Ernst Gernot Klussmann (1901-1975) studied in Hamburg with Hermann Behn, the friend and patron of Gustav Mahler, Felix Woyrsch, and later with Joseph Haas in Munich. From 1925 he worked as a repetiteur in Bayreuth and held teaching positions in Cologne. In 1942, he was appointed director of the conservatory in Hamburg with the task of transforming it into a university of music, whose vice president he became at it's foundation in 1950. Klussmann's career invites us to take a differentiated look at the biographies of musicians who were not persecuted or driven into exile during the Nazi era, and who were reproached for being followers after the war. In the late 1920s, Klussman's music was criticized by the right-wing press as degenerate. The premiere of his 1st Symphony in Dresden in 1933 by Bruno Walter did not take place due to Walter's emigration. After the Gleichschaltung, Klussmann was part of the education system, without toeing the party line. In 2025, the Hamburg University of Music and Drama celebrates it's 75th anniversary. Reason enough to commemorate Klussmann with a first monographic CD dedicated to two chamber music works from his early period. They impressively show Klussmann's development from late Romanticism to Expressionism, a process that he was to continue after the war by embracing Schonberg's techniques of serial composition.

Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, studied with Alexander Zemlinsky and Alois Haba. He worked as a conductor, pianist and composer until the annexation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany in 1939. As the scion of a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, he survived - after forced labor and deportation to Theresienstadt - through a series of miracles. Winterberg, whose compositional legacy has been rediscovered only recently, combines various influences in his music to create an original and exciting personal style. He takes up stylistic elements of Janacek but is also influenced by the Second Viennese School and French Impressionism. Eda records dedicates a focus to this important Czech-Jewish composer, who saw himself as a bridge-builder between the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe.

Bolko Count von Hochberg (1843-1928), scion of a Silesian noble family, dedicated himself primarily to music after a short diplomatic career: as a composer (pupil of Friedrich Kiel in Berlin), musician, cultural manager, and important patron. In 1867, he founded the Silesian Music Festival, which he directed until 1925. In 1910, he initiated the construction of the Municipal Hall in Gorlitz, which he largely financed privately. As General Director of the Prussian theaters, he reformed the repertoire of the Berlin Court Opera, introduced Wagner's works, and engaged world-class conductors such as Felix Weingartner and Richard Strauss. Instrumental works by Hochberg are recorded here for the first time ever, late-romantic gems in classical perfection. Polish String Quartet releases on eda records include also first recordings of Jozef Koffler (eda 42) and Johann Anton Andre (eda 50).

Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alois Haba. He worked as a conductor, pianist and composer until the annexation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany in 1939. As the scion of a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, he survived - after forced labor and deportation to Theresienstadt - through a series of miracles. After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Germany. His compositional legacy, locked away for years in a German music archive, has only been rediscovered in recent years. Winterberg combines various influences in his music to create an original and exciting personal style. He takes up stylistic elements of Janacek but is also influenced by the Second Viennese School and French Impressionism. He saw himself as a bridge-builder between the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe. Eda records dedicates a focus to this important Czech-Jewish composers of the generation of the so called "Terezin composers" alongside Ullmann, Krasa and Haas. Further chamber music recordings and the complete works for piano with pianist Jonathan Powell will follow.

Polish-Ukrainian composer Józef Koffler is considered one of the most important representatives of the Second Viennese School before the outbreak of World War II. After studies in Vienna with Guido Adler and Egon Wellesz, among others, he quickly established himself in the European avant-garde and was regularly played at the festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music, of which he was a member. He was friends with Alban Berg and corresponded intensively with Arnold Schoenberg. As the first professor of atonal and dodecaphonic compositional techniques in Lwów/Lemberg, he contributed earlier than others to the dissemination of Schoenberg’s teaching and aesthetics. Five works by Koffler are presented here as world premiere recordings. For the first time ever some of his brilliant symphonic music can be heard on modern recording equipment: his Piano Concerto and his 2nd Symphony, in which he produced an original synthesis of neoclassicism and dodecaphony. In conjunction with the series Poland Abroad, eda records pays its respects with this third production in its en hommage series to a great Polish composer who became a victim of the Nazi terror, and whose outstanding works await rediscovery to the present day.

Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alois Haba. He worked as a conductor, pianist and composer until the annexation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany in 1939. As the scion of a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, he survived - after forced labor and deportation to Theresienstadt - through a series of miracles. After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Germany. His compositional legacy, locked away for years in a German music archive, has only been rediscovered in recent years. Winterberg combines various influences in his music to create an original and exciting personal style. He takes up stylistic elements of Janacek but is also influenced by the Second Viennese School and French Impressionism. He saw himself as a bridge-builder between the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe. Eda records dedicates a focus to this most important Czech-Jewish composers of the generation of the so called "Terezin composers" alongside Ullmann, Krasa and Haas. Further chamber music recordings and the complete works for piano with pianist Jonathan Powell will follow.

