Vol. 2 once again demonstrates the unique stylistic quality of Felix Draeseke’s works for strings. When the composer turned to the quartet genre, he ventured onto compositional terrain largely regarded as the domain of composers of traditional orientation. Wagner’s influence is also found in Draeseke’s quartets, though not in the form of an imitation of Wagnerian composing but as a creative rendering of the Classical composers as they had been conveyed to Draeseke by Wagner. The idea of the “melodic thread” running through the music and unifying it is everywhere in evidence in these works. The composer’s third quartet, his op. 66, was regularly performed in Central Germany during his lifetime – for instance, in Leipzig in 1911, when the Gewandhaus Quartet included it on the program for the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth. Draeseke’s op. 66 quartet differs from all of his other works in sonata form in that it is designed in five movements, a structure reminding us both of Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor op. 132 and Haydn’s early quartet divertimenti. Both spheres, the sublime tone of the “Heiliger Dankgesang” and the carefree mood of the cassations and serenades, seem to occur in continuous mutual interpenetration in this work. The “most feared contrapuntist” reveals his strictest mien, while at the same time showing that he is a subtle humorist who in particular delights in play with metrical emphases.

“No matter how one might try, one cannot be unkind to Mr. Bertini: he can bring one beside oneself with his friendliness and all his finely fragrant Parisian expressions; his music has the feel of pure satin and silk.” In his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Robert Schumann gave numerous fellow musicians who rubbed him the wrong way a solid piece of his own mind, but he never found anything to hold against Henri Bertini, a French composer who was twelve years his senior. Although he was a little indirect in his praise, he was right: in the music of this once highly esteemed pianist, piano teacher, and composer there is nothing irritating, nothing that might offend good taste – and yet we never have the impression that here we have a composer who eliminated every trace of »modernity« merely to win public favor. Friendliness apparently was a characteristic trait of this musician who was born in London in 1798 and died in Meylan, near Grenoble, in 1876. He never attempted to go at everything headfirst to prove that it was possible to shatter the sound barrier. His countless études and learning pieces were so very popular internationally because a natural music flows in them, offering welcome expressive opportunities to the pupil. And his finely crafted chamber compositions – from the duo sonata to the nonet – form a catalogue’s trove of treasures combining a very fine ear with great narrative talent. Two of these magnificent pieces from the late 1830s – the Piano Trio op. 43 and the Nonet op. 107 – inaugurate this vibrant work series that would be a top wish for a complete recording edition and definitely in every way represents a valuable contribution to the repertoire.

On their first album featuring madrigals and canzonettas by Andrea Gabrieli, the WESER RENAISSANCE ensemble led by Manfred Cordes was already in its element. On SWR2 Radio Michael Stegemann commented: “A most highly entertaining and successful album. Perfect balance in the mixture of singers and winds, audio transparency of the polyphonic structures, great textual intelligibility.” And on the ensemble’s second Gabrieli release, now with madrigals, psalms, and organ works by this master delighting so much in experimentation, his intention and wish to offer intelligent entertainment to his fellow human beings are clearly shown. By 1566 at the latest, Andrea Gabrieli was appointed to the coveted post of organist at St. Mark’s Cathedral, and already during his lifetime he was esteemed in particular because of his enormous versatility.

There are indeed many recordings of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, but the special thing about this particular recording is that it was produced following the performances of a scenic interpretation with the Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito. What now follows is a musical exploration forming a sequel to scenic occupation with the Vespers. Since 2017 Il Gusto Barocco has been the guest ensemble for the four-part Monteverdi cycle initiated by opera director Albrecht Puhlmann at the Mannheim National Theater. From the musician’s perspective, the scenic exploration of music rooted in the liturgy does in fact clearly differ from a performance during a religious service or a non-scenic concert performance. During the time-intensive process prior to the staging of an opera, scenes, images, and figures gradually take shape. In each stage figure the quest is for an emotional truth from which her or his artistic nature, aesthetic character, and credibility result – and ultimately word and tone, in order to produce empathy and engage the public. Another important aspect of this recording is the great number of diminutions in all the instrumental and vocal parts, all of which were improvised at the particular moment. During the shared scenic preparation for the opera stage, the individual movements of the Marian Vespers obtained a definite emotional space in the dramaturgical sequence. Accordingly, sections and their basic characters were defined and invented at the particular moment for each performance and for this recording.

Today Lena Neudauer is in great demand as a musician who delights an international public with the clarity, power, charm, and emotional depth of her violin playing. For this reason, following her successful interpretation of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto for cpo, we now are also very delighted to have obtained her services for the interpretation of three violin concertos by Antonio Rosetti: she has a special place in her heart for this charming composer, and her stupendous virtuosity enables her to rise to the challenge of the high technical demands of his concertos. Movements of exuberant freshness flow and overflow with performance joy, and these three concertos once again display Rosetti’s tendency to endow the first movements of his solo concertos with extensive orchestral introductions and richly diverse musical material. This is listening pleasure of a special kind!

