Leopold van der Pals wrote a total of three works in which he dealt with the concerto genre. His early music, including his Concert Piece op. 10, was composed in an unmistakably Romantic style, but even then van der Pals challenged harmonic structures and endeavored to submit them to further development. By contrast, his Piano Concerto op. 100 and the Concertino of 1937-38 from his later years attest to a composer who in the meantime had experienced enormous development. Broad Romantic gestures are no longer found in his music, which had become more concentrated with respect to thematic work, formal development, and performance length in individual compositions. The alternation between various musical characters as well as the various means employed in developmental work have expanded. Study of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy led van der Pals to Goethe's idea of metamorphosis, which he then increasingly endeavored to incorporate into his music as a structural basis. The idea that an entire artistic complex can develop from a single seed became an increasingly important factor in his work process and led to entirely new approaches that continued to stamp his creative production through to his late oeuvre. In his late suite on the dramatic poem Monk Wanderer op. 84 the celestial spheres represent association with the physical world, freedom of the spirit, love, light, courage and strength, wisdom, and profound knowledge of the mystery.

Following the great successes of his recently released Czerny albums, Kolja Lessing now dedicates himself to a most highly interesting new project in his capacity as a pianist. He interprets piano music by modern Israeli composers such as Joachim Stutschewsky, Sergiu Natra, Mordecai Seter, and Tzvi Avni. The last-mentioned composer has repeatedly turned to the piano, and his rich oeuvre for this instrument reflects all the changes that he has lived through as well as the diverse personal, artistic, and political experience that he has gathered during the course of his compositional career, which now spans seven decades. Against this background the two piano compositions by Avni from the most recent years, the In Spite of All That: Sonata brevis (2014) and the Dedication composed in 2016 for the hundredth anniversary of the birth of his teacher Mordecai Seter, assume the character of autobiographical statements. Reflection on the thousands of years of the Jewish song tradition and the effort to develop a national identity marked the genesis of music in the new state of Israel, which achieved its independence in 1948, having formerly been the British mandated territory of Palestine. The development of an Israeli music world in the sense of European institutionalization was first made possible by exile and the unbroken pioneering spirit of many outstanding musical personalities in the 1930s. No other land of exile encouraged occupation with Jewish traditions like Palestine / Israel from the 1930s to 1950s; independently of individual positions regarding religion and Zionism, here the question concerning Israeli identity – concerning the creation of a new Israeli music on the basis of many different influences and primarily those emanating from Eastern European Jews – was explored.

Martin Luther’s self-description as an “insignificant and ungifted tenor” was modest to the extreme. Schooled in the artes liberales of his time, he had a command of music theory and composition, was a skilled lutenist, and had such a gifted voice that Hans Sachs termed him the “Wittenberg Nightingale.” Whether at table or in the liturgy, music belonged to his life and his faith. As so we are now setting out on a musical journey with top soloists, the Bach Choir of Siegen, and the Johann Rosenmüller Ensemble, all under the renowned music director Ulrich Stötzel, on this CPO release for the Luther Year 2017 featuring works by his friends and by composers active in his environment, with him, or shortly after his life: Werner Fabricius, Hans Neusiedler, Thomas Stoltzer, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Eccard, Michael Praetorius, Johann Sebastian Bach, and others. The four-part cantus firmus motet based on Psalm 118: 17 is even by Luther himself.

For more than two thousand years the birth of Christ, the incarnation of God as a child in the manger at Bethlehem, has fascinated and inspired artistic production and reflection. It is precisely in the field of music that thousands of songs and multipart compositions have come down to us attesting to the richness of this body of works and documenting the diversity of artistic expression. Most of these works were composed for liturgical use in the Christian churches. It is a rewarding experience to sift through the repertoire and to edit and record previously unknown works. This year our Christmas album presents recording premieres of five cantatas: one each by Bach's contemporaries Christoph Förster (1693-1745) and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749) and three by members of the following generation, one by Gottfried August Homilius (1714-85) and two by Johann Heinrich Rolle (1716-85). All the cantatas were composed for use in Lutheran religious services and are based on a similar plan of construction: an extensive opening chorus is followed by recitatives and arias, and a chorale strophe from a church hymn concludes the work. The opening choruses are usually based on short quotations from the Bible, and the festive splendor of the trumpets and timpani forms the dominant tonal element.

