Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85: Dvorak's most extended cycle of lyric character pieces for piano. The great Czech composer is hardly known for his piano works, in which he invariably seems to stand somewhat in the shadow of great Romantic masters such as Schumann or Brahms. Nonetheless, the 13 character pieces that comprise the Poetic Tone Pictures reveal an incredibly rich, enchantingly diverse world of inner images. At the same time, they offer a multitude of stylistic and pianistic surprises by combining folklore elements with subtle timbre effects. It is therefore all the more astonishing that they have been seldom performed in concert.

In Haydn themes are firmly rooted in Baroque aesthetic, and at the same time they are future-oriented. In Schumann the extremes often collide directly with one another. In his music there are abrupt changes. Melodiousness is something the Schumann trio and the piece Vitebsk by Aaron Copland certainly have in common. The Copland work is centered around a Jewish song. Hosokawa dissolves everything at once. He attains a new dimension. Time is suspended, it evaporates. The Oberon Trio was founded in 2006. Shortly after the ensemble's premier concert, the Flensburger Tageblatt already credited the Oberon Trio with "enormous interpretive abilities, which testify to the enchanting ripeness and stylistic command of this new ensemble." Meanwhile, the trio has given performances, among others, at the Berliner Philharmonie, the Wiener Konzerthaus, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Konzerthaus Dortmund, and Esterházy Palace, as well as in Italy, Bulgaria, Israel, India, Egypt, and the Ukraine.

Claude Debussy is often labeled as a musical Impressionist. It is misleading to do so, however, since Debussy was not truly associated with the visual artists who belonged to that current. Instead, he viewed himself as an adept of Symbolism, as one can tell from his choice of texts for musical settings and from his opera Pelléas et Mélisande; he eventually turned against the association of music with imagery. In his two volumes of Préludes, the subjects or poetic descriptions were not featured as titles, but appeared in brackets at the end of each piece – more like subtitles than titles. Thus, the Préludes hark back to previous milestones in the genre: in the preludes of Bach and Chopin, the center of attention had not been musical illustration, but the keyboard per se.............The aspect of magic in sound is not only prominent in Debussy’s cycle of préludes, but also in another cycle: Makrokosmos, which American composer George Crumb started to write in 1972. Makrokosmos eventually grew to four volumes and acquired legendary status. The first two volumes are for solo piano; Vols. 3 and 4 are for two pianos and percussion, viz. for piano four hands, respectively. Contemporary modes of execution are prominent in all four volumes, including tapping and knocking on the piano frame, or scraping the strings. Transformation of timbre is an essential element for Crumb, who had alchemy in mind. Aspects of the occult are prominent in the first volume, which is devoted to the signs of the zodiac – not in terms of astronomy, but of astrology, i.e. the influence of zodiac signs on a person’s development and character. Crumb’s Makrokosmos is thus likewise a collection of character pieces such as the more Romantic ones Schumann wrote for piano in the19th century.

Capella Cracoviensis was established in 1970 on the initiative of the then director of the Cracow Philharmonic, Jerzy Katlewicz, who entrusted Stanislaw Galonski with the mission to form an ensemble that would specialize in early music. Over the course of the years, the group has become organizationally independent, featuring highly diversified repertoire from the Middle Ages to world premieres of contemporary music. In November 2008, Jan Tomasz Adamus was named its executive and artistic director. The repertoire of Capella Cracoviensis is thoroughly eclectic, ranging from Renaissance polyphony to Romantic operas, performed on period instruments and staged according to the guidelines of historical performance practice. With unswerving support from the City of Cracow, the band is able to bring its artistic ideas to life on a world-class artistic level, without compromises. CC is often invited to major festivals and concert halls, such as Bachfest Leipzig, Schwetzingen SWR Festspiele, and many more. The orchestra also regularly invites conductors, concertmasters and soloists for guest performances. Among others, the group has thus already collaborated with outstanding musicians such as Evelino Pido, Christophe Rousset, Alessandro Moccia, Giuliano Carmignola, Paul Goodwin, Andrew Parrott, and Paul McCreesh.

In its recording cycle, the Feininger Trio is pairing each of the three piano trios written by Brahms with a work by another Viennese composer: Alexander Zemlinsky, Ernst Krenek, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, respectively. Brahms’s three piano trios are among the genre’s crowning achievements, and the members of the Feininger Trio were interested in exploring how the piano trio genre developed in the master’s wake. Younger composers drew on Brahms’s legacy while opening a new window to Modernism and the 20th century, and that was the main criterion in choosing the three pairings. Biographical similarities among Korngold, Krenek, and Zemlinsky in their early years also played a major role in the Feininger Trio’s selection. Despite major stylistic differences, a red thread in their the three composers’ lives connects them all with Brahms. The connection was strong. As Alexander Zemlinsky put it, young composers attempted to outdo one another by writing in a vein as Brahmsian as possible. Young Zemlinsky knew Brahms and enjoyed the older composer’s support. He was not Brahms’s pupil, but Zemlinsky’s early Piano Trio op.3 has much in common with Brahms. It is more widely known as a clarinet trio: in 1896, Zemlinsky submitted it to a competition organized by the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein which required a chamber music work “using at least one wind instrument”.

