The history of the 20th century was shaped to an extreme degree by ideological, political and racial barriers that hindered the arts from developing freely. Many artists were forced to emigrate, while others perished in death camps. Those who remained and survived were often cut off from the outside world, forced to adjust, or were silenced into submission. And this was by no means restricted to individual names: entire groups of artists and genres of art were eradicated and are no longer present in cultural life. With its series “Across Boundaries – Discovering Russia 1910–1940,” eda records seeks to bridge one such a gap in music history. It presents world premiere recordings of works by Russian composers who were part of the generation of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and who made major contributions to Russian music in the 1910s and 1920s. The reason why they were banished and suppressed: their Jewish ethnic background and refusal to accept the dictated “socialist realism.” Grouped around Sergei Prokofiev’s famous piano cycle Visions fugitives (1915–17), Vol. 1 presents first-ever recordings of character pieces by Joseph Achron, Arthur Lourié, Samuil Feinberg, Alexander Weprik, and Lazare Saminsky. Aside from Feinberg, they all emerged from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and, following Mussorgsky, represent a turn away from the late-romantic tradition à la Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. A stylistic arch spans from Arthur Lourié’s enchanting 1917 cycle Piano Gosse to the rather bitter Statuettes by Joseph Achron from 1930. Vol. 1 of the series serves as an introduction of the representatives of this “New Jewish School”, while Volumes 2 and 3 explore their oeuvres in the context of their Jewish identity, persecution, and exile.

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. In its first release, which also marked the birth of eda records, the ensemble dealt with two Romantic works which had remained largely unknown since their composition. Max Bruch’s piano quintet in G-minor was only published a few years before the recording was made, almost exactly a hundred years after its creation. Bruch could hardly be called a proponent of chamber music. Nonetheless, he was not about to turn down an order from a board member of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, which he himself had recently become director of. After getting off to a promising start in England, his hope was that his works would continue to spread throughout the English-speaking world. It took Bruch no less than nine years to complete his work, which ended up never even being printed during his lifetime. The posthumous publication of this unjustly forgotten gem did not appear until 1988. Alexander Borodin’s early piano quintet in C-minor hails from the initial phase of his composing work. He wrote it at the age of 28 on a journey to Italy, prompted by the young pianist Katarina Protopova, whom he went on to marry. It was on this journey (in 1862) that Borodin was called to St. Petersburg – albeit not as a composer, but as a chemist. In the same year, he met Balakirev, who was to give him lessons in order to channel the musical inclinations which he had already developed at an early age. Listeners will immediately appreciate for themselves how original this quintet is in its mixture of tuneful “Russian” elements and characteristic regional elegy. Between these two works comes the quintet of Pehr Henrik Nordgren – a fascinating melange of Nordic/Finnish and Far-Eastern sounds and traditions, and the ensemble’s homage to Finland, where they did most of their work. Nordgren spent many years in Japan and incorporated the “folkloric” (in the broadest sense of the word) musical traditions of both lands, which formed the two centre-points of his life.

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. In this third release in the Pihtipudas Kvintetti series, the ensemble turns to two protagonists of national Romanticism. Edward Elgar’s quintet is one of his final four major works, concluding with his legendary Cello Concerto Op. 85 in 1919. These works are often described as having an “autumnal” feeling. In fact, they constitute something of an alternative to the usually monumental symphonic works (both with and without choir) which Elgar had primarily composed up to the end of the 19th century and which ended up finally gaining him the (national) recognition he had longed for. The cyclical form of the work is clearly evident, yet its motif deserves a special mention. It appears three times in a row at the end of the first movement. We meet this descending four-note motif over and over in one form or another, not only over the course of this piano quintet, but also at the most thrilling point in the cello concerto, namely where Elgar returns to the slowest movement just before the conclusion, lending the work another turn to a melancholic, nearly depressing mood. He clearly treated this motif like a personal motto in his final major works. After these “autumnal works,” Elgar virtually fell silent as a composer. The piano quintet continues to fascinate listeners today; the effect of the mysterious mood at the beginning of the piece (which continues to keep critics and biographers spellbound) remains uncontested to this day. George Bernhard Shaw, whom Elgar befriended late in life, attended the private preview in the summer of 1918 and declared these suspenseful measures to be “the finest thing of its kind since Coriolan.” When Elgar and Camille Saint-Saëns met in 1913, it had already been over 50 years since the Frenchman had composed his quintet. At that time, he was organist at the Eglise de la Madeleine, and, as one might expect, wrote church music. However, the fact that, after the three symphonies he had composed in the meantime, he now presented a piano quintet, was met with scepticism and rejection. “As a young composer, he faced great difficulties at that time, since the French audience had developed an antipathy towards chamber music, and the ingenious newcomer sought to champion and maintain this lofty musical genre.” (Jules Combarieu, 1901). Both chamber music and the symphony were deemed genres of the German/Austrian tradition, and Saint-Saëns found himself on thin ice by carrying on these styles, which had come to be condemned as “Germanisms” in France. His quintet (as well as previous work) showed the influence of his musical role models in Viennese classical and early Romantic music, while the influence of Schubert and Schumann is unmistakeable. Nonetheless, he was able to create accents in his work which transcended these influences. For instance, the thematic combination of the two outer movements and attaca transition from the Andante sostenuto to the furious Scherzo (Presto) were at the very least unusual for their time. Even more so is the ad libitum expansion of the instrumentation in this movement by the addition of a contrabass to make it a sextet, an option which this recording made use of.

