On this new production the Kölner Akademie has recorded two oratorios composed by members of the generation after Bach and explicitly focusing on the theme of the Resurrection. Johann Friedrich Agricola composed Die Auferstehung des Erlösers for performance in St. Peter’s Church in Berlin on the First Day of Easter in 1758, and Gottfried August Homilius wrote the Oratorium auf Ostern in 1767, when it was probably performed in the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. Agricola’s Easter cantata Der Gottmensch jauchzt is included with the two oratorios. Regarded during his lifetime as “certainly now absolutely the best church composer,” Homilius wrote an extensive cantata consisting of ten individual movements in the form of his oratorio for Easter. His music already displays elements of Early Classicism and the empfindsamer Stil, his cantata choruses are frequently of homophonic design and song character, and the polyphonic sections are rather rare. While the oratorio by Homilius continues to contain the historical component of the Easter event, Die Auferstehung des Erlösers by Agricola, with its subtitle Ein musikalisches Gedicht, is much more freely designed. The three accompagnato recitatives are of special musico-dramatic significance; in them the author of the text embellishes the earthquake accompanying the resurrection of Jesus and the mysterious event on the whole with rich verbal and pictorial formulations. The works presented here attest to the mastery of their composers. Arias of marvelous musical beauty, the naturalness of their expression, and the dramatic suspense in the individual movements continue to make for compelling listening even today.

Mikolaj Górecki, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, and Finnish composers such as Rautavaara and Sallinen have shown that contemporary music can be immediately appealing and emotionally moving, that tonality has not at all said everything. Milan Mihajlovic definitely has his place on this list of prominent contemporary composers, and it is high time for him to receive due recognition from us in the West. Born in Belgrade, he began teaching in the field of music theory in the music department at the University of Belgrade in 1975, holding positions ranging from assistant to full professor. In 1998 he also began teaching in the field of composition. He was able to bring about a very successful internal musical dialogue between the discourse of the “Polish school” and the classicizing style in 1983 in his Notturni for String Quartet and Wind Quintet, in which richly interrelated nocturnal sound pictures are boldly combined with hidden quotations. Mihajlovic executed this feat through the practical use of avant-garde and classical compositional techniques rooted in the vertical structures of the “Scriabin mode.” This musical concept for deriving the formal perfection of clear linear construction and skilled instrumentation from a personal expressive world characterizes all the works written by Mihajlovic since the mid-1980s. The thematic design is often reduced to little core elements – often over ostinato layers and pedal points – from which the motifs and lines of the musical world are created. The composer inspects his masterful compositional technique by “thematizing the thematic procedure,” – in other words: by producing his foundational materials on the basis of a small number of intervals. These core elements, which he employs in manifold and always original ways, are omnipresent in the flow of his music. So much for theory – this music is an absolute listening must!

Now at Last: Vox humana by Allan Pettersson. “Ever since I began my work as a producer with CPO, I’ve wanted to release Allan Pettersson’s cantata Vox humana from 1974 as part of our edition of his works. However, we could not find the right Swedish soloists and a Swedish choir for the job. Now we’ve finally found the ensembles we wanted and can release this magnificent work on CPO. Vocal works occupy a relatively modest place in Pettersson’s oeuvre; after the composition of the Barfotasånger from 1943 to 1945, almost thirty years passed before he again decided to write a work for the human voice. In 1973 / 74 he wrote his twelfth symphony based on texts from Pablo Neruda’s Canto general and immediately thereafter, in 1974, the three-part cantata Vox humana, which is also often termed a song cycle and likewise is based exclusively on South American texts. And as a bonus the album also contains Pettersson’s Six Early Songs for Middle Voice and Piano, here in a special arrangement by Staffan Storm for string orchestra and harp from 2016. A gala premiere event!”

Handel’s Almira with the BEMF. The Boston Early Music Festival has recorded George Frideric Handel’s very first opera, Almira, Queen of Castile, with a superlatively sumptuous ensemble. For its previous recordings of Baroque operas this successful ensemble has won prizes such as the Grammy, the German Record Critics Annual Prize, and the Echo Klassik. The Hungarian soprano Emoke Baráth sings the role of Almira with a choice ensemble of singers, all of whom have performed in the world’s most renowned concert halls and opera houses. Handel’s Almira is based on a freely invented plot featuring fine entertainment in the form of love and marriage schemes among the nobility, infidelity and mistaken identities, and a happy ending brought about by a court servant’s negotiations. This work was presented at the Hamburg Opera House in 1705 about twenty times and with great success. At the time Reinhard Keiser was the director of the Hamburg Opera, and he merits great praise for giving the young Handel, who then was earning his livelihood as a second tutti violinist in the orchestra pit, to compose and present an opera under his supervision. Handel’s Almira would as a work not be imaginable apart from the special circumstances prevailing at the Hamburg Opera: various styles and various languages are mixed, and it includes German and Italian arias, vocal dance numbers and da capo pieces, as well as instrumental ballet inserts of larger format. The result is indeed a colorful mixture, and the melodic signature so typical of Handel is already omnipresent and creates a fascinating unity – now heard with a top-quality ensemble!