Classical Music

Daniel Heide writes: “The home of my mother – a pianist and singer herself – was where I first came in contact with Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Several of her piano students from Weimar Conservatory often came to take lessons or visit us in our apartment. Curiously, instead of popular sonatas such as the Pathétique or the Appassionata, we tended to hear other ones: I still vividly recall Sonata No. 30 in E Major op. 109, on which my mother was working with a student to whom I had taken a liking. The themes from Sonata No. 31 in A Flat Major regularly rang through the apartment as well. Bound in red leather, the three Peters volumes of Beethoven sonatas were just as much a staple of our living room as the LPs next to the record player, including Maurizio Pollini with Sonatas op. 109and 110, or Wilhelm Kempff with the op. 13 sonatas, op. 27/2, and op. 57. My gaze was long held by portraits of famous pianists, usually in a serious, contemplative pose. My mother was also my first teacher, and she often raved about these 32 masterpieces’ major importance, quoting the names of great Beethoven interpreters such as Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Backhaus, and Walter Gieseking. When I owned my first CD player at age fifteen, I started to look for those names in music stores, and they turned up quite readily. The first album I purchased myself long remained my favorite: a recording made by Walter Gieseking in 1956 with the Op. 13 sonatas, Op. 14, and Op. 27. It helped me become more familiar with these pieces, now with the passionate, burgeoning interest of an adolescent. It is thus certainly no coincidence if I am featuring those works on this recording.”

Wayne Marshall was eight years old when, at home in England, he heard a Gershwin concert broadcast on the radio – a pivotal listening experience as he recalled fifty years later in a WDR video clip. It may have set his life in a new direction, eventually leading him to Cologne as Chief Conductor of the Funkhausorchester. It comes as no surprise that outstanding recordings from those six years at WDR include productions of great Gershwin works. Wayne Marshall called it to an end after ten years of being chief conductor of the WDR Funkhausorchestra, the second orchestra of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk broadcast station. Wayne just wanted to look out for new challenges, internationally and worldwide, being an independent musician, mainly an organ player. This release is a document of his work with the WDR Funkhausorchestra.

Leonard Bernstein was certainly not surrounded by an aura of aloofness. He enjoyed his immense popularity, although he never consciously attempted to be “everybody’s darling” and to be hailed as “Lenny” by everyone on the street. His parents had officially named him Louis, but tended to call him Leonard. Serge Koussevitsky, his teacher and elder friend- with whom he not only shared an outstanding musical talent but also an Eastern European Jewish family background- called him Lenyusha. This release is being presented in honor of Bernstein’s 100th birthday. A high caliber artist roster led by Wayne Marshall is playing most of Bernstein’s Piano and chamber music which is not at all known to most connoisseurs of his music. A great part of these short pieces have until now only been available on vintage albums, making this release even more special.

“Schubert’s music is always associated in my imagination with a journey in a horse-drawn carriage. Outside, the scenery is flowing by. Cities, mountains, rivers, lakes, villages. At times the carriage slows down, then it speeds up again, but I always have that feeling of being on a journey. Not on foot and not on horse, but in a carriage on wheels.” (Elena Bashkirova) The year 1816 ushered in a series of new beginnings for 19-year old Franz Schubert. He had applied for a music teaching job in Laibach (and soon would probably be overjoyed in secret that he was turned down, thus avoiding the task of school teaching, which he abhorred). He sent Goethe a notebook with songs of his pen, hoping, in vain, that he would be allowed to dedicate them to the “prince of poets”. He dreamt of his future wedding with the soprano Therese Grob. And he composed incessantly, including his three sonatas “for fortepiano and violin”, his first chamber music works for violin. Schubert probably intended these sonatas as music for domestic use: perhaps for Ferdinand, his favorite brother, who, one year thereafter, arranged them for orchestra with Schubert’s approval. Or perhaps they were destined for the convivial circle of friends who gathered on a regular basis to make music, read out loud to one another, and have lively discussions. Schubert also took up the violin himself at times: in his school days, he had been the leader of the orchestra at the Vienna Stadtkonvikt (Municipal Seminary), where he was a pupil. He thus may have played these sonatas himself on the violin. We do not know. The sonatas were only published in 1836,many years after Schubert’s death: publisher Anton Diabelli gave them the title “sonatinas”, and the name has stuck until today.