In its focus on the repertoire of composers who fell victim to the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, eda records sought to avoid labeling them with catchwords such as “verfemt” or “entartet” (literally “outlawed” and “degenerate,” terms used in the Third Reich’s persecution of musicians and artists) in order not to practice modern-day ghettoization. The rediscovery of composers such as Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein quickly led to the term “Theresienstadt composers,” which suggests that the musicians somehow belonged together, as if they were part of the same school or artist group. The fact that the Nazis confined them in a concentration camp became their identifying feature, which actually makes it even more difficult to adequately address the composers’ respective biographical particularities and highly disparate stylistic approaches. As with the other CDs in eda records’ catalogue dedicated to composers who were interned in Terezín and murdered in Auschwitz, it is intended to highlight the context in which they developed and to designate the place they should rightfully claim in European history of music, with all of their individual features. This CD broadens the Terezín-context with world premiere recordings of works by Franz Schreker and Bohuslav Martinů. The Bohemian and Moravian roots of the composers portrayed here manifest themselves in markedly different ways, and amalgamate with later influences into exciting personal styles. Diving into the flair of Paris, a city charged in equal measure with surrealism as well as neoclassicism, was of decisive importance to both Krása and Martinů. The world premiere recording of Franz Schreker’s dance play Der Wind (The Wind), which oscillates between impressionism and fin de siècle longing (written in 1910 for the Wiesenthal sisters in Vienna), foreshadows other focal points in eda records’ catalogue, such as the exploration of the origins of expressive dance (eda 13, Schreker/Toch) or Schreker’s impact as a teacher in Vienna and Berlin (eda 17, 19, 24).

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. This second release in the Pihtipudas Kvintetti series presents two quintets originating from the US which couldn’t be more different – but which can each be considered grandiose, essential works in this genre. When Bloch wrote his Piano Quintet No. 1 in 1923, he had already been living in the USA for seven years, having moved there after losing his professorship in Geneva amidst political intrigue. In his new homeland, he composed the works which he is best known for today, which focused on his Jewish roots and ethnic pride. His quintet hails from the end of this period and forms the transition into the neo-classical phase of Bloch’s work. A characteristic piece from this new stylistic direction, it spills over from a wide range of styles and techniques, and even dares to venture into the domain of quarter-tone music. This opulent work is held together by both a formal sternness in all four movements, as well as by the remarkable fact that Bloch accumulated virtually all of its thematic material from a single motif. Moreover, its vehement rhythmic power makes this monolith a unique composition to this very day. Amy Beach was one of the greatest musical Wunderkinder of the New World and was held in high regard as both a composer and a virtuoso on the piano. In fact, she taught herself how to compose, which never hurt her fabulous career – not even in Europe. The quintet made its debut in February 1908 (with Beach herself on piano) and quickly became one of the most popular works in its genre. The piece bears many of the traits which were characteristic of Amy Beach’s mid-period compositions. It combines the expressive, virtuosic handling of the piano, stretched-out melodic lines and great emphasis on chromatics with austere use of instrumentation, steady development and handling of the motif-based material, as well as her ability to lend the work clear, formal breaks in spite of its highly Romantic approach. The Scherzo in F-major of Finnish composer Toivo Kuula was discovered by the performers at the Helsinki University Library and recorded based on the manuscript. Kuula’s auspicious career – a generous state scholarship sent him to the Continent to continue his studies – was ended abruptly by his early death in the Finnish Civil War in 1918. A violinist himself, he loved stringed instruments and chamber music, and dedicated much of his work to the folk music of his homeland. In his compositions, he strove to synthesise the immediacy of traditional music with a pronounced, emotional subjectivity and passion. This early scherzo’s combination of seemingly familiar melodies with venturesome harmonies makes it clear how extraordinary talented he was.