Kreutzer’s Violin Concertos Vol. 2. Ten years after our release of the first album featuring violin concertos by Rodolphe Kreutzer, we are now releasing his Concertos Nos. 1, 6, and 7, again in interpretations by Laurent Albrecht Breuninger. Even today Kreutzer continues to be ranked with the great violin virtuosos of his time and along with Viotti, Rode, and Baillot is regarded as a central figure of the French violin school. As FonoForum wrote of Vol. 1 in 2011, Breuninger “does outstanding justice to the virtuosic demands. He adds brilliant polish to his solos, absolutely in a manner reminiscent of Paganini.” Kreutzer wrote his nineteen violin concertos during his active years as a virtuoso. After he had found it necessary to abandon his solo career in 1810, he did not compose a single other such work. Although the concertos adhere to the traditional three-movement design, they contain numerous innovative elements, formal surprises, motivic-thematic interdependencies, and genial ideas.

Arnold Krug, a contemporary of Brahms, is almost entirely forgotten today- unjustifiably so, as is amply proved by the two pieces of chamber music on this recording. He was a familiar figure in popular concert guides until well into the 1930s. In Wilhelm Altmann’s ‘Handbuch fur Streichquartettspieler (1929), for example, we read the following words on the String Sextet by this ‘subtle Hamburg composer’: “Though Krug’s Sextet by no means stands out with particular idiosyncrasy, it can hold its own with flying colors. In point of melody and sound the most successful movement is the deeply felt Adagio tranquillo, interrupted by an urgent and dramatic interlude in which yet another Tranquillo, almost doleful and certainly imploring, has been interpolated.” Successful, fresh, exhilarating- and for more than 40 years! Thus the adjectives heaped on the Linos Ensemble, over and over again. This is more than just the result of the ensemble’s busy schedule. It is also due to the common efforts they make to renew their interpretations, and their unwavering pleasure in newly discovered scores.

The penultimate volume of our edition featuring organ works of the Northern German Baroque focuses on the complete organ works of Jakob Praetorius the Younger and Paul Siefert. Hieronymus Praetorius, the organist at the Church of St. James in Hamburg, is regarded as the most important founding figure in the field of independent Northern German organ artistry. Three of his four songs, Jakob, Johann, and MIchael who already in 1604 had contributed a quarter of the eighty-four cantional settings to the renowned Hamburger Melodeyen Gesangbuch, is said to have developed a special form of fingering and pedal technique making it possible for the organist to assume a very relaxed sitting position and corresponding to his serious, sober, personal disposition. According to the music critic Johann Mattheson, Praetorius's works were "mroe serious" and "more forcefully elaborated" than those of his friend Scheidemann.

Our album presents a selection of five works from the extensive, largely unexplored Easter Cantata oeuvre created by Georg Philipp Telemann during the course of his sixty years in Eisenach (1708-12), Frankfurt am Main (1712-21), and Hamburg (1721-67). Four of the works recorded here date from the 1720s and take us back to the years in Telemann’s creative life as a composer when he was the new music director of Hamburg’s five principal churches and was reorganizing the city’s church music and modernizing it in musical respects. The two cantatas from the “Annual Cycle without Recitatives” refrain from use of larger ensembles with brass and woodwind instruments and concertizing instrumental voices; the focus is on the arias and quotations from the Bible, and of these it is above all the opening dictum that is very extensive and often elaborated with rich counterpoint. On the whole, the annual cycle has an intimate, subdued character. Its music does not score points with tonal effects; instead, it generates appeal with refinements in the musical setting of the texts. The cantatas of the “Second Lingen Annual Cycle” are characterized by a fixed sequence of movement forms. The initial sinfonia is followed by an accompagnato recitative, and this weighty exordium is succeeded by two duets in alternation with chorale strophes. The duets are da capo arias and designed in such a way that one voice sings the A part, while the other voice sings the B part.