During the summer of 1883 Richard Strauss composed two large-format orchestral works in traditional genres, the lengthy Concert Overture in C minor and the Symphony in F minor op. 12, both of them also with the same instruments. The overture is anything but a secondary effort; it also cannot be understood as a simple »work of his youth.« Although the key and the opening stance of the overture clearly point to Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture, the subliminal irritations, frictions, surprises, and saliencies already present here become even much more apparent in the symphony. As in the overture, so too in the symphony: the composer abstains from any sort of allusions to content, and – even more strikingly – he does not include a dedication, even though the work was immediately published. And the finale pursues an unusual course, not with a breakthrough but over a festive path leading to a hymnic theme followed by an absolutely wild conclusion. Following our release of early chamber music by Richard Strauss, we are now presenting two more significant early works by him!

Our first collaborative venture with the Constanze Quartet from Salzburg also marks the production of the first complete recording of the string quartets of Felix Draeseke – a German composer, a representative of the new German school, and a contemporary of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms. Draeseke’s string quartets are unique in style. In them we often encounter influence from Wagner, even if not in the form of an imitation of Wagnerian compositional style but as a creative continuation of the legacy of Classical composers such as they were transmitted to Draeseke through Wagner. The idea of a “melodic thread” holding the music together while serving as a unifying element is in evidence everywhere in these works. Both quartets impressively demonstrate the words of the Draeseke expert Christoph Schlüren: “Draeseke is primarily lyrical in nature but at the same time has his appealing harshness and explores the dark, introverted expressive worlds with a unique imagination. The far-reaching melos is tailored for contrapuntal suitability, and for German circumstances the rhythm is particularly zestful and highly varied. Stylistically, relations quite obviously exist not only between Draeseke and Beethoven but also between Draeseke and Mendelssohn inasmuch as Draeseke’s highly colorful harmonic language, in part pervaded by surprising modulations, is an individual continuation and development of the New German “progressive” stance proceeding from Wagner and Liszt. Draeseke’s outstanding stature as a string quartet composer rests above all on his entirely original architectonic mastery in a genre in which Beethoven and Schubert created unsurpassable music, but where Draeseke, together with Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the late Dvorák, proceeding from the experiences of Schumann and Mendelssohn, produced decidedly new music.”

This album marks the recording premiere of four cantatas by Gottfried August Homilius for Advent and Christmas. Homilius was the number-one composer of Protestant church music during the second half of the eighteenth century and during his lifetime was regarded as »perhaps today’s very best church composer. “After his death the lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber expressed the view that he was »without contradiction our greatest church composer.” Homilius’ music already displays elements of early Classicism and the sensibility of the empfindsamer Stil, his cantata choruses are frequently homophonic and songlike in design, and polyphonic sections are rather rare. His cantatas composed around 1776 prove to be works of individual design and conception and attest to his mastery as a composer. Arias of great tonal beauty, the naturalness of their expression, and the dramatic suspense of the numbers continue to fascinate listening audiences even today!

In the 1960s Aram Khachaturian engaged in a number of experiments in which he covered terrain situated at an astonishing distance from the immediately appealing tone of the works that he had composed prior to those years. These experiments included the first of his three concert rhapsodies, in which he completely emancipated himself from the established forms that he had filled out in his concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, which already then were world famous. While the virtuosic ambitions of the rhapsodies are in no way inferior to the technical demands of their older sister works, he now requires what is perhaps an even higher measure of expressive shared experiencing and solo messaging. The direct juxtaposition of the two concert violin compositions recorded by Antje Weithaas and Daniel Raiskin and the Rhineland-Palatinate State Symphony Orchestra conveys the extraordinarily grand leap into a “modernism” that hardly anybody would have thought possible for the author of the Sabre Dance. In 1971 Aram Khachaturian was honored for his rhapsodic risk-taking when he received the State Prize of the Soviet Union for his second concert trilogy.