Krzysztof Meyer, who studied with Stanisław Wiechowicz and Krzysztof Penderecki in Krakow as well as with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, ranks among the most important Polish composers of his generation. His oeuvre encompasses works from all genres. He was awarded the most important composition prices, including that of the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation for his opera Kyberiad in 1970, two special prizes from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers Competition in 1970 and 1978, and the Herder Prize in 1984. Since the 1987 he has split his professional life between Krakow, where he was vice-president of the Academy of Music, and Cologne, were he taught composition at the Conservatory. Between 1985 and 1989 he was president of the Polish Composers Union. Krzysztof Meyer is a protagonist of the so called “Polish School” and also a distinguished writer on music. He gained worldwide reputation for his biography of Shostakovich. Meyer’s relationship with the piano is a very personal one. He has played the instrument since his childhood, attaining the perfection needed to perform in public at a very early age. For many years, he composed piano works primarily for his personal use. The first four sonatas reflect the stylistic development of the young composer whose primary reference – as of so many other composers of his generation – was Bartók. The parallel triads at the end of Meyer’s Sonata No. 1, a quote from the conclusion of Bartók’s String Quartet no. 6, can clearly be heard as a reference and homage to the great Hungarian composer who died prematurely in 1945. Meyer’s later three sonatas attest to how Polish “sonorism” had developed and flourished in the 1960s: a prominent feature of the Polish School, which reacted to serialism not with systems and rules, but with a search for new sounds. The composer accompanied the WRD studio recordings as artistic advisor. Christian Seibert gave his debut concert at the age of ten. At sixteen, he began studies with Pavel Gililov in Cologne. He went on to study in Vienna, participating in master classes with pianists such as Bruno Leonardo Gelber and Rudolf Kehrer. The Busoni Competition in Bolzano, the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau, and other international successes paved his way to many concert halls in Germany and abroad, including the Gasteig in Munich, the Salzburger Residenz, and London’s Wigmore Hall. The cpo label has released Christian Seibert’s recordings of piano music by Ernst Toch and Alexandre Tansman.

The 1930s saw composers in Berlin beginning to use the saxophone as a classical instrument ¬– the alto sax paired with the piano being a particular favorite. But alas, the heyday of the classical saxophone in Germany was all too short. The Nazis’ cultural policy was the kiss of death for this pariah instrument. Yet a good number of works for the concert saxophone still emerged in the face of this restrictive environment. Some appeared in Berlin, others were created in the exile that many composers had to choose after 1933. Only a handful of works for alto sax and piano were written in Germany after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that this format finally enjoyed a rebirth. The four-part series “Music for Saxophone from Berlin / Music for Saxophone from Germany” offers a selection of works for this distinctive liaison of instruments – from pre-war Berlin, post-war Germany, and again from Berlin’s flourishing musical life at the turn of the millennium. Most of these are world-premier recordings. After repression, war, and finally the division of the country had hit the metropolis, performers and composers in Berlin only started returning to the classical saxophone in the 1980s. The fourth part in the series is dedicated to compositions for the alto sax and piano that were written in Berlin between 1982 and 2004. Several phases of radical musical transformation after World War II had a fruitful impact on this combination of instruments, leading to the exploration of new compositional techniques and the creation of fascinating and unheard-of sound worlds.

The 1930s saw composers in Berlin beginning to use the saxophone as a classical instrument ¬– the alto sax paired with the piano being a particular favorite. But alas, the heyday of the classical saxophone in Germany was all too short. The Nazis’ cultural policy was the kiss of death for this pariah instrument. Yet a good number of works for the concert saxophone still emerged in the face of this restrictive environment. Some appeared in Berlin, others were created in the exile that many composers had to choose after 1933. Only a handful of works for alto sax and piano were written in Germany after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that this format finally enjoyed a rebirth. The four-part series “Music for Saxophone from Berlin / Music for Saxophone from Germany” offers a selection of works for this distinctive liaison of instruments – from pre-war Berlin, post-war Germany, and again from Berlin’s flourishing musical life at the turn of the millennium. Most of these are world-premiere recordings. “Music for Saxophone from Germany” sheds light on the saxophone situation against the background of the dogmas and judgments of post-war modernism. The majority of avant-gardists shunned the saxophone, considering it “dubious.” But composers using tonal and free-tonal styles made great use of the instrument and its image in a language that represented a continuation of classical modernism. This collection covers the 1950s and 60s by presenting a generation of composers who banged the drum for a combination of instruments that was again considered inappropriate.