REVIEW:

Telemann has an almost inexhaustible facility for good melodies, piquant harmony, and a colorful yet discrete orchestration. To pull this off requires considerable focus and attention by the performers, and here Michael Willens knows his stuff. The tempos are all carefully chosen, the phrasing precise, and the sound clear. Soprano Johanna Winkel, who doesn’t have a great deal to do, has a clear and rather lyrical voice, while alto Margot Oitzinger is richer but not too dark in terms of tone. The real vocal work is done by Georg Poplutz, no stranger to this style of music or the composer, but the hero seems to be bass Peter Kooij, whose rich tone and vocal dexterity are evident from the start. In short, these are terrific works, varied and yet copacetic with each other, and the excellent performance of the Kölner Akademie produces a disc that should win kudos, even from jaded Telemann enthusiasts.

-- Fanfare

Johann Matthias Sperger, the standout double bassist among the leading forces of the Viennese School in Germany, honored his instrument with greater virtuosity and more compositional versatility than any other composer. This fact is documented by his eighteen double bass concertos, all of which have come down to us in the autographic scores and in some cases in the parts and are available for consultation in the Schwerin Library. On Vol. 2, which features Concertos Nos. 1 and 8, Sperger once again gives the double bass the solo space it needs to display its song qualities, often with extremely striking and exceptional themes. And as already on Vol. 1, our soloist Roman Patkoló “does complete justice to what are sometimes the breakneck demands of the concertos” (klassik-heute. com of Vol. 1). The album also includes Sperger’s Symphony No. 15, a work that has a tonal language very close to that of Haydn – and that here is being performed and recorded on album for the first time, 239 years after its composition.

Our second album with music for strings by British composers features most highly creative compositions by Sir Granville Bantock and Christopher Wilson. When Bantock reached the pinnacle of his fame, the Three Choirs Festival held in Hereford in 1912 ordered a work for string orchestra from him. The result was the four-movement Serenade for Strings, to which he assigned the subtitle “In the Far West.” Bantock’s string movements are distinguished by an impressive tonal richness. After the performance Douglas Bostock remarked: “I am truly amazed – this is anything but a ‘Serenade,’ as the innocuous title suggests. The succinct, symphonically developed music is nothing other than a string symphony with a demanding writing style representing a genuine tour de force.” Moreover, extensive recorded material documents the Scottish melodies used by Bantock in his Scenes from the Scottish Highlands. For them he chose the finely managed format of three fast dances separated by two euphonious slow movements. The six short movements in traditional or dance style forming Christopher Wilson’s Suite for String Orchestra made it something new and fresh when it was premiered in 1901, and it came over very well. It is thought that one of the composer’s goals was to connect with the tradition of Johann Sebastian Bach.

•Dorothee Mields is one of the leading female vocalists in the field of the music of the 17th – 18th centuries and is especially loved by the public and press for her unique timbre and moving interpretations. Possessing in addition a flawless technique and an ethereal vocal clarity, makes her a fortunate choice for the interpretation of Haydn's Scottish songs and English canzonettas. The ensemble Les Amis de Philippe assists her with great sensitivity.

Jacques Hotteterre’s suites form the focus of the last volume in our complete edition of his chamber music. The Italian idiom, Hotteterre’s affinity for Italy and its music, distinguish the structure of his works, and this proximity to the goût italien can also be heard in the four Suites op. 5. Hotteterre modified the French suite type consisting of many pieces in the same key and replaced it with a model practically verging on the sonata form. L’art de préluder, a course offering instruction in the so very important capabilities necessary for improvisation, is another highly interesting work by Hotteterre. Here the composer writes short preludes that could be used to introduce suite cycles in the corresponding keys and were supposed to school and inspire the musician’s own gifts of invention. In his pieces from the valuable volume entitled Airs Ornez d’Agremens Hotteterre arranges familiar melodies of French provenance for two or three flutes and writes Doubles for flute solo. These greatly embellished variations are unrivaled in their marvelous display of the ornamental improvisational style of French flute artistry.

Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) was a German musician, teacher, music theorist, diplomat and composer who lived his life in Hamburg. He composed mainly vocal and some instrumental works. Johann Mattheson was a contemporary and personally knew composers George Frideric Handel, Christoph Graupner and Reinhard Keiser.

Almost all of Mattheson's music vanished during World War II and was presumed lost, however missing scores and copies were discovered in 1998 in Yerevan, Armenia and were returned to the city of Hamburg. The rediscovered scores included four operas and most of the oratorios. The manuscripts are now located at the Staats und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, the former Hamburg Stadtbibliothek.