The WESER-RENAISSANCE ensemble had two goals in mind in its concert series “Breslau – A City in the Heart of Europe”: the first was to offer musical enjoyment and the second was to remember an old cultural environment that had been forgotten for many decades. The music manuscripts and printed editions discovered in the Berlin State Library attest to the great diversity and high quality of music culture in what was once the capital of Silesia. “Die Geburt unsers Herrn and Heylands Jesu Christi” (The Birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ), a Christmas narrative by Tobias Zeutschner, who was active at Breslau’s principal churches St. Bernhardin and St. Mary Magdalene, forms the focus of the present selection from these sources in a program entitled “Weihnachten im Breslau des 17. Jahrhunderts – Festmusik in der Kirche St. Maria Magdalena” (Christmas in Seventeenth-Century Breslau – Festive Music in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene). This early example of a Biblical history composition is richly scored for eighteen voices.

During his lifetime Carl Stamitz, the firstborn son of Johann Stamitz, the famous founder of the Mannheim School, became a violin and viola virtuoso and successful composer. In our Carl Stamitz Edition we are now releasing four more symphonies that were regarded as a practically ideal embodiment of sensibility because his “heart full of feeling left its imprint on his music.” Stamitz’s desire to discover and explore new paths in the composition of symphonies took him to the programmatic pastoral symphony “Le jour variable” (La promenade royale) designed in Versailles in the fall of 1772. What Stamitz presents to the ears in the way of previously “unheard-of” music would completely outshine even the programmatic pieces produced at the end of the nineteenth century. Many experts, including Hugo Riemann, were very much aware of the fact that this program symphony is a particularly interesting and remarkable composition.

Spectacular Baroque Opera with the BEMF. The prizewinning Boston Early Music Festival, joined by the choicest soloists, once again presents a spectacular Baroque opera discovery with Christoph Graupner’s Antiochus and Stratonica. Graupner composed the musical play L’Amore Ammalato, Die kranckende Liebe, oder: Antiochus und Stratonica during his time as the harpsichordist at the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg. The core subject of the opera is the love of the Seleucid prince Antiochus for his stepmother Stratonica. This match brings with it highly dramatic moments as well as deeply sad ones inasmuch as Antiochus is supposed to have an incurable illness – but then at the end three old and new romantic couples appear on the stage and everything comes to a happy ending. Graupner’s opulent orchestral ensemble, which prescribes three recorders and four oboes in addition to strings and a large continuo apparatus, offers the most highly nuanced tonal manifoldness – and during his later decades as the Darmstadt court chapel master the composer would continue to expand this element.

“Specializing in unknown repertoire, cpo is now serious about uncovering yet another veritable treasure:” this is what klassik-heute wrote of Vol. 1 of our Wind Overtures by Telemann. This master of all musical trades was also active and extremely successful in the field of Harmoniemusik – the compositional genre for wind ensembles entrusted with military, hunting, and table music. The wind version of the work known as the “Alster Overture” heard along with other works on Vol. 2 is regarded as a model example of this artistic philosophy of Telemann’s. However, what is a more important key to the significance of the work is the knowledge that the movements following the overture are practically to be understood as an audio instrumental preview of the serenata composed by Telemann and going along with them. In this overture suite the “musical artist” presents to our ears highly atmospheric sound depictions of Hamburg and what were then its country surroundings, through which the Alster River flowed. Even the singing swans majestically gliding along the Alster are represented in a wonderfully beautiful sarabande. At the end there is a spirited gigue in which shepherds, hunters, nymphs, and Pan, as it were, gather together again in order to conclude the musical preview anticipating the serenade.

Telemann’s Wedding Serenata Georg Philipp Telemann never missed the opportunity to delight those around him with countless compositions treating the subject of love and its consequences. The origins of his enormous achievement in this field are certainly to be sought in his personal disposition: in his exuberant joy in composition, combined with an open, optimistic attitude in his dealings with his environment, which in his works not rarely revealed his roguish sense of humor. And so he above all was very much in demand as a composer of wedding pieces. The texts of the wedding serenata »Liebe, was ist schöner als die Liebe« undeniably exhibit mirthful exuberance and belong to the most original and wittiest musical creations of all by this composer. The serenata has the form of a disputatio, a dramatic dialogue in which an advocate of marriage (Ametas, soprano) and a skeptic (Crito, tenor) are in disagreement about the usefulness of the institution of marriage. The album also includes the solo cantata “Lieben will ich,” in which the imponderables of love are celebrated in witty free texts, and the cantata “Der Weiberorden,” which quite clearly was composed in conjunction with a wedding feast and in lighter tones enables to join the young bride in joyous anticipation of her future married life.

