For the first time; this edition makes available Herbert von Karajan's previously unpublished early live recordings from the Lucerne Music Festival - made in a decade in which Karajan was rebuilding his career. Included are legendary soloists such as Clara Haskil and Géza Anda; Robert Casadesus and Nathan Milstein. The Lucerne International Music Festival (today's Lucerne Festival) was the first organiser outside Austria to engage Herbert von Karajan after his ban from performing and denazification proceedings; thus enabling him to return to the international podiums. "I will never forget that," Karajan later confessed. For almost four decades; from 1948 to 1988; he was to make his mark on Lucerne Festival. His annual guest appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic (from 1958) enjoyed cult status. But already in the decade before; which this edition documents; Karajan thrilled audiences and critics alike in Lucerne and quickly rose to become the defining artistic personality alongside Wilhelm Furtwängler: with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; but above all on the podium of the Swiss Festival Orchestra; which he held in high esteem and which he conducted in a total of nine concerts.

The preserved Lucerne live recordings range from Bach's C major Concerto for Two Keyboard Instruments BWV 1061 (with Clara Haskil and Géza Anda) to Arthur Honegger's Symphonie liturgique. The exciting; rhythmically tightly formed interpretations show Karajan to be an extremely form-conscious; textually faithful conductor of great expressive power. He spurs his orchestras on to top performances; but also acts as a sensitive and at the same time extremely present accompanist - for example in Brahms' Violin Concerto with Nathan Milstein or in Mozart's dramatically pointed C minor Concerto K. 491 with Robert Casadesus. As a digital bonus; the edition includes Bach's Mass in B minor; which Karajan celebrated at the end of the 1951 festival with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; the Vienna Singverein and a top-class quartet of soloists (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; Elsa Cavelti; Ernst Haefliger and Hans Braun): a stylistically distant; but nevertheless fascinating audio document due to Karajan's very personal approach. The sound of the live recordings on the 3-CD box set has been carefully restored. The 62-page; trilingual booklet contains essays by Wolfgang Rathert and Erich Singer on Karajan's new career start in the post-war years and on his special relationship with Lucerne Festival. It contains numerous previously unpublished photos.

REVIEW:

Included among the contents of this set are quite a few gems. Most unexpected but welcome is Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Nathan Milstein. Karajan and his Swiss Festival Orchestra are fully ablaze, Milstein’s tone typically lean and sinewy. Overall, this is an intriguing batch of musically worthwhile live Karajan discoveries, very well transferred from clean analogue sources.

— Gramophone

The popular album"Horn Concertos" by Felix Klieser is being released as a 180g Vinyl Reissue. The talented and unique horn player masters the technically demanding Horn Concertos by Joseph Haydn and his lesser known brother Michael Haydn. He is accomapnied by the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn under the baton of Ruben Gazarian. Together, they display these innovative compositions and their masterful orchestration with brilliance and unrivaled brilliance. The reconstructed 'Horn Concerto No. 0' by W. A. Mozart offers glimpses into the maestro's early Viennese years.

This recording is a reflection of several performances that took place over time and in varying acoustic environments, including collaborations with contemporary and aerial/vertical dance.

The Cage works tend to be binary in form, and while meditatively free flowing in spirit, the architecture is clean and easily understood. The Bach works—four movements that make up a sonata—offer a multitude of interpretive options, including an approach that wanders through the harmonic labyrinth without regard to pulse and traditional notions of time, magnifying minute rhetorical statements along the way. It can be such that the Bach works represent the dreamscape while the atonal prepared piano pieces of Cage represent structure. This might be in opposition to many listeners’ expectations.

These five works – four sonatas and a sonatina – chronicle a century of American writing for the viola and are linked by a concern for directness of musical language. But they also reflect diversity in their origins and inspirations, the Ulysses Kay pieces being written by a pioneering African American, Libby Larsen’s by a successful female freelance composer, Eric Ewazen’s animated by a particularly American lyricism and energy, and the sonata by David Tcimpidis commemorating the ‘9/11’ terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which Tcimpidis heard unfolding.

This album already carries the intention in its title: "A Tribute to Bach" is meant to be a deep bow by the world-renowned recorder player Maurice Steger to the great master of the music world; Johann Sebastian Bach. For his Bach project; Maurice Steger has chosen six compositions that follow six different musical genres and placed the recorder at the forefront of solo instrumentation. In doing so; he places himself in the tradition of Bach himself; who has been proven to have repeatedly undertaken new instrumentations for his works in the course of his life. The result in terms of sound is fascinating: Bach becomes a convincing recorder player through Maurice Steger's interpretation.

The German radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the German Music Council, and GENUIN once again jointly present the debut CD of a promising young musician: organist Aurel Dawidiuk is the winner of the 2022 German Music Competition in the organ category. His stellar career, however, goes far beyond that, as Dawidiuk is also celebrating his first international successes as a pianist and conductor. Exploring the theme of B-A-C-H in his organ debut, the major organ works assembled here span three centuries and include music by Johann Sebastian Bach himself, Johann Krebs, Franz Liszt, Zsigmond Szathmáry, and Max Reger – a rich diversity of music covering a wide range of styles!