Andreas Romberg explored new musical territory when he got the idea to include Turkish color in his fourth symphony. It was not until the romantic era that Oriental or Arabian color very deliberately was incorporated into symphonic music, whether in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888) or in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Maurische Rhapsodie (1898). Right in the first movement of his symphony Romberg used the title “A la turca” to get his audience to anticipate Turkish color. The gradually intensified initial part goes over into a passage with the expected percussion accents and swiftly whirling violin figures. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto in A major, the last of his five violin concertos, is also regarded as a concert piece with Turkish color. In the rondo finale there is a famous interlude in A minor in which the violoncellists and double bassists beat the rhythm on the strings with their bow sticks. This too produces the popular “Alla turca” flair. Our soloist is the young Swiss musician Julia Schroder, and it is not least in the swift main part of the Haydn overture that things sound “Turkish”; here not only the timpani but also the bass drum and cymbals accentuate the rhythm. This album also marks the inauguration of our complete recording of the symphonic music of Andreas Romberg.

CPO's previous release with the soloists and ensembles of the Boston Early Music Festival was awarded two prestigious prizes. The recording of Charpentier’s opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs received the Grammy Award for the Best Opera Production in February 2015 and recently won the Klassik-Echo 2015, again for the Best Opera Recording of the Year. Prior to this double success, other productions by cpo and BEMF had been nominated for Gramophone Awards. In the category of the Best Opera Production these were Ariadne by Johann Georg Conradi and Thésée and Psyché by Jean-Baptiste Lully. In addition, Thésée and Psyché received nominations in the category honoring Baroque Vocal Works.

Now the American ensemble joins forces with successful soloists like Aaron Sheehan and Teresa Wakim for our production of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea in the version of 1718, which was composed for the landed estate of the Earl of Carnarvon and does not recycle music from the earlier version. Both Acis and Galatea and the cantata Sarei troppo felice heard here represent decisive turning points in Handel’s career. The Italian cantata came at the beginning of the one and half decades spent by Handel in the service of patrons. Acis and Galatea marks the highpoint of this phase and therefore, like the cantata before it, clearly renders recognizable the musical means available to him in the private ensembles of his employers. Moreover, Acis and Galatea contains the musical and textual seeds of the English oratorio, which after 1742 completely supplanted opera compositions.

Francois-Joseph Gossec was doubtless one of the most prominent French composers of the eighteenth century and wrote works representing almost all the musical forms and genres. Our recording of his symphonic music has just been awarded an Opus Klassik 2020, and now we would like to share some of his magnificent vocal works with you – since his oratorios and truly amazing Messe des Morts also made him a trailblazing figure. La Nativite to a text by Gossec’s contemporary Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon is his most famous oratorio. It was premiered on Christmas Eve in 1774 and went on to be performed no fewer than nine times in the Concert Spirituel. The impact was immediate, and critics vied with each other to formulate poetic descriptions of the orchestral effects and the impressive parts sung by the Shepherdess, the Shepherd, and the Choirs of the Angels and the Shepherds. This is moving music!

The focus of our further cooperative effort with the Cappella Aquileia and Marcus Bosch – for the Beethoven Year and with “Beethoven and the Theater” as its theme – is formed by a complete recording of this composer’s stage music for Konig Stephan (King Stephen). Archduke Franz Josef Karl of Austria had a new theater built for the city of Pest as a reward for the loyalty of the Hungarians to the Austrian monarchy. As was fitting for the occasion, Beethoven was given the commission for music commemorating the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary by King Stephen I, and the music was premiered in the new edifice in 1812. The text for Konig Stephan was penned by August von Kotzebue and surely would have been forgotten long ago if not for Beethoven’s music. The pathos and hero worship in its verses are not so easily grasped today, but this should not stand in the way of the work’s performance. Understood as a historical memorial, Konig Stephan, in particular in the meticulous modernization of the text produced by Kai Weßler for this recording, is a rewarding work. Three versions each of the Leonore Overture and the Fidelio Overture round off the album.

Andreas Romberg is now more than an insider’s tip; he is a recognized composer situated on the interface between Classicism and Romanticism. Romberg was regarded as a celebrated violin virtuoso, concertmaster, and composer, and his stays in Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Italy spread his fame internationally. He met Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, and many other musical personalities of his times. A great deal of his oeuvre covering all sorts of different genres was forgotten, but this is slowly changing, primarily owing to the “Arbeitsstelle Andreas Romberg” at the University of Vechta, a research center that since 1993 has engaged in the systematic investigation of this composer’s works. Of his ten symphonies, only six are extant, and only four of them were printed during his lifetime. However, his symphonies were extremely popular when they were written. In 1817 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung praised “what Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Romberg have accomplished so far in this genre of musical works.” With these words the author numbered Romberg among the absolute “masters” in this field. For quite some time the performance figures for Romberg’s symphonies ranked second only to those for works by the Viennese Classicists. Now here it is: Vol. 1 with his Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3!