The Beethoven pupil Ferdinand Ries always holds surprises in store for listeners. Whether considering his symphonic music, chamber works, or vocal oeuvre (a broad selection available on CPO), his vibrant powers of invention, formal mastery and genial talent when it came to multiple paving of his own unique paths for the musical language of his times never fails to enthuse. The concert overture probably took shape in response to specific demands arising from the development of the concert as a public event. Ries’ rousing works of this genre are now rendered audible for vinyl fans!

The present trio sonatas for transverse flute, violin and basso continuo by Christoph Georg Wagenseil, who was one of the most famous Viennese composers of his time, are all conceived in three movements according to the usual sonata scheme of fast - slow - fast, but they are by no means musical "mass-produced goods", since the music of the 17th and 18th centuries was, without exception, committed to the musical imitation of the so-called "affects", whereby this term was understood to mean any human emotion. This imitation of affect was considered the highest goal of composition in those days. As means for this imitation, the composer had all the parameters of composition at his disposal, such as style, genre or form, key, melody, rhythm, tempo, meter, harmony, dynamics, articulation and instrumentation, whereby he should always choose such means and their combinations that best corresponded to the intended affect. The Ensemble Klingekunst interprets these trio sonata jewels - all first recordings, by the way - expressively and passionately.

Michael Haydn did not achieve the same exorbitant quantity of instrumental music as his older brother, since he had to compose a large amount of sacred music because of his position; but the surviving symphonies and chamber music in particular are not lacking in novel and "original" character traits. This becomes clear, for example, in the six string quartets recorded here, which he wrote sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. Here, personable elegance and subtle humour are combined with a quiet touch of tragic drama to create a very unique candour that reveals a world view that is as moving as it is entertaining, somewhere between the masterpieces of his brother Joseph and Amadeus, who was around twenty years younger.

Friedhelm Flamme plays an extraordinary role in the organ catalogue of our record label. His discography, which ranges from the Baroque era to the 20th century, is a gift to organ connoisseurs and aficionados alike. Not only has he recorded a multitude of works of unknown composers, but has opened an impressive "organ museum" of more than two dozen productions on historical instruments that are seldom heard on record. This is the final release of our complete recordings of BUXTEHUDE's work. Here the German-Danish musician shows his compositional skills in an area that is justly called the ultimate discipline of Baroque keyboard players - the connection between prelude and fugue, which culminated in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of the Baroque era. It is well known that he made a pilgrimage to Lubeck in his younger years to attentively listen to the organist of St. Mary's Church there.

Opus Klassik prizewinner Tatjana Ruhland has been described as “the Paganini of the flute,” and in December 2018 the Tagesspiegel, commenting on her interpretation of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune with the Berlin Philharmonic, termed her »a fabulous faun« and declared: “Already the first measures justify the jubilation at the end.” Now she once again is heard as an interpreter on cpo, this time with more flute concertos by August Eberhard Müller. The critics showered her with praise for Vol. 1, for her rendering of the concertos with »inexhaustible musicality« (klassik-heute.com). The three new Flute Concertos Nos. 5, 7, and 8 show once again that the composer, who dedicated himself to this genre or instrumentation throughout his life, was a great admirer of Mozart. As in the case of almost all his concerto compositions, Müller himself was the soloist in these three works, which enjoyed great popularity and soon numbered among the repertoire pieces for traveling flute virtuosos. His seventh concerto receives tonal reinforcement lending it a special character: trumpets and timpani enhance the overall sound picture. Magnificent!

