With CPO's Volume 15, their comprehensive project featuring organ works of the Northern German Baroque is now complete. On the last release, Friedhelm Flamme dedicates himself to the complete free organ works, that is, to the complete fugues and preludes, of Heinrich Scheidemann, a composer regarded as one of the co-founders of the Northern German organ school. Some of Scheidemann's chorale settings are also presented. Johann Adam Reincken succeeded Scheidemann as the organist at St. Catherine's Church in Hamburg after his mentor's death and is regarded as his most important pupil. Scheidermann's activity and influence on other organists and choirmasters brought him great respect in Hamburg's music world, and he is regarded as one of the most significant composers or organ works from the early seventeenth century. Here we would like to thank our interpreter Friedhelm Flamme for his renderings of Northern German marvels of organ sound. His recordings demonstrate how genuine technique and virtuosity can be combined with intellectual probing to produce sensational results.

Michael Korstick has produced more than forty albums and with them, received distinctions such as the Echo Klassik, Midem Classical Award of Cannes, as well as repeated prizes of the German Record Critics. Since 2014 he has live and worked in Linz, Austria, where he holds a professorship at the Anton Bruckner Private Univeristy. On his latest album, Korstick dedicates himself to the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera with great passion and virtuosic technique. The present album released on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Ginastera's birth comprises this composer's complete published piano oeuvre - apart from his Piano Sonata No. 2. The pieces display great virtuosity, brilliance and rhythmic brisance. In the piano parts Ginastera comes forward as an orchestral composer who repeatedly complicates the piano part with enormous intervals imitating the effect of percussion and wind instruments and playable in the exact rhythm only with great difficulties. For Korstick this is no problem. After all, reviewers have repeatedly emphasized as a characteristic quality of his playing the astonishing balance he maintains between brilliant virtuosity and musical interiorization while negotiating between his very distinctive personality and uncompromising faithfulness to the works.

If the number of compositions written for a specific instrument is any indication of a predilection, then Ferdinand Ries did indeed have a soft place in his heart for the flute. He penned no fewer than six quartets for flute and string trio, a quintet for flute, violin, two violas, and violoncello, a trio for piano, flute and violoncello, and many works for flute and piano - more works than for any other wind instrument. His first Flute Quartet presents itself as a grand, imposing quartet in the affirmative key of C major and contains many surprising elements. Here too, as already in his symphonies and string quartets, Ries proves to be an entirely independent and original composer - despite his close association with Beethoven. The Ardinghello ensemble adheres undogmatically to historically informed performance practice. Karl Kaiser plays transverse flutes from the early nineteenth century. The string players perform on instruments with stringing and bows from around 1820.

The Twenty-Second Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days in March 2014 celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Telemann's godson and successor, with a program entitled "Generations: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann." The festival program offered concertgoers the opportunity to experience the similarities and differences in the music of these protagonists representing two compositional generations and traced lines of development in musical style. The live concert recording presented here features sacred compositions by Telemann and Bach written about the same time for Hamburg, some of which were first performed in modern times at the Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days. The Hamburg music director Telemann maintained intensive contact with composers of the younger generation into the late years of his life, exchanged ideas with them, and was interested in developments in the new musical style being formed by them. For their part, younger composers looked up – not without great veneration – to the "father of music" (Johann Heinrich Rolle, 1767) and intensively studied or performed his compositions, which left their mark on German music life over many decades. Among Telemann's contacts, those with his godson and later successor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach are especially significant. A great part of the church compositions brought together here, all of them connected with the liturgical performance of music at Hamburg's five principal churches, number among the documents attesting to their relationship.

The Magdeburg Sunday Concerts held ever since 1961 focus on chamber music. Not infrequently, as the present release likewise demonstrates, compositions by Telemann are featured and include works again made available for the everyday concert world in Magdeburg following intensive research investigations and the publication of modern score editions. From the 531st Sunday music concert, the GSOConsort led by the soprano and artistic director Gudrun Sidonie Otto now presents Advent cantata arias with a single vocal part and the continuo in a duet. These arias belong to a single annual cantata cycle published by Telemann from the end of 1726 to the end of 1727. They have been excerpted from church compositions designed with this option in mind, that is, the independent performance of the arias. Telemann revised the arias for publication; in particular, he worked on the precision of the ritornellos, shortening, redesigning, or rewriting them, or eliminated them entirely. Just how carefully the arias have been elaborated is shown both on the formal level and in what in part are complicated and unusual melodic, declamatory-rhythmical, and harmonic processes in an impressive spectrum of musical keys (Hirschmann, 2012). Telemann of course pays close attention to the verbal pictures, often also opposing ones, given in the texts – and does so in a most highly nuanced manner.