Johann Anton Andre (1775-1842), the scion of a Huguenot family that emigrated to Germany at the end of the seventeenth century, is known among musical experts primarily as the first publisher of an extensive edition of Mozart's works, but hardly as a composer. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Johann Andre Music Publishers in Offenbach, the firm founded by Andre's father in 1774, this first ever production of works by Johann Anton presents a series of chamber music works from around 1800. They reveal a young, openminded talent who developed an original personal style before the consolidation of what was to become known in music history by the epochal term "Viennese Classicism": a craft honed on models by Mozart and Haydn meets elegance and subtle irony, an inheritance from Johann Anton's French ancestors.

The string quartet genre has already once before been in the spotlight in the "Poland Abroad" series. With works by Joachim Mendelson, Roman Padlewski, and Simon Laks (eda 34), the focus was on the fate of three Polish composers who became victims of the National Socialists' policy of persecution and annihilation because their life circumstances did not provide a lifeline for flight and exile. With the present recording, we turn our attention to the works and biographies of three Polish-Jewish musicians who were spared ghetto, concentration camp and violent death thanks to timely emigration, and who are linked by decisive biographical details. All three were born in Poland at a time in which the Polish state had not yet been re-established. All three built careers in Berlin. All three managed to reach a safe harbor in the USA after Hitler's seizure of power, and were active in New York until the end of their lives. Ignatz Waghalter, first music director of the Stadtische Oper Charlottenburg (today Deutsche Oper Berlin), studied with Friedrich Gernsheim at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. A protege of Joseph Joachim and Arthur Nikisch, he developed an international career as a composer and conductor in the early years of the 20th century. Composed 25 years after Waghalter's first and only string quartet, Ignace Strasfogel's 1st String Quartet is also an early work of the highest perfection. Strasfogel, who studied in the master classes of Franz Schreker and Leonid Kreutzer, was the youngest ever student of the Berliner Hochschule and the youngest winner of the renowned Mendelssohn Prize during the Weimar Republic. After his emigration in 1934, he made a career as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. Karol Rathaus, also a master student of Schreker, ended his odyssey from Berlin via Paris and London in 1942 in New York, where he received a composition professorship at Queens College. His 5th String Quartet is his last completed opus, a work of great concentration and maturity.

With the homage to Joachim Mendelson, eda records continues its survey of Poland’s rich musical heritage of the first half of the twentieth century, a heritage that – as a result of the devastating consequences of the expulsion and extermination of the European Jews after 1933, the destruction of Polish musical life following the occupation of Poland in September 1939, and the policy of suppression during the communist era – was obliterated from music-historical consciousness. The monographic series en hommage appears as a supplement to eda records’ meanwhile six-part Poland Abroad series with first recordings of works by important Polish composers who almost all shared the fate of persecution and exile. Joachim Mendelson was born in Warsaw in 1892, and studied composition in his hometown and in Berlin. Like nearly all Polish composers of his generation, he went to Paris in the 1920s, where he joined the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, in which Poland’s entire musical elite gradually came together and, under the patronage of Karol Szymanowski, Arthur Rubinstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Maurice Ravel, and Nadia Boulanger, enriched the musical life of the metropolis on the Seine with extremely interesting colours. In the middle of the 1930s, Mendelson accepted a professorship at the Warsaw College of Music. After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, he was interned in the Warsaw ghetto, where he was murdered in 1943. Merely five compositions from Mendelson’s pen have been preserved in editions issued by the Parisian music publisher Max Eschig. In the works of the late 1930s recorded here for the first time, Mendelson finds his way to a classicism of synthesis that can integrate the refinement of French “impressionism” as well as Mahler’s Weltschmerz and Strauss’s emphatic style, the austere, rhythmically pointed inflection of the “New Objectivity” as well as the dance-like soulfulness of Slavic provenance. Mendelson’s String Quartet, his earliest preserved work, was already recorded for eda records by the Silesian String Quartet (EDA 35). Musicians from the three countries that marked the axis of Mendelson’s life – Poland, Germany, France – perform together on this CD, which was coproduced by Radio Berlin Brandenburg and Polish Radio.