The next-to-last album in our complete recording of Johann Kuhnau’s cantatas once again presents outstanding examples of German Lutheran church music. “They reinforce the positive impression created by the previous volumes. The singers very much know their way around Kuhnau, and this knowledge is rendered audible. The instrumental parts are perfectly executed” (musicweb international of Vol. 6). Kuhnau’s magnificent cantata “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” for five-part choir, two corni grandi, two recorders, five-part strings (with divided violas), and basso continuo is certainly an outstanding composition within his oeuvre and a special highlight on Vol. 7. This work has been transmitted in a copy made by the renowned Weimar city organist and lexicographer Johann Gottfried Walther, who is known to have engaged in personal dialogue with Kuhnau. The cantata is framed by Philipp Nicolai’s sacred hymn of the same name and traces its origins to an anonymous poet, and in it Kuhnau lives up in every way to the outstanding reputation that he enjoyed among his contemporaries as a vocal composer in the devotional church style. The opening chorus clothes the chorale in a musical fabric of great sonority consisting of imitations, in anticipation, in repetition, and of motet character, such as only a few composers of his generation could have committed to paper.

On the present recording the Peñalosa Ensemble brings together works by the two composers whose sacred music forms the chronological frame of the Golden Age of Iberian vocal music: its namesake, the Spanish Renaissance composer Francisco de Peñalosa (motets, Magnificat), and Tomás Luis de Victoria (Missa, motets). If Peñalosa may be said to belong to the first generation of composers who assimilated the Franco-Flemish style of Josquin Desprez, then Victoria’s death in 1611 symbolically closed the Iberian Renaissance through the adoption of Italian influences from the Age of Mannerism. The unique, highly emotional manifestation of Iberian Marian piety also influenced both composers – just as it also left its imprint on the visual arts in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Compositions by Tomás Luis de Victoria not only experienced successful, rapid, and continuous dissemination over the whole of Europe owing to what was beyond any doubt their sublime quality but also received additional impetus from printed editions of music – so that his music was interpreted without interruption until the nineteenth century and was elevated to the status of a symbol standing for an entire musical epoch.

Georg Philipp Telemann’s intermezzo Pimpinone celebrated its premiere at the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg on 27 September 1725 as an insert in George Frideric Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano and turned out to be a major public draw that continued to find its place in the Hamburg performance program until 1740. Telemann too valued this work and published it on his own in 1728. Apart from Telemann’s music, one reason for the success of this three-part intermezzo involved his pointed realistic look at the contemporary professional and private spheres. And each intermezzo offers us music fans today insights into existential worlds that only seemingly have disappeared over time: they tell of the hard life of single women, the significance of wealth and social standing for eligibility for marriage, the injustices of patriarchal marriage law, and the ridicule directed at romantically inclined senior citizens. In 1708 Tommaso Albinoni became the first composer to set the libretto Pimpinone e Vespetta by Pietro Pariati; in 1725 Telemann and his librettist Johann Philipp Praetorius lent the work a Hamburg touch. Italian arias were retained, but some arias, duets, and the recitatives were given new texts. Telemann proves to be – also in these scenes from a marriage – a master of musical depictions of moods, situations, and persons. Without exaggeration it may be said that this cpo new production with the Akademie für Alte Musik represents a benchmark recording.

A full ten months older than Ludwig van Beethoven and a friend since their years together in Bonn, the Bohemian Antonín Reicha is to a certain extent a complementary addition to the revolutionary achievements of the "Titan". You can hear at every turn that he also had a pronounced tendency towards experimentation. This is seen mostly in his extremely "relaxed" treatment of established norms – a minuet where any dancer would immediately and hopelessly falter; variations with extremely contrasting means of expression; harmonic and melodic impudence; an often very subtle way of shifting phrases; and astonishing scoring – these are the characteristics of a man that shook the foundations of Paris and beyond.

