Siegmund von Hausegger belongs to the rare guild of creative artists who work exclusively on the basis of inspiration and have a very fine sense of what is happening in the world around them. As soon as the particular zeitgeist opposes them, they fall silent – as did this son of the highly regarded philosopher of music Friedrich von Hausegger. After an early creative wave that produced some symphonic and vocal works above all during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, Hausegger mainly worked as a conductor and only very rarely wrote music of his own. The songs brought together on this album represent a significant portion of his multifarious and multifaceted vocal oeuvre and show the whole great breadth of this composer whom his contemporaries described as an »extremely upright character« of the highest artistic seriousness but who occasionally – as his songs to texts by Robert Burns reveal – drew on his humorous vein far removed from any sort of cynicism. This production is an ideal complement to the releases featuring Hausegger’s symphonic works released by cpo during the course of recent years.

In 2016, almost three hundred years after the composition of Georg Caspar Schurmann’s Die getreue Alceste, Barockwerk Hamburg presented a semi-scenic performance of this opera in the atrium of the Hamburg State Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. Ira Hochman founded the ensemble Barockwerk Hamburg in 2007 with the goal of rediscovering both vocal and instrumental chamber and stage music from the Baroque era and bring it back to life. The ensemble draws particularly often from the rich tradition of Hamburg, which not only attracted numerous great musicians during the 17th and 18th centuries, but also the public and patrons from all over Northern Europe. The permanent cast of Barockwerk Hamburg consists of 15 instrumentalists and singers. However, the ensemble cooperates closely with other Baroque specialists and adapts the cast to the requirements of different programs. Its members include musicians with international experience as well as up and coming talents from Hamburg University of Music and Drama.

The program Missa in Festo Sanctissimae Trinitatis presents the reconstruction of a main religious service in one of the principal Hamburg churches at the beginning of the seventeenth century; it consists of works for ensemble and organ by the composer Hieronymus Praetorius, who was the organist of the Church of St. James in Hamburg from 1582 until his death in 1629. In addition or in between, the liturgical components of the Mass that were performed monophonically are heard as they have been transmitted to us in the regulations for religious services then in effect in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. The search for a suitable instrument led to the choice of the swallow’s nest organ in St. Mary’s Church in Lemgo; it may be regarded as a model example of the Northern German organ building tradition and has a mean-tone temperament ideal for the period of composition, characteristics, and stylistics of the selected repertoire. The Gospel and Sermon have not been incorporated into the present production; instead, the hymn O lux beata Trinitas- which actually does not belong to the Mass- is heard.

Walter Braunfels studied law and economics at the university of Munich until, after seeing a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, he decided to shift his focus to music. He went on to study with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna before returning to Munich to study composition with Felix Mottl and Ludwig Thuille. His earliest success came with the opera Die Vogel. With the rise of the Nazis to power, however, he was dismissed from his positions and listed as being half-Jewish. Luckily, the war passed peacefully for his family, he returned to the public eye after the war was over. On this release, the Munchner Rundfunkorchester with violinist Henry Raudales, violist Norbert Merkl, and hornists Karl Reitmayer and Marc Ostertag present Braunfel’s String Quintet in F sharp minor in its version for String Orchestra, and his Sinfonia Concertante op. 68 for violin, viola, 2 horns, and string orchestra. These are world premiere recordings.

Already during his lifetime Giacomo Carissimi was regarded as an esteemed composer and musician, not only in the music world of seventeenth-century Rome but also beyond this city. His numerous pupils did their special part to spread his fame. German musicians like Johann Kaspar Kerll, Johann Philipp Krieger, and Christoph Bernhard, who had stayed at the Collegium Germanicum while in Rome between 1650 and 1660 and were under Carissimi’s tutelage, contributed significantly to the Italian’s renown. Today Carissimi is also regarded as one of the most significant representatives of the new oratorio form. Some of his works have been transmitted with more than one title; most them are assigned the “Historia” label and treat the prophetic books of the Old Testament, including Ezekiel and Jonah, as well as the sapiential book of Job. Musicologists currently accept thirteen of these oratorio compositions as authentic works by Carissimi, who clearly preferred subjects from the Old Testament. The texts of the Latin oratorios are rarely taken word for word from the Vulgate but instead tend toward paraphrase. To make the action intelligible to the faithful and to enliven it for them, Carissimi employed a wide range of highly effective stylistic means.