eda records launched the highly regarded series “Poland Abroad” in 2004 in cooperation with DeutschlandRadio Kultur following a festival that the Konzerthaus Berlin dedicated to Poland, Germany’s neighboring country, on the occasion of the eastern expansion of the European Community. The focus of this extensive presentation is on composers who have hitherto attracted little or no attention in international musical life, composers who as a consequence of the political situation (during Poland’s partition, during the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Communist yoke) were persecuted or driven into exile, and several of whom survived, sometimes under dramatic circumstances, the war and Shoah. Compositions in all genres – opera, ballet, symphony, concerto, and chamber music – will be presented. The goal is to highlight the outstanding quality of this neglected repertoire by means of reference recordings and to stimulate interest in a central aspect of cultural history (not only of the 20th century), transculturality, and transnationality. The school of Nadia Boulanger, and the influence of Stravinsky and French neoclassicism were decisive for the three composers presented in vol. 6 of the series. Because of their Jewish descent, Jerzy Fitelberg and Tadeusz Kassern were in mortal danger in Europe after 1939. While Fitelberg, a master student of Franz Schreker’s, was able to emigrate to New York via Paris, Tadeusz Kassern remained in Poland and survived the Second World War in hiding. In 1945 he went to New York as a diplomat, but broke with Communist Poland in 1948 and applied for political asylum in the United States, which was denied to him for years by the paranoid immigration authorities of the McCarthy era. Michał Spisak, resident in Paris since 1937, vice-president of the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, spent the war years in a secluded village near Grenoble, returned again to Paris immediately after the war, where he was active until the end of his life, enjoying great success in France as well as in Poland. The recordings on this CD were made live in 2011 at the 25th Warsaw Music Encounters festival. Jerzy Fitelberg’s Double Concerto, which received its European first performance at the festival, opens a new window to the solo concerto genre, which has previously been lacking in the series. While Jerzy Fitelberg is already present in the catalogue of eda records with his First Piano Sonata and the Concerto for String Orchestra (eda 19), we expand the circle of composers introduced in “Poland Abroad” with Spisak and Kassern, whose works enjoy a recognition appropriate to their importance neither in concert life nor on the market for recorded music that is oversaturated with multiple versions of standard repertoire.

As a sixteen-year old aspiring pianist, York Höller made his debut with his own compositions. These piano works were written between 1968 and 1996 and have long since been out of print. These works represent Höller's life and the landmarks of it.

eda records launched the “Poland Abroad” series in 2004 in cooperation with Deutschlandradio Kultur following a festival that the Konzerthaus Berlin dedicated to Poland as Germany’s neighbor on the occasion of the eastern expansion of the European Union. This large-scale presentation put the spotlight on composers who have largely gone unnoticed on the international music scene and were persecuted or driven into exile due to the political situation (during the partition of Poland, the Nazi occupation, and the Communist yoke that followed). Some of them survived the war and the Shoah under dramatic circumstances. The series presents compositions of every genre: opera, ballet, symphony, concerto, and chamber music. The goal is to highlight the outstanding quality of this repertoire in reference recordings and to encourage listeners to take an interest in two central aspects of cultural history (and not only that of the 20th century): transculturality and transnationality. All of the composers presented here stepped outside of their national context and developed a style that was as individual as it was universal in their engagement with the various movements of the European avant-garde of their time. Vol. 5 of the “Poland Abroad” series presents masterpieces of 20th century chamber music. They stand for the extraordinary stylistic diversity of Polish music – both during and after World War II – and reveal the manifold international networks in which it developed. With his legendary Quintet, which was premiered in an underground concert shortly before the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, Constantin Regamey created a breathtaking key work of the Polish avant-garde, a companion piece to Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Regamey played an important role in the cultural organization of the Polish underground during the Nazi occupation. Caught after the uprising, he was spared from deportation thanks to the Swiss citizenship he inherited from his father. After the war, Regamey was a leading linguist, an expert for Eastern European and Asian languages, teaching in Lausanne, as well as one of the key figures in the contemporary music scene in Switzerland. Józef Koffler, the pre-war era’s most important representative of the Second Viennese School in Poland, was discovered in hiding and executed by the Nazis in 1943. The evocation of love in his 1931 Cantata based on the words of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (which also inspired Brahms in his Four Serious Songs) has lost none of its power and urgency. Simon Laks narrowly escaped the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau as a member of the men’s orchestra. After the liberation, he went back to Paris, where he had lived since 1926 as an active member of the “Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais”, and resumed his career as a composer. His Divertimento from 1966, a piece of divine lightness and masterly elegance, became his swan song. After the Six-Day War in 1967 and the anti-Semitic acts in Poland in 1968, followed by the exodus of thousands of Polish Jews, he lost his belief in artistic creation.