The wild fantasy of the early baroque period reveals itself to us in musical aggregates that are still far away from the formal cohesion of musical material. Ideas and sounds drift on a sea of virtually unlimited possibilities, delighting us with a colourful diversity that is only very gradually bound into clear structures by rational regulative forces. Munich's Johann Christoph Pez lived and worked during this fascinating time of inspired searching and experimentation. Thanks to his talent, he was able to visit the promised land of Italy, inhaled the air of the all-powerful Italian Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lully - and left behind a twelve-part Duplex Genius, an instrumental compendium whose highly entertaining qualities are all the more enhanced by the unpredictability of events.

Rarity – German version of Mozart's "Finta gardiniera. 5 years ago, the Munich Radio Orchestra under Andrew Parrott performed Mozart's singspiel "Die verstellte Gärtnerin" - the rarely performed German version of "Finta gardiniera," which can now finally appear on cpo. When this opera was first performed, Mozart was 19 years old - an age at which most composers had not even begun. Wolfgang Amadeus' career as a musician - and as a composer - had been in full swing for several years, however. The work belongs to the genre of opera buffa, within which it follows the type of opera semiseria (half opera) popular at the time. Accordingly, in addition to buffa parts, there are also semi-seria parts and even a pure seria part. The music is of great richness. Mozart shows himself here as a true master of opera buffa. At the same time, the music already points beyond these to masterpieces such as Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. The first two acts of the opera contain large-scale, effective finales. In the second act, Mozart combines the finale with several preceding arias and recitatives to create a grand scene that transcends the boundaries of contemporary number operas.

Georg Abraham Schneider was born in Darmstadt in the same year as Beethoven. His musical talent became apparent at a very early age, and after an educational trip to Rheinsberg, he was engaged by Prince Heinrich of Prussia as a horn player for the Rheinsberg Chapel. The composer Schneider is a representative of the spirit of Haydn and Mozart, who wanted to be understood as their preserver. In the reviews, he was attested to compositional skill and a dignified artistry that was committed to the bourgeois taste of the time. Schneider wrote a remarkably large number of compositions for flute, including four flute concertos, about 90 flute duets, and 60 quartets for flute and string trio. The charming, very light-hearted, three-movement Flute Concerto op. 12 is in classical concerto form, and the Mozart model is clearly audible. His Concerto op. 53 conforms to the classical scheme of the instrumental concerto, with ample opportunity for soloist Gaby Pas-Van Riet to display her virtuosity. The work charms with lovely delicate themes that offer the flute every opportunity to explore the instrument's tonal spectrum. In the Concerto op. 63, printed in Leipzig in 1812, the orchestra is augmented with two trumpets and timpani in addition to the double instrumentation of oboes, bassoons and horns. Schneider here demonstrates his ability to orchestrate a concerto well and to use the winds effectively.

For the third time Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our times, dedicates himself to the multifaceted composer Carl Czerny and specifically to his Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte op. 200 (Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte). “If a finely written musical work can be compared to a noble architectural edifice in which symmetry must predominate, then a successful fantasy is a beautiful English garden, seemingly without rules but brimming with surprising variety and intelligibly, meaningfully, and planfully executed.” It was with this poetic comparison that Czerny, writing in the introduction to his Anleitung zum Fantasieren, characterized the nature of improvisation, contrasting it with a composition elaborated in writing. It is scarcely surprising that Czerny, quite early marked by many years of the closest contact with his mentor Beethoven and his unique art of improvisation, presented this compendium in 1829 in his effort to grasp music encyclopedically. As an instructive work, it systematizes all the different kinds of improvisation then in use and illustrates them with numerous models, often ones honed with the finest artistry. In his compendium Czerny addressed the knowledgeable, technically uncommonly well-versed player. In his accompanying texts he refers to models that at the time were almost completely unknown such as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue, to exemplary works by his contemporaries Beethoven, Clementi, Hummel, and Moscheles, and even to his own publications in respect of each improvisational genre. It is thus that Czerny’s op. 200 offers fascinating insights into the musical practice of the early nineteenth century at the crossroads between Classicism and Romanticism – while he himself already belongs to the Romantic period by virtue of his encyclopedic thought bringing together all the epochs of music history.