Andreas N. Tarkmann, one of today’s most creative arrangers of instrumental and vocal music, has personal reasons for setting himself the task of producing music for wind ensemble based on operas by Albert Lortzing: “There are many reasons that I felt compelled to choose the operas of Albert Lortzing for my Hamoniemusik arrangements. Lortzing’s music was still very popular in my childhood in the 1960s and 70s and such a staple in opera houses and in the media that his music accompanied me in my musical development as a natural part of the canon of classical music. To me, this music was especially genial and cheerful, slender in tone and full of inspired melodies. Beyond that, I liked the humorous and pithy song texts and ironic characterizations of philistine public officials and dignitaries, even if some of the life’s maxims set to music seemed a bit too deep naïve and inherently German in their emotional content even then… Four decades later… I renewed my interest in Albert Lortzing and his music, since I noticed that his operas are gradually disappearing from the schedules of German opera houses…” The Stuttgart Winds bring Tarkann’s project to life on this release.

CPO’s successful Reger edition continues here with the fifth volume in the successful series, even as critics are still raving about the previous release. Musik & Theater wrote of Volume 4: “These recordings number among the best currently available.” The German organist and choral conductor, Gerhard Weinberger, studied organ with Franz Lehrndorfer and church music at the Musikhochschule in Munich. In 1971, he was the prize winner in organ at the renowned international ARD Music Competition. In 1974, after spending three years directing the choir at Saint Lorenz Basilica in Kempten, Gerhard Weinberger assumed a teaching post in organ and church music at the Munich Musikhochschule. He was Professor of Organ there from 1977 to 1983. Currently he is Professor of Organ and Director of the Church Music Department at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and of the Leipzig New Bach Society directorate. Gerhard Weinberger's wide repertoire ranges from pre-Baroque to music of the 20th century, with a special emphasis on the works of J.S. Bach and Max Reger. He has given recitals throughout Europe, Asia and America.

At a time when the majority of German composers turned from the opera to the singspiel and its considerably smaller dimensions, Franz Lachner continued the tradition of the grand historical opera with Catharina Cornaro. Lachner’s once so very successful opera, last performed in Munich in 1903, was forgotten for many decades, but a few years ago the editor Volker Tosta of Stuttgart prepared a new edition of this work, its first published version, especially for the concert performance by the Munich Radio Orchestra. The action of the tragic opera is based on the true-life story of the Queen of Cyprus. Political intrigues and great passions distinguish the plot. It is difficult to believe that this musically so very appealing work, which captivated the audience at Munich’s Prince Regent Theater already with its highly atmospheric overture during the performance on which this album is based, ever could be forgotten. “With this opera the German school has been enriched with a dramatic work that has to be counted as one of the most genial and magnificent of the works belonging to it.” This is what the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote after the premiere, and Max Zenger’s Geschichte der Münchner Oper of 1923 documents the pathbreaking effect of this opera when it states that Catharina Cornaro had “quite literally become Munich’s hallmark, like the two towers of the Cathedral of Our Lady.”

Henri Mulet was born in the immediate vicinity of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in 1878 and studied organ with Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne at the Paris Conservatory. Vierne ranked his student with the “most brilliant of musical personalities” and described him as “an outstanding virtuoso and a very fine improviser.” From 1923 to 1931 Mulet was a professor at the Schola Cantorum in Paris; Camille-Saint-Saëns was one of his colleagues, and Gabriel Fauré merits mention as one of his first students. Mulet’s oeuvre focused first and foremost on the organ, and the Esquisses byzantines composed from 1914 to 1919 and published in 1920 has continued to be his most frequently performed collection of pieces. While the rhythms and meters in most of his pieces – the “quadrature of the compositional structure” castigated by Richard Wagner – were rather conventional, the harmonies negotiating between Debussy, Wagner, and Vierne are very appealing.

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.