Our fourth release in this series offers listeners the opportunity to enjoy chamber music for piano and strings by Boris Papandopulo. The recording premiere of his Concertino in modo antico presents a little masterpiece of Croatian Neoclassicism. As the title itself indicates, here the composer draws on historical models both in form and content. For example, the Overture, a free rendering of the sonata form, recalls similar forms from the Late Baroque and Early Classical periods. It pulsates in a lively motoric rhythm and is based on the polyphonic imitation of numerous short motifs running through the entire movement and reaching their end in a little Fugato. Masterful motivic work, brilliance, and verve as well as real and true joy of performance distinguish this composition, which easily finds its way into the hearts of musicians and audiences alike – and the same is true of the other chamber pieces heard here. The Rapsodia concertante, to name one example, is not only a highly effective and attractive composition in which three contrasting movements are skillfully linked together; it is also a virtuoso piece representing the summit of technique and worked out to perfection.

In 2020, in a fitting contribution to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, the Innsbruck Early Music Festival presented a concert performance of the opera Leonora by his contemporary Ferdinando Paër. With this program selection the conductor Alessandro De Marchi rescued from oblivion the counterpart of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio and its model. Spirited recitatives, extended arias, cabalettas, and marvelously mellow duets occur in sequence in Paër's works, including his opera Leonora, premiered in 1804.

During the Napoleonic Wars what he presented here was a heroic liberation opera of French stamp. The action corresponds to the spirit of the times, and the faithful wife displays heroism in her rescue of her unjustly imprisoned husband from a self-complacent tyrant’s dungeon. Dark political intrigues are denounced, and honesty, uprightness, and pure love are glorified. Paër’s musical setting of Fidelio’s heroic story differs from Beethoven’s only opera in many respects. First and foremost because the libretto is in Italian, a language that has very different effects on the melodic, rhythmic, and rhetorical flow of the music and its expressive character. Then there is also the fact that Paër composed considerably more coloraturas for the principal singers than Beethoven did. Here an Italian opera composer of the high Neapolitan school clearly continuing to point back to Hasse and Porpora makes his voice heard.

Hummel and Schubert at their Best Stylistically, Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s music generally stands for the end of Viennese Classicism and the transitional period between this epoch and Romanticism. Hummel composed his Quintet op. 87 in 1802, that is, seventeen years before Schubert wrote his “Trout Quintet” in 1819. The famous chamber music critic Rudolf Felber wrote of Hummel’s work: “The quintet is a masterpiece; the first movement immediately captivates and impresses the listener with its power and passion. The peculiar main theme has a somewhat belligerent character….The Allegro agitato finale is full of carefree mirth and ends with a brilliant and effective conclusion.” On this new album Hummel’s quintet is combined with Schubert’s famous “Trout Quintet.” The esteem in which Schubert held Hummel manifested itself on occasions and is reflected particularly by the fact that he dedicated his last three sonatas to him. These two radiant quintets representing the best of classical chamber music are interpreted by the Libertalia Ensemble, whose members include the renowned and successful brothers David and Alexandre Castro-Balbi.

Many works by Camillo Schumann remained unpublished during his lifetime and today are housed in the Saxon State Archive – a fate very different from that of his elder brother Georg Schumann, whose oeuvre has experienced a selective, though continuous renaissance on the recording market during the past decades (e. g., on cpo). And yet Camillo Schumann’s oeuvre covers almost all the musical genres, and more than three hundred works by him have now been documented. The special qualities of Schumann’s compositional capabilities are present in fine fashion everywhere in his sonatas for clarinet and piano: careful, finely balanced architectonic structures with skillfully elaborated transitions between the individual movement sections, attractive dialogues between the voices, congenial use of the resources of the particular instruments, suspenseful intensifications, and neatly proportioned solutions and conclusions. The compositional tradition of Reinecke and Radecke in which Schumann grew up is continued practically without a break into the twentieth century. Along with his fourth sonata, his playful Serenade in F major in five movements for clarinet and piano was his last composition of more than one movement for these instruments. Here too he proves to be a composer who knows what he is doing and knows how to realize his ideas with the greatest technical expertise.

Ludomir Rózycki and his Violin Concerto. Although Ludomir Rózycki is known to only a few internationally, he is indisputably regarded as the most famous Polish opera composer after Moniuszko and was the founder of the Polish national ballet. His symphonic poems, masterfully instrumented and designed with highly animated, melodious creativity, enriched what was then as yet his country’s modest symphonic repertoire. During his creative career Rózycki occupied an important place in Polish artistic circles and his works were presented on Polish and other stages. Unfortunately, he left one of his violin concertos unfinished. It was not until 2000 that Zygmunt Rychert, the artistic director of the Baltic Philharmonic, prepared his own instrumentation of the violin concerto for symphony orchestra, lending it a fascinating character very much like that of Rózycki’s earlier orchestral works. The outstanding young violinist Ewelina Nowicka interprets the difficult solo part of the concerto with skill and great verve on this album presenting the result of this harmonious collaboration between these two musicians. The miniature pieces also heard on this album offer us melodic invention illustrating Rózycki’s sound and the inner warmth of his compositions. These works put violinists to the test while also offering them an opportunity to demonstrate their virtuosity.