Michel-Richard Delalande is regarded as one of the great composers of the French Baroque, and so it is not surprising that our prizewinning Boston Early Music Ensemble has now turned to him. Along with his many sacred works, Delalande also wrote for the court occasions that required secular music. Les Fontaines de Versailles, the work occupying a central position on this release, above all contributed to Delalande’s increasing popularity. It was performed on 5 April 1683, some weeks before Delalande was appointed to the coveted post of “Sous-maître de Chapelle.” After the court had settled in Versailles with King Louis XIV in 1682, its musical microcosm also experienced a renewal. Les Fontaines de Versailles numbered among Delalande’s efforts to produce an oeuvre perfectly tailored for Versailles, both in its form as well as in its poetic content, thereby demonstrating his skill as a composer of »French music« and displaying it in a proper light for the king. It is with refined sophistication that Les Fontaines de Versailles evokes the special relationship between the king and his gardens. Delalande beyond doubt occupied the first place among Louis XIV’s favorites: in 1689 the king named the thirty-one-year-old his “Surintendant de la Musique de la Chambre,” a post that before only Jean-Baptiste Lully and then one of his sons had held.

Classical Music

Aram Khachaturian conquered the world with the boundless delight he took in composing. His Sabre Dance found its place in advertising, his Adagio from the ballet Spartacus accompanied a cult series, and prominent ice skating pairs danced their way into the hearts of their spectators to the Waltz from his stage music to Lermontov’s Masquerade. On the other side, his symphonic music and concertante works even today continue to attract the greatest conductors and soloists. A unique, often imitated, but never reproduced synthesis consisting of fascinating instrumental virtuosity, exotic melodies, highly imaginative harmonies, and irresistible rhythmic spirit distinguishes the three concertos and three concert rhapsodies written by Aram Khachaturian during 1936-46 and 1961-67, and this double trilogy begins its cpo journey with the earliest and latest of these works. The Armenian pianist Stepan Simonian, who resides in Hamburg, the Russian conductor Daniel Raiskin, and the Rhine State Philharmonic, which Aram Khachaturian himself accompanied a good forty-five years ago during his visit to Germany, get things going on this quasi-authentic recording of these two concertante works for piano and orchestra timelessly reflecting each other like a mirror in a mirror.

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REVIEW:

You can hear the really extraordinary pianistic qualities of the soloist in the piano concerto recording.

– Klassik Heute

Zebeljan: The Horses of Saint Mark

“Venzago amazes us with his idiosyncratic and wholly novel performances of Bruckner. The sound of his Bruckner is thrillingly lean...His intelligent conducting focuses our attention on the chamber-music aspect of Bruckner's music.” –Pizzicato. In this Vol.2, Venzago devotes himself to the beginnings of Bruckner's symphonic output, the so-called “No. 0” and the 1st.

Following the release of two of Friedrich Gernsheim’s symphonies, cpo presents two piano quintets by this composer whose life was very much of European stamp. His first Piano Quintet quite audibly moves along paths marked out by Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, composed twelve years before. The second Piano Quintet, composed in the year of Brahms’s death, is precisely in the key of B minor and 6/8 time for the first movement – just as in Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet – certainly to be understood as paying Brahms tribute. The Bohemian theme heard in the Scherzo of op. 63 honored the works’ dedicatees.

In 1677 Johann Schelle became the music director at the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, succeeding his teacher Sebastian Knüpfer and preceding Johann Kuhnau in this post. His own pupils included important composers like Johann Christoph Graupner, Johann David Heinichen, Reinhard Keiser, Johann Theodor Roemhildt and Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow. Schelle is known to have produced more than 180 compositions, of which unfortunately only 48 have survived. His importance lies mainly in his chorale cantatas and in the combination of Biblical texts and freely written sacred poetry he employed in his more advanced sacred concertos- an early form of what would later become the Lutheran church cantata. The present release gathers together Schelle’s known compositions for Advent and Christmas. In doing so it also sheds light on the musical role of the St. Thomas Choir in Leipzig’s musical culture during the final third of the 17th century.