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. “What would Brahms say about that?” Herzogenberg asked in 1897. But Brahms held his tongue, has he had done since 1875, when the “New German” Herzogenberg, who had started out as a comrade-in-arms of Wagner and Liszt, suddenly became a Brahmsian. What it was exactly that moved Herzogenberg – a hopeful, oft-mentioned composer in certain circles – to change his position and condemn the New Germans from that point on remains unknown. What is known is that this new position more or less meant the end of his career, since there wasn’t all that much air left to breath in Brahms’ vicinity. In 1872, Herzogenberg moved to Leipzig of all places, the hotbed of musical conservatism, where he was effectively ignored. He could no longer make a living from composing there – and fell silent for three years. But he broke his silence in 1875 and returned to the public with his piano quintet in C-major (!). As with all his other works, he sent this one to Brahms as well – in vain. It wasn’t until it was too late that he found out that Brahms was displeased by nearly all of his scores. Nonetheless, the Herzogenberg family remained in touch with Brahms for life; Heinrich and his wife Elisabeth had the honour of being the first to see several of his most important works – but not the famous piano quintet: in this case, it was Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, who used clever criticism to cultivate it from its initial seed as a string quartet into a work for two pianos and finally into the piano quintet in its definite form. While many consider the Brahmsian work to be his greatest chamber music creation, Herzogenberg’s sister piece disappeared from the concert podiums for many years – unjustly, as attested by this rediscovery, with which eda records brought its series of piano quintets performed by Pihtipudas Kvintetti to a close.

More than wars, religious and political upheaval, it was industrialization that shaped the basic feel of life in the modern era. The breakthrough of machines into everyman’s life and their increasing dominance in work processes was already reflected in the painting and literature of the 19th century. But music – supposedly the most romantic of all arts – only dealt with the social, material, and intellectual implications of this transformation much later, after the First World War. The age of the machine then moved into the concert and opera halls in the twenties, a “gloriously manly era,” as machine fetishist Fernand Léger called it. Maschinist Hopkins (1929), an opera by Schreker student Max Brand, conquered the repertoires and achieved performance figures equaled only by Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf. Honegger’s railroad piece Pacific 213 (1923), Alexander Mossolov’s Die Eisengießerei (1926/28), and George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1924) are considered highpoints of the musical treatment of the world of machines. Antheil used propeller noises and sirens to live up to his reputation as the iconoclastic bad boy of music: 10 years after Stravinsky’s Sacre, the music world needed another scandal. The topos of machine music was a major influence (albeit less in the foreground) on a whole generation of post-romantic composers, whose intellectual inventory included jazz, as well as the archaic rhythms of Stravinsky’s folkloric works, atonality, and dodecaphony. Yet, the fascination this generation of composers found in the cold lives of the machines is often interpreted too one-sidedly and too positively from the viewpoint of Russian Futurism and Suprematism. With this collection of piano works, we would like to draw attention to the extremely multifaceted, often ambivalent impact the pacemaker of modern times, as the machine was often considered to be, had on avant-garde composers basically in the first half of the 20th century.

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. One such figure the festival highlighted was Auschwitz survivor Szymon (Simon) Laks, whose oeuvre runs through the “Poland Abroad” series like a golden thread. It 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 demonstrated 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. In Vol. 1 of the series, the Berlin Chamber Symphony presents works for string orchestra under the guidance of artistic director Jurgen Bruns. With the exception of the Serenade by Karłowicz, all works are recorded here for the first time. Karłowicz, who was close to the “Young Poland” group that surrounded Szymanowski, had studied in Berlin; his Serenade was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Jerzy Fitelberg, son of the legendary conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, also studied in Berlin. As a graduate of Franz Schreker’s master class at the Berliner Musikhochschule, he ranked among the outstanding representatives of the young Polish avant-garde, which received long-term support from Alexandre Tansman, the doyen of Poland’s new music movement. Tansman and Fitelberg both managed to escape Nazi persecution by fleeing to the US. Simon Laks, who joined the “Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais” in Paris in 1926, was imprisoned in 1941 on account of his Jewish heritage and deported to Auschwitz. He survived as the director of the men’s orchestra at the Birkenau extermination camp.

In