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

This release features the first complete recording ever of the cello sonatas of the Worms late romanticist Friedrich Gernsheim, with encores in the form of his only two cello pieces with piano. For the virtuoso parts in his three cello sonatas, Gernsheim could draw on his own brilliant piano technique, which he had demonstrated already in 1850 as an eleven-year-old child prodigy. The five works span five decades. The Sonata in D minor op. 12 from 1868 continues to follow the paths of Mendelssohn’s two sonatas, while the Sonata in E minor op. 79 of 1906 is a dramatically charged work in the style of the turn of the century. The cello composition Elohenu of 1881 and the Andante op. 64bis from 1898 are situated between them chronologically. Two years prior to his death Gernsheim reworked the last movement of his Sonata in E minor and wrote two completely new movements for the first and second positions. The result was the Sonata in E minor op. 87 of 1914, the seventy-five-year-old composer’s farewell to his epoch on the eve of World War I. Alexander Hulshoff and Oliver Triendl perform these works with aplomb.

Georg Philipp Telemann’s extant works for wind ensemble take us into the unique region between military music, hunting music, and court table music. However, these ensembles were active not only at the courts as part of the military staff but also influenced middle-class life in the towns through the garrisons stationed in them. Telemann was familiar with these ensembles both in the court and civic spheres, and about twenty works survive today in the characteristic wind instrumentation with woodwind instruments and a pair of horns, ten quintets of more than one movement, ten marches, and a wind version of the so-called Alter Overture TWV 55: F11. This album presents five Quintets for Two Oboes (or oboi d’amore), Two Horns, and Bassoon (thoroughbass) – interpreted by the L’Orfeo Baroque Ensemble, which was established in 2009 with members from the L’Orfeo Baroque Orchestra in order to apply the orchestra’s approach to the orchestral literature in the genuine dimensions of a chamber ensemble.

The Italian composers of the Baroque, led by Antonio Vivaldi, often honored the small instruments of the lute family in their rich compositional oeuvres. At the time these instruments with a fourth-third tuning were known by names, for example, as the leuto, leutino, mandola, or mandolla. Today the small lute is uniformly termed the “Baroque mandolin” and more rarely the “soprano lute.” The number of composers who wrote attractive works for the mandolin documents the fact that it was then a much-played instrument that musical audiences liked to hear. Accordingly, this new recording brings together concertos, trios, and sonatas by Carlo Arrigoni, Johann Adolf Hasse, Ranieri Capponi, and – of course – Vivaldi. What is particularly surprising here is the so very homogeneous sound of the dialogue between the Baroque mandolin and the Baroque violin – since they are two very different instruments in the field of tonal production. The tonal beauty of both solo parts, with one duo partner supporting the other with accompanying broken chords, produces a captivating effect in the second movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto RV 548. The magic of the fascinating tonal idiom of the mandolin and violin duo makes us wish that this rediscovered version will find many delighted listeners. Anna Torge, our soloist on the Baroque mandolin (six courses), has made a name for herself as one of the leading virtuosos on this instrument.

It not infrequently happens that the compositional oeuvre of a renowned and perhaps even legendary performing artist disappears from view for quite a long time. In the case of Henri Marteau this disappearance was occasioned in part by the circumstance that some of his compositions remained unpublished. Today the violinist Henri Marteau is known mostly only to specialists or fans of Max Reger’s music. After all, during the early years of the twentieth century Marteau was an important violin interpreter of Reger’s works. The close association between Marteau and Reger, who arranged Marteau’s Cello Concerto for piano in 1905, the year of the publication of the String Quartet No. 2, is sometimes quite evident here and in many other works by him. However, the contrapuntal intricacy of Marteau’s quartet also holds in store chromatic passages more reminiscent of Nielsen and his Quartet in E flat major op. 14 from 1897-98 than Reger’s modulations. In its own way the quartet very much anticipates developments far into the twentieth century while exploring all the many gives and takes of German and French musical influence. The album also includes Marteau’s Huit Mélodies for soprano and string quartet – sung by Karine Deshayes, who in 2016 was named the “Lyric Artist of the Year” for the second time at the prize ceremony of the Victoires de la Musique.