Following our successful first release featuring symphonic works by Robert Radecke, the Swiss Trio Fontane ensemble now turns to chamber music by this composer. Radecke took up residence in Berlin in 1853 and significantly influenced the city’s music culture through to the turn of the century. He initially performed in public as a chamber musician as the second violinist in Ferdinand Laub’s quartet and as a pianist who created a sensation with his renderings of Beethoven’s last sonatas. His mastery as an instrumentalist is reflected especially in the brilliant piano part of the Trio in B minor, which not coincidentally is dedicated to Anton Rubinstein. Radecke composed the first movement quite likely while he was still in Leipzig (1853) and added the cantabile adagio two years later. However, it was not until 1868 that he supplied a scherzo and a finale to complete the work for publication as his op. 33 by Bote & Bock of Berlin. This work and Radecke’s two piano trios, about whose circumstances of composition and reception hardly anything is known, are being presented in recording premieres on this release. Along with the Fantasy Pieces op. 7, this means that almost all of the composer’s published chamber compositions, that is, three of his total of four such works of this genre, have now been recorded. This beautiful romantic music displays Radecke’s independent talent coupled with consummate compositional artistry and a fine feel for formal perfection.

After the composer Paul Juon had resigned from his professorship at the Berlin College of Music in 1934, he retired to the shores of Lake Geneva, where he wrote a series of remarkable orchestral works over a period of six years. These works by the Moscow-born Juon, whose ancestors had immigrated to Russia from Switzerland, included his last two symphonies, which once again display all his special qualities as a teller of musical tales and a lyrical and playful tone poet. The Rhapsodic Symphony op. 95 composed in 1937-38 is a grand narrative on the topic of the music with which Juon had concerned himself during the course of his life: Nordic and Russian tones can be heard in it as well as reminiscences of contemporary Central European music from Mahler to Strauss. Juon completed the Sinfonietta capricciosa op. 98, his last major composition for orchestra and a work that may be said to represent the reverse side of the "rhapsodic coin," in the summer of 1939. It has a classical three-movement structure and is kept simple in its form but is so "capricious" and intricate that like its elder sister work it only gradually reveals its full wealth – which means that here the process of musical discovery occurs in phases that are all the more fascinating because they too gradually bring to light new allusions and increase our associative pleasure with each new listening experience.

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.

Concertos for two pianos and orchestra by Felix Mendelssohn and Max Bruch belong to the standard German romantic repertoire for piano duos. Genova & Dimitrov have recorded them as well as the concertos of Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Robert Casadesus. If until these composers the piano above all functioned to develop complex melodic and harmonic relations, then the Hungarian composer, pianist, folk music researcher, editor, and teacher Béla Bartók moved the piano or pianos closer to the percussion family. Here his Concerto for Two Pianos is presented along with the Concerto for Two Pianos by Victor Babin. This highly effective work, in its substance hardly needing to hide behind other classically inspired concertos of the twentieth century, is heard in a world-premiere recording. The American Victor Babin (Viktor Genrikhovich Babin), who died in 1972, made music history primarily as the member of a famous piano duo. With his wife this strapping, strong son from a Jewish Russian family formed the Vronsky & Babin Duo. Newsweek described it as the most brilliant piano duo of its time. Babin studied composition under Franz Schreker in Berlin and piano under Artur Schnabel. His Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra breathes a neoclassical spirit from the tradition of the Russian dynamo Stravinsky and even more so of Prokofiev, mixed with the mirthful and grotesque musical impact of a Shostakovich. Listeners may also detect Influences from the Groupe de Six. In this marvelously transparent score Victor Babin proves to be a dazzling instrumentator.

Franz Krommer was once a highly regarded composer, but he then ceased to be remembered more quickly and disappeared more completely than any other creative musician of his generation. It was not until 1997 that the Czech musicologist Karel Padrta compiled a thorough catalogue of his works including a biographical introduction. Krommer all too long was overshadowed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and it is only recently that his oeuvre has begun to attract increased attention. Krommer’s oeuvre focuses almost exclusively on instrumental music. In his first symphony he succeeds in forming a thoroughly individual synthesis of stylistic elements recalling Haydn and Mozart, while in his second such work he largely distances himself from these models and develops a symphonic style all of his own. The slow introduction of the first movement, which begins in forte with a gloomy D minor triadic chord, immediately presents a tone quite different from that of his early works and develops an individual sound character with a fitting continuation in the following Allegro vivace’s main movement complex distinguished by strong dynamic contrasts and constantly oscillating between major and minor. Krommer’s third symphony is comparatively conventional, which may have to do with the fact that it is based on an older source and was merely reworked for its publication.

