Ensemble Extrakte – this name outlines a musical program. The thirteen treatises on this album are seismographic soundscapes of uncommon encounters. In 2013 Elke Moltrecht and Sandeep Bhagwati brought together the eleven musical polyglots of the ensemble in music. They came from widely different musical backgrounds and to each of them music meant something else. Every track on this album started with an idea – a poem, an image, an artistic form, a metaphor etc. – and grew in workshops and rehearsals. This album is the culmination of what the musicians found to be precious, the music that they loved the most. It is a milestone, yes, but one that, in a very real sense, marks only their very beginning. Ensemble Extrakte is part of a large-scale international research-creation project led by Sandeep Bhagwati at matralab (Concordia University Montreal).

Friedhelm Dohl Edition, Vol. 14

Urumchi - capital city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China and home to the Turkic people, the Uyghurs, is the departure point for this film. The city, which is marked by the ambivalence between its Uyghur tradition and global modernity, is home to the musician Perhat, who like many other musicians from the region had no ideas about ever leaving the city. This film, by Mukaddas Mijit, is about music that is caught up in the tension between tradition and modernity. Mukaddas Mijit is an Uyghur ethnomusicologist and filmmaker. A Han blogger wrote about Perhat saying, He is bringing sincerity and honesty to all of us, and this is what our utilitarian society lacks the most.

Works for Clarinet Solo

Some of Peter Gahn’s earliest impressions were of the art of cubism and the compositional style of Bernd Alois Zimmerman. Today, Gahn is still receptive to inspiration from art. Many of his works owe their inspiration to architecture, literature, theatre, dance, and visual art. Ensemble Reflexion K is widely known for their brilliant interpretations of contemporary music.

The Morgenland Festival Osnabruck has dedicated itself since 2005 to the fascinating music culture of the Near and Middle East, from traditional music to classic and avant-garde, jazz, and rock. With its focus on a region which immediately conjures up positive and negative cliché images, the Festival has set itself the goal of counteracting these images with authentic ones. On this recording, Dreyer-Gaido presents one of the currently most exciting Armenian jazz bands in a magnificent live recording of audio guru Walter Quintus.

Founded by harpist Sirin Pancaroglu and singer and composer Bora Uymaz, the ensemble Simdi is one of the most prestigious representatives of Sufi music in Turkey. The ensemble plays both the compositions of its members and traditional repertoire. French tuba and serpent player Michel Godard joins the ensemble for this recording.

Before the invention of the phonogram, arrangements for chamber orchestras made it easier to listen to orchestral works. In modern times, their charm is not only based on the frequently encountered musical reduction, but also in the possibility to find new nuances in the pieces. On the present CD soprano Barbara H�fling and the Helian Quartett showcase both adaptions (Mahler and Mussorgsky) as well as original works (Hindemith).Ms. H�fling, a singer with a wide-ranging repertoire, won the Supersonic Award for her 2010 debut CD, which featured songs by Schumann, Schubert and Faur�.

The Moravian-born Jewish composer Gideon Klein (1919-45) composed his final work, the String Trio (1944) while interned in Theresienstadt. + Quite a few of his works written there are based on Czech folksongs; his string trio falls into this category. + Jewish composer Josef Koffler (1896-1944) suffered a similarly tragic fate as Klein. + His Trio, op. 10 (1928) was written, however, when he was Prof. of Harmony and Atonal Composition in Lviv (Lemberg). + The Trio in D Major by Ernst Neumann (1832-1910) is a work from 1883. + The Eos Trio Frankfurt is keen to bring forgotten or unknown works back to audiences.

Ever since its triumphal premiere on 12th September 1910 in Munich, Mahler’s 8th Symphony in E flat major has had the reputation of being, along with Arnold Schönberg’s “Gurre-Liedern”, the piece on the whole of the symphonic repertoire calling for the largest number of participants. This recording has a number of musicians much less than the average, but Gabriel Feltz sees it more like a great chance. He used flanking positions for the choir in relation to the orchestra and lager parts of the choirs were facing each other, which gives especially the first parts stereophonic effects. For Feltz these performances of Mahler’s 8th symphony on 3rd and 4th July 2018 were especially successful and fulfilling moments in his life as a musician.