The fifth volume of Masaaki Suzuki’s series of Bach’s works for organ features one of the most important surviving instruments from Bach’s time, made by the German organ builder Christoph Treutmann the Elder. Widely known for its extraordinary tonal quality, the instrument was built between 1734 and 1737. A recent general restoration preserved all essential structural elements or renewed them while remaining faithful to the originals, making this an ideal instrument for Bach interpreters who wish to come close to the sound world of the Leipzig Thomaskantor.

Suzuki now takes up the Orgel-Büchlein (literally, “little organ book”), a collection of 45 short chorale preludes on melodies from the Lutheran hymn book, a project that came into being in connection with Bach’s appointment as organist and chamber musician at the Duke’s court in Weimar in 1708. Presenting chorales for different periods of the church year, this collection serves as a general guide to text-based composition focusing on word- sound relationships and content-specific musical expression. Three Preludes and Fugues complete the second volume dedicated to the Orgel-Büchlein, illustrating the principle of variety and structure historically practised by concert organists in order to demonstrate the tone colours and expressive possibilities of their instrument.

Founded in 1841 under the participation of Constanze Mozart, the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg today enjoys the highest reputation worldwide for its lively and style-conscious Mozart interpretations. In numerous ways, it connects the Viennese Classical period to the music of the 19th/20th and 21st centuries. The orchestra's constant preoccupation with his core repertoire also shapes its approach to the music of later periods. In this recording, the Mozarteumorchester brings chamber-musical transparency, articulatory clarity, and nuanced sonority to the highly romantic music by the late Richard Strauss. The selected repertoire on this Album highlights the individual sections of the orchestra.

While Clementi’s sparkling music has been recorded by many celebrated pianists such as Arturo Benedetti MIchelangeli, few of them have paid much attention to the composer’s first published collection. This new recording by Carlo Alberto Bacchi is all the more welcome for being informed by his study of the composer’s complete oeuvre as part of the ‘Clementi Project’ which sees him performing many of the sonatas in concert as well as recording them for Piano Classics.

The inscription on Clementi’s tomb in Westminster Abbey commemorates him as ‘the father of the piano’. Clementi above all was responsible for devising a modern technique, of the kind still recognisable today, which would serve pianists on the larger instruments being manufactured in the early years of the 19th century. This technique is differentiated from harpsichord technique, and trained not just through lessons but through pianistic ‘methods’ and publications such as these sets of sonatas, which are arranged in order of progressive difficulty in order to introduced students to technical challenges step by step. Like Mozart, Clementi also manifested his musical talents at a very early age: at the age of 7, he was already studying organ, singing and counterpoint; he wrote a mass at the age of 11 and an oratorio at the age of 12.

The English nobleman and eccentric Sir Peter Beckford effectively bought the young Clementi on a seven-year contract and kept him at his West Country pile. When the contract with Beckford expired in 1774, Clementi moved to London and took off on a career that brought him fame across Europe – as a touring virtuoso, a teacher, publisher – and even sometimes composer. The six Op.1 sonatas were published in 1771, during Clementi’s period in service to Beckford. Although he was not yet 20 and almost completely self-taught, they show his mastery of material and his irrepressible invention. All the sonatas have a simple, playful and light-hearted character, and a two-movement form. The five Sonatas of Opus 1a, on the other hand, date from a decade later, even after the Op.6 Sonatas. They were published in Paris around 1781, and here we sense the stirrings of Clementi as ‘father of the piano’ in the cascades and doublings and expanded imagination.

A superb, collector’s-item vinyl transfer for a recent and widely acclaimed recording of Bach’s nocturnal meditations. When Piano Classics released this recording of the Goldberg Variations on CD in 2022, critics praised its natural phrasing and unobtrusively skilful and sensitive response to the technical demands made by Bach in his most virtuosic piece of keyboard writing.

According to Fanfare magazine, the playing of Klára Würtz ‘has limpid clarity, and rhythmic firmness and exactitude; her articulation is clean and nimble (she has a cleaner trill than Perahia), and her voicing of different lines is splendidly balanced. Her rapid playing is vigorous, her slower playing has calm repose. Her interpretive outlook has spirit and vivacity, but also a total sense of confidence and security, the kind of integrity that needs no ostentatious display to make its mark of absolute rightness... Perahia now has a pianistic rival on my shelf; strongly recommended.’ Reviewers elsewhere were hardly less enthusiastic. ‘Cards on the table, what Würtz’s Goldbergs offer is calm appreciation of the music’s manifold beauties,’ according to Rob Cowan in Gramophone. ‘Her pianism sidesteps overt display or affectedness in favour of purely musical values... This for me is truly great piano playing, a direct route to the soul with no tiresome diversions along the way.’ Vinyl collectors can now enjoy this superb recording in a new transfer made for analogue at the Edel factory in Hamburg, which specialises in collector’s print LP editions such as this one.

The heavy-grade vinyl has exemplary quiet surfaces, and the Dutch church acoustics of the original recording gain a rounded, luminous quality which ideally complements Klára Würtz’s pianism. The set is issued as a 2LP gatefold with booklet notes on the inner sleeve.

Previously unreleased broadcast recordings capture Thomas Jensen in Baroque and Classical-era repertoire new to his discography. Jensen makes a stylish Mozartian in these rhythmically sprung and cultivated concert performances, given by the DRSO in Copenhagen and on tour. They are joined by the Danish violinist Tutter Givskov for one of Mozart’s earliest masterpieces, the Violin Concerto No. 3 K216.