Already in 1993, eda records released the much acclaimed world premiere recording of Viktor Ullmann’s piano sonatas nos. 1 through 4, performed by pianist Edith Kraus, a survivor of the Ghetto Theresienstadt, who had there given the premiere performance of Ullmann’s 6th sonata in 1943. Edith Kraus, who died in 2013 at the age of one hundred years and to the memory of whom this recording is dedicated, wasn’t able, due to reasons of health, to complete her recording of Ullmann’s sonatas with the nos. 5 through 7. Twenty years later, eda records releases a two CD set including the complete sonatas by Vikor Ullmann together with sonatas by Norbert von Hannenheim, performed by the young Moritz Ernst. In the 20th century, if often suffices to know a person’s date of birth in order to get an idea of his experiences and his fate. 1898, Viktor Ullmann’s and Norbert von Hannenheim’s year of birth, means: witnessing World War I during the formative years of late adolescence; attempting to establish oneself during the Twenties - a time that was hardly “golden”, but rather downright chaotic – and eventually, after 1933, living through increasing darkness and danger of death; a time in which boundaries dissolve, all identities become indeterminate and solid points of reference seem no longer to exist; a time in which the alert “I” is subjected to severe psychological strain. The piano sonatas by Ullmann and Hannenheim bear witness to their faith in a high purpose of artistic endeavor. They demonstrate vitality through their power of form, wrested from the most adverse of conditions. This is what makes us appreciate and honor this music especially today. The arrangement of this recording’s sonatas was chosen in order to ensure a varied listening experience and to bring some facets of Ullmann’s and Hannenheim’s compositional craftsmanship into prominence. The presentation of the sonatas in alternating order highlights the contrasting personal idiosyncrasies of the two composers.

Ernst Bachrich (1892-1942) was a pupil and close collaborator of Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna. As a founding member of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, pianist and composer, he was one of the most important protagonists of the Second Viennese School. After working as a Kapellmeister in Dusseldorf and Duisburg, he returned to Vienna, where he attempted to make a stand against the increasing repressions after the Anschluss. He was deported in May 1942 and murdered in July of the same year in the Majdanek extermination camp. The present production is the first ever recorded presentation of Bachrich's works. It came into being in partnership with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and the EchoSpore project, which the Cologne College of Music launched in 2018 to rediscover and publish works by persecuted composers. Following first recordings of works by Roberto Gerhard, Viktor Ullmann and Jozef Koffler, eda records presents with Ernst Bachrich another composer from the Schoenberg School who was protected from epigonism by a strong artistic personality, who at the beginning of the 20th century endeavored to synthesize various tendencies of the avant-garde from a Central-European perspective.

In its very first thematic series (released in the 1990s), eda records dedicated itself to presenting a total of six recordings in the piano quintet genre, many of which were the first to ever be recorded worldwide. The Finnish-German PIHITPUDAS KVINTETTI (Pihtipudas Piano Quintet), artistic partners of eda records in this project, is the only professional chamber ensemble to date which works exclusively in this line-up. In 2013, it celebrated the 25th anniversary of its founding. Since then, the renowned formation hasn’t just focused on the main pieces in its repertoire – far from it. Instead, it has dedicated much of its activity to unearthing a wide variety of little-known and forgotten works, thus enriching the piano quintet genre with its discoveries and recordings in a highly original manner. The fact that Anton Rubinstein was Russian is indisputable from a purely genealogical perspective, but he can hardly be described as a Russian composer in the way a present-day music listener would understand it. Anton and his brother had their (Silesian) mother to thank for recognising their musical talent and sparing them from a career in business. Anton started out studying piano under the renowned Villoing in Moscow, and it wasn’t long before he was passed around as piano genius. Paris and London were among the stations in his triumph as a performer before he finally landed in Berlin and came to know and love the music of German Romanticism. As a result, he was barred from the Russian composer schools. And while this did not dispel his recognition, he became much better known as a pianist than as a composer, even though his body of work was prolific. By establishing the conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Rubinstein laid the foundation for the training of instrumentalists in Russia, which remains first-class to this day. His wrote his piano quintet in 1876, which was naturally a veritable piece of virtuosity – for the piano. But it also offered plenty for the strings to do. The result: a work rich in melody with a wealth of ideas. Shostakovich, in contrast, certainly is a Russian composer, as well as a political chronicler and commentator on the tide of events over the 20th century. The way he conveyed his emotions in his 15 string quartets is nothing short of legendary; the fact that he composed at least a single piano quintet is thanks to his friendship with the Beethoven Quartet, an early formation of the Moscow Conservatory which sought to finally appear together with Shostakovich after having debuted several of his quartets. The time had come in 1940; according to historical sources, the debut was an extraordinarily great success – and two movements even had to be repeated. And it ended up winning Shostakovich the Stalin Award, which came with a prize of no less than 100,000 roubles, which at that time was an astronomical sum for a work of music. In sharp contrast to Rubinstein’s approach, Shostakovich used the piano part as a voice which was not intended to dominate his score. In so doing, he created one of the first works of this genre which was suited to a chamber musician instead of a piano virtuoso – in this case, himself.