One can easily find a great number of outstanding chamber music works for string instruments; on the other hand, chamber music repertoire for woodwinds on a similar high level of composition is relatively sparse. By the 1800s, string instruments and the piano had achieved a high standard in terms of playing technique and construction; wind instruments, however, lagged somewhat behind. Woodwinds still sounded uneven across their registers and suffered from technical constraints, including limitations in terms of musical keys: all of this must have exerted a counterproductive influence on a generation of Romantic composers who wanted to expand music’s horizons in terms of dynamics and harmony. The Ma’alot Wind Quintet has teamed up on this album with pianist Markus Becker in works by Ludwig van Beethoven for piano and woodwinds, supplemented by several of Beethoven’s charming works for flute-playing clock, arranged by clarinetist Ulf-Guido Schäfer for woodwind quintet. The main raison-d’être for this choice of program lies in the fact that Beethoven himself composed an excellent large-scale original work for four woodwinds (oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) and piano – a work which, in terms of musical proportions and compositional ingenuity, rose far above the standard of what was otherwise being written for winds at the time when it was premiered (1796).That original composition is coupled on this album with another work by Beethoven for which we no longer have the original instrumentation, but which can be reconstructed, thanks to a series of circumstances, to a point of departure from which Ulf-Guido Schäfer has been able to arrange it as a chamber music Concerto for piano and wind quintet.

Arthur Schoonderwoerd and his Ensemble Cristofori are taking on Beethoven’s Symphonies but in a very different style. Tempo, accentuation, phrasing, or structural architecture are not the first thing that strikes us when we listen to Arthur Schoonderwoerd’s performances of Classical orchestra music for the first time. Instead, the first thing we notice is that the music sounds different. The orchestra is unusually small. Ensemble Cristofori plays as an orchestra- string quartet, double bass, and winds- and the effect is stunning. The orchestral sound is present, but each voice can be heard specifically as well. Arthur Schoonderwoerd is a well established pianist and powerful conductor, and is widely known as a consistent advocate for Early Music performance. He is also a powerful conductor of 21st century music.

“There are countless reasons for loving Bach’s music. Certain musicians and music-lovers are fascinated by its complexity, its flawless craftmanship. Others treasure it for its emotional, spiritual significance with total absence of sentimentality. Others, still, are seduced by Bach’s appealing mixture of transparency and warmth.. When I learn that a composer of Bach’s stature published his impressive collection of partitas under the modest title Clavierübung (“Exercise for Keyboard”), and when I read his statement that music’s only purpose should be “the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit”, I see that he was manifestly excluding his own person – a gesture that stands in stark contrast with my own generation’s chronic hubris and boundless egocentricity.” (Schaghajegh Nosrati)

Dina Ugorskaja writes: "J. S. Bach's Inventions - unfortunately still regarded as mere exercises - have fascinated me since my childhood thanks to their incredibly refined wealth of ideas, particularly when it comes to just two voices, where it is up to the player to discover how able you really have to be in order to master the task. And standing in contrast to this is one of the most challenging cycles in piano music, in both a musical and a technical sense - Chopin's Pr�ludes, with their rapid changes between different, and at times highly polarized, feelings and sentiments; a synthesis imbibed with disarming naturalness that makes it almost impossible for a performance to bring out the music itself and not the interpreter. The tension between the deceptive straightforwardness of Bach and the simplicity required by the complexity of Chopin, for me, makes this an exciting combination."

This new recording from the Linos Piano Trio presents four iconic works from the turn of the 20th Century. The three French works, transcribed for piano trio by the Linos players themselves, are recorded for the first time here, while the Verklärte Nacht arrangement harks back to the inception of the Linos Piano Trio in 2007.

Transcriptions have, since the start of the 19th Century, acted as a precursor to modern day recordings. Works for larger ensembles were transcribed for smaller groups to make music at home, and the piano trio was among the favourite combinations for this purpose, with its rich sonic possibilities apt at recreating the orchestral sound. This aspect of the genre has fascinated the Linos Piano Trio from the beginning, its first ever performance being of Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht in the arrangement by Eduard Steuermann. 

Since 2016, the Linos Piano Trio has been taking this idea further, creating a series of its own transcriptions with the aim of reimagining each work as if originally conceived for piano trio. The transcriptions are all created collaboratively, evolving through experimentation and refinement, seeking the most colourful distillation of the original versions. Inspired by Stravinsky’s notion of creative stealing—taking something and making it one’s own—the Linos Piano Trio calls the project Stolen Music.

The four ambitious transcriptions here share a common thread: all are imbued with poetic images of transformation. The Debussy, Dukas and Schönberg are compositions based on poems by Mallarmé, Goethe, and Dehmel. In Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Mallarmé’s sensually symbolist images are translated into elusive harmonies. In Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice the music ‘paints’ the famous broom-conjuring tale literally, almost line-by-line, with its iconic rhythm uncannily echoing Goethe’s relentless tetrameter. Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht depicts, in an intensely emotional late-romantic sweep, the transfiguration of Dehmel’s poem. Ravel’s La Valse, a “poème chorégraphique”, evokes the sense of decadence and nostalgia of old Vienna, plotting “the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz”, as observed by composer George Benjamin.