"I am too cowardly to be a proper composer," Hugo Wolf confessed to a Viennese friend when he was barely 28 years old. And the result of his introspection was not so wrong: everything in his life, not only composing, proceeded in explosive spurts. He wandered through the deepest emotional valleys, suddenly flew up into the highest regions, suffered agonies when he couldn't think of anything to say, shouted his enthusiasm about a successful piece to the whole world and still managed to produce a respectable, albeit fragmentary oeuvre, from which the early poem Penthesilea after Heinrich von Kleist's tragedy of the same name stands out as a symphonic masterpiece. The Austrian baritone Benjamin Appl and the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra, led by its principal conductor Simon Gaudenz, have prefaced this highly dramatic monolith with twelve selected songs, most of which were orchestrated by their author himself: a dozen small, finely polished gems based on texts by Goethe, Mörike and Heyse, whose subtle arrangements leave no doubt that Hugo Wolf would certainly have had the makings of a "proper composer". Whether then, of course, the ingenious things would have been created that posterity owes to him - that is another matter.

Christian Sinding is one of those unfortunate composers who owe their world fame to a single piece. Rustle of Spring immortalised his name and, despite it's brevity, overshadowed the rich oeuvre of the Norwegian, who was once considered the legitimate successor to Edvard Grieg. And this despite the fact that he did not rely on his country's folk music, but on the great genres of Central Europe, which he contributed to with four symphonies, three violin concertos and a great deal of chamber music. Among them are three elegant, expressive, artful, vividly orchestrated, and exceptionally beautiful piano trios, which with this release expand our already unrivalled Sinding catalogue. The Six Pieces for cello and piano are also of the highest quality. They form a precious, ultra-Romantic 'encore' that is also featured as a first recording here.

The composer of the chamber music presented here belongs to the large group of musical talents who left the Bohemian groves and meadows to find a place for themselves in the German-speaking world. Georg Druschetzky (1745-1819) chose a military career, became a well-known timpani virtuoso and soon came to the attention of the Hungarian nobility, who appreciated his virtuoso and administrative skills as much as his original creativity. Especially in the field of chamber music for wind instruments, this contemporary of Haydn and Mozart was an inexhaustible source of pleasure. Without rebelling against the great classical forms, Druschetzky knows how to constantly surprise his audience with a subtle refinement that is virtually written on the historical instruments of the Grundmann Quartet around oboist Eduard Wesly. As on the first album, the four of them are completely in their element.

Long before the founding of the Trio Vivente, Anne Katharina Schreiber, the trio’s violinist, heard a radio broadcast about Shostakovich’s Romance Suite and the circumstances of its premiere. She was so deeply moved that she later absolutely wanted to incorporate the suite into the Trio Vivente’s repertoire. However, the search for the right Russian-language female vocalist long remained without success – until she met the singer Kateryna Kasper. While studying Weinberg’s trio, she discovered just how closely the two composers had worked together. It thus seemed only natural to combine their works, and since Weinberg’s Jewish Songs also exist in a version for soprano and trio, a perfect circle was formed. This is how this album featuring trios and songs by these two expressionistic composers came about – and it is filled with expressive power!

REVIEW:

Trio Vivente have produced a most intelligent reading of all the works on this disc. Weinberg’s Piano Trio is the highlight for me but his songs too get remarkable performances. Kateryna Kasper, the young Ukrainian soprano, is a wonderful exponent. I have every admiration for her impressive and convincing achievement in singing in Yiddish. She is a powerful advocate. She also gives a magically beautiful performance of Shostakovich’s songs. They are not easy fare but she manages to inject just the right amount of darkness into them. None of my praise should detract from the excellent performance of Shostakovich’s youthful trio. The entire disc is highly recommended.

-- MusicWeb International