Elisaveta Blumina prefers playing character pieces. This may be because, even as a child, she was attracted to the ballet and her most fervent wish was to become a ballerina. This wish was never to be fulfilled ("You are too tall", they said at the ballet school", but it had a significant impact in her understanding of music: Through the perception of dance, of movements and the characters involved, she can get a better feeling for the music. The fundamental reason for the choice of repertoire on this album was that the works by Scriabin, Prokofiev, Weinberg, Frid and Kancheli also, for her, represent a retrospective connection to her home country.

Aynur is one of the most prominent Kurdish singers. With impressive voice and extraordinary musical narration she represents Kurdish music heritage which comes from her cultural roots as a global genre. She is a unique vocal artist who specializes in infusing traditional Kurdish folk music with a contemporary sensibility influenced by Western music. And this soulful voice is finally rejoicing her audience with her new album ‘Hedûr / Solace of Time’ after a break of five years. Hedûr is Aynur’s long awaited 7th studio album, it means “consoling oneself, taking solace in time” in Kurdish in her mother tongue. In Aynur’s own words the journey of the album Hedûr, emphasizing the present moment of musical and spiritual journey, is “The way of finding inner peace and balancing it; the result of dearth, isolation or even of existence itself.” One of the basis of the underlying themes of the album, “taking solace in time” is without a doubt a reflection of hardships, injustice and the mass misery being experienced in her homeland Turkey.

In 2014, ten Montr�al musicians, each from another tradition, came together to re-imagine an iconic work by Claude Vivier. They re-arranged Vivier's score, rendered his melodies in their own manner, improvised around his music, and remembered their own traditional music through Vivier's composition. This album is a composite selection of live recordings from various concerts of this project since 2015. Constantinople is a musical ensemble that chose the journey-geographical certainly, but also historical, cultural and inner-as it's cornerstone. It draws inspiration from all sources and aims for distant horizons. Inspired by the ancient city illuminating the East and West, Constantinople was founded in 1998 in Montreal by it's artistic director, Kiya Tabassian.

Gabriel Feltz writes: "The choral symphonic poem "The Bells" was written during Rachmaninoff's last years in Russia (first performance 1913, emigration 1917). It is, without a doubt, note- worthy that the Russian translation of a poem ("The Bells") by Edgar Allan Poe was used. I know of no other famous Russian composition of that time which is based on an American text. Rachmaninoff conducted the first performance in Saint Petersburg himself. In spite of already having a very successful career as a soloist behind him, composing was always more important to him than playing concerts. Respighi wrote to Rachmaninoff asking to be allowed to orchestrate some of the Etudes. Rachmaninoff helpfully suggested titles for some of the pieces, which provided a degree of insight with regard to their content. It is quite interesting that these titles are not included in the original piano version. In a way this somehow reveals Sergei Rachmaninoff's inner world, something which he had not been willing to divulge earlier.

This long-expected new double album presents Kinan Azmeh as composer, soloist and outstanding improvisator together with the Grammy-awarded Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted by Manuel Nawri. One album presents Kinan as interpreter of his own music while the second album presents three clarinet concertos that were written for him by the Syrian composers Kareem Roustom, Zaid Jabri and Dia Succari. Finally it presents the most recent of Azmeh’s works, The Fence, the Rooftop and the Distant Sea, a duo for clarinet and cello written for himself and Yo-Yo Ma, commissioned by the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and first performed there in January 2017. Hailed as a virtuoso and “intensely soulful” by the New York Times, “Spellbinding” and “Brilliant” by the New Yorker, and “Incredibly rich sound” by the CBC, Kinan Azmeh’s utterly distinctive sound across musical genres has gained him international recognition as clarinetist and composer.