano.

Elias David Moncado, the 21-year-old German-Spanish-Malaysian violinist, has won many 1st prizes and is regarded as a potential top classical artist of the near future. Each of the three composers featured on his new album of violin sonatas dealt in some special way with psychological stress and anxiety in their lives.

"In the Poulenc sonata I find a concealed passion, harsh brutality, and overwhelming pain. The Hindemith sonata contrasts and juxtaposes somber, dancelike, and heroic elements. The timbres in the Bartók are incredibly elaborate, and a general mood of suffering imbues the entire work." --Elias David Moncado

Florian Glemser asks...are Robert Schumann’s late works the product of a household where two married composers, one physically and mentally declining and the other refusing to admit that reality, were living in a stuffy atmosphere? Or was their Düsseldorf circle a fruitful terrain that gave rise to magnificent masterpieces because close, talented friends and family members – Robert, Clara Wieck Schumann, Albert Dietrich, Johannes Brahms, and Joseph Joachim – continually inspired one another?

"For this recording, Sophie [Wang] and I have chosen a program that attempts to answer those questions. All the chamber music works on this album are from the period between 1849 and 1854, thus stemming from the Schumanns’ time in Düsseldorf. The personal and musical connections between Robert, Clara, Johannes Brahms, and Joseph Joachim are intrinsically present in all these works. Those biographical relationships are interesting for us as interpreters because they give rise to special moods we can sense in the music. We want to fathom them, to feel them, and to make them palpable for the listener: this is one of the most exciting projects we have ever undertaken as performers.”

The Quatuor pour la fin du temps counts as one of the harrowing musicals heritages of a horrible past history. Messiaen wrote it in 1941 while caught in a German concentration camp, and based the work on resources available. The work, which is more than 50 minutes in length, is a maximum condense on a harrowing musician’s thoughts, composed under psychological pressure, distress and horror, and also out of pure despair. The piece counts as one of the most difficult musical works to play; it needs an enormous amount of concentration and psychological power. “The work,” as Messiaen writes, “is directly inspired by the Revelation of St. John. Its musical language is essentially transcendental, spiritual, catholic. Certain modes, realizing a kind of tonal ubiquity in terms of harmony and melody, draw the listener into a sense of the eternity of space or time. Special rhythms, lying outside any sort of measure, contribute significantly toward the banishment of the concept of time.”

Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, a collection of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys completed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1722, was clearly modeled along the lines of Ariadne Musica by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (1662-1746, Kapellmeister in Baden from 1715 to 1746) – an organ music anthology published for the first time in 1702 and probably known by Bach in its second 1715 edition. Bach took Fischer’s original layout of 20keys and expanded it to a total of 24, thereby creating the first self-contained collection of music written for the entire corpus of existing keys. Bach, who, on the handwritten title page of the beautiful copy now preserved in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek (Mus. Ms. P 415), signed as Hochf. Anhalt-Cöthenischen Capel-Meistern und Directore derer Cammer Musiquen, clearly indicated his purpose in composing this incomparable collection: “for the profit of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study…”

The concert season of the Ruhr Piano Festival 2020 has suffered heavily under the Corona pandemic shutdown – loosing more than 85% of all scheduled concerts. In the late June/July days some concerts had taken place, some were live recorded; some concert also had taken place in the early autumn 2020,before the entire new planning was cancelled as well for all 2020, like for so many other concerts and festivals. At least the few live recordings are showing an interesting picture of a list of unknown piano works of Beethoven. It is therefore for sure a rich source for collectors and connoisseurs.

Even more than in Beethoven’s case, Mendelssohn’s Lieder were intended for performance in the salons of the prosperous bourgeoisie: a convivial circle of highly qualified connoisseurs who shared the same outlook, and often a similar financial status. Those members of the upper middle classes were the musical link and the sociological crossroads between Hausmusik and the concert hall. Mendelssohn often wrote songs as gifts for the friends he was visiting, frequently as settings of their own texts: the considerable technical challenges they contained still needed to be manageable for members of those circles. Thanks to their songlike or folklike character, certain works by Mendelssohn became true classics, even across broad swaths of the population. The narrower the compositional framework in his songs, the more noteworthy were Mendelssohn’s divergences: he often unobtrusively proved his mastery by varying upon a strict form thus providing variety, excitement, and ironic musical fractures. Robert Schumann’s Lied output was probably more crucial for his existence than in Mendelssohn’s case, and likewise more significant due to the artistic dialogue he held with his wife Clara: songs thus took up a greater place in his life. Composed in Leipzig in 1840, Dichterliebe Op. 48 on texts by Heinrich Heine offers an excellent example of Schumann’s use of a self-contained episode with a homogeneous poetic idea as a point of departure for an entire song cycle. Thus he not only rearranged the order of Heine’s poems from the Lyric Intermezzo, but chose the title Dichterliebe himself. Here the piano goes far beyond pure instrumental accompaniment: instead of merely illustrating the text, it provides its own dimension of interpretation as a partner on equal standing with the voice, both in terms of extension as well in terms of artistic niveau.

Tobias Koch: “This recording of eleven Beethoven sonatas was made during several recitals entitled Beethoven – in search of new paths. These sonatas were written in short succession from 1797 to 1802: one practically led to the next. It was the same period in which Beethoven is said to have revealed to a friend that he was “dissatisfied with his previous works” and intended to “embark on a new path”. Indeed, in those years, the composer seems to have stepped on the turbo accelerator, innovating sonata form in a series of energetically concentrated experiments. Beethoven’s musical propositions are often bold, unconventional, and extreme, something which we often tend to overlook and smooth out with today’s knowledge of all that was to come.

Luca Guglielmi: “Bach himself did not see the autograph manuscript as a 'definitive' version. He kept it as an 'open manuscript' on the rack of his harpsichord up to his death, using it as a 'textbook' for the lessons he gave to his students, never ceasing to insert a series of corrections, reworkings, improvements, small variants and even performance instructions. Bach's hands-on approach to his work in progress proves just how modern he actually was and remains. Through a truly 'holistic vision' we can embrace artistic parameters inherited from our 18th-century forebears: a profound, venerable legacy that remains unknown to the ones who approach the musical art on 'scientific' methods based on calculation and measurement. For this recording we have had the fortune to use an original Christian Zell 1737 harpsichord, a favorite of Gustav Leonhardt to whose memory this volume 1 is dedicated.”

In her solo album TWO, violinist and violist Elisabeth Kufferath presents compositions of four contemporary composers, each represented by one work for the violin and one work for the viola. The number of correspondences one can find is striking: relationships between composers, interpreters, compositions, and instruments, stretching throughout the centuries and into our own. The more one searches, the more one can find. Elisabeth Kufferath is possible one of the very few soloists to promote the Violin and viola literature of the contemporary composers. Three of the pieces are actually written for her. Three pieces are world premiere recordings