Hartmut Rohde became the new artistic director and conductor of the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra of Wroclaw (Breslau) at the beginning of the 2014 / 15 season. Their debut album featuring symphonic works by Simon Laks and Philipp Jarnach is now being released on cpo. The decision to combine these two composers may seem to be quite arbitrary, and at first glance their origins and musical impulses seem to be very different. "On a second look, however, interesting parallels come into view and make their joint presentation appear to make very good sense. Both grew up during a period of dramatic historical change prior to World War I and enjoyed promising career beginnings in the 1920s, which many important performances document for Simon Laks in France and for Philipp Jarnach in Germany. Both experienced the establishment of dodecaphony, its expansion into serial music, and the first experiments in the field of electronic music. However, both also had in common a strong commitment to the preservation of traditional tonal language. As moderate moderns they firmly believed in the viability and expandability of musical principles that had developed over the centuries and above all in the irrevocability of tonality as the animating and energizing source constituting the substrate of musical design. Moreover, these principles included homophony and polyphony beginning with the seventeenth century, the rhetorical doctrine of the affections, the flow of melos, and the spirit of the historically transmitted compositional genres. Their music is highly emotional, crafted with supreme skill, rich in associations, and fascinatingly diverse in expression." (Hartmut Rohde)

Dominik Wörner, a prizewinner at the Bach International Competition in Leipzig in 2002, established the Kirchheimer BachConsort in 2008. Its members, leading musicians from the early music scene, perform as an ensemble of soloists in programs focusing on the repertoire of the eighteenth century. On this brand-new release Wörner leads his ensemble and the Czech soprano and harpist Hana Blažiková in interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s dialogue cantatas. All the compositions on the present recording involve musical dialogues. The oboe d’amore and the Baroque orchestra engage in dialogue in the concerto, and in the three cantatas the soprano and the bass are the partners in conversation. All four works are designated as concertos – which in the first case is hardly surprising, but in the three cantatas is rather unique. Bach designed some of his cantatas as dialogues between the soul and Christ, entitling each one a "Concerto in Dialogo." Here he drew on a musical tradition from the seventeenth century and with his distinctive musical language produced the finest achievements in this genre.

Heinrich Finck was born in Bamberg and quite probably spent his formative years at the court chapel in Cracow or Warsaw in Poland. In any case, this is what can be gathered from comments by his grandnephew, Hermannn Finck, in his Practica Musica of 1556. Here we also read that his granduncle was famed as a master already in the 1480's. After a short period of study in Leipzig he then was active as the church music director at the Polish court in Cracow for a number of years. He interrupted his activity there in 1490 in order to accept a position at the Hungarian royal court, but this arrangement was not permanent. When the ducal ensemble was disbanded in 1514, Finck probably became a member of the imperial court chapel. He later served the Salzburg Cathedral chapter, then at the Scottish Abbey in Vienna, where he contributed to the development of the choral and instrumental ensemble, and finally as the chapel master of Emperor Ferdinand I's court ensemble.

Today nothing remains of Ignaz von Beecke's former renown as apianist and composer. The early music lexicographers Gerber and Lipowsky were among those who celebrated his renown, but his many works have all been forgotten. And yet he created music of great originality very much absolutely worth getting to know again in the concert hall and on sound carriers. This release, featuring Beecke's piano concertos is a genuinely pioneering effort inasmuch as it represents one of the first commercial releases wtih works by this composer. Beecke's early works continued to be obliged to early classicism, while his late oeuvre of the 1790's began opening the door wide to romanticism. During the 1750's he initially served as an officer and in 1759, he made his way to the Wallerstein court as an adjutant to Hereditary Prince Kraft Ernst von Oettingen-Wallerstein. It was also here that he celebrated his first successes as a pianist and wrote his first compositions.

Hermann Max and his Rheinische Kantorei present an entirely new facet in the oeuvre of the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer on this recording premiere of his sacred chroal works. In the booklet, Max himself writes, "The protagonists of the Enlightenment influenced Giacomo's social network in letters and conversations during his early years. It was only logical that religious texts were viewed more in literary terms than as faith documents to be taken seriously. The stories from the Bible contradicting the laws of nature were taken more nonchalantly than with absolute seriousness and naive faith. Jesus often was mentioned no longer as the Son of God but as the most important human being ever born. As a principle operating against prejudices and intolerance, reason questioned everything religious and offered guidance contributing to the proper recognition of the laws of nature. For Meyerbeer, the fascination of religious texts lay in their musical setting as historical and literary material. Romanticists experienced "time travel" to regions located in the distant past as a departure from reality and the exploration of an imaginary world created by the mind. Giacomo enjoyed all of the above and was enthusiastic about what he learned as a traveler in Europe. His career as a virtuoso, which his great talent as a pianist when he was a boy had seemed to promise, was soon forgotten. Italy fascinated Meyerbeer. Especially Rossini and Salieri. He now kenw that it was right to have abandoned the oppressively dry instruction in composition that he was receiving from Zelter and to study in Darmstadt with Abbe Vogler. The Abbe cured him of self-doubts and opened his imagination to a vast ocean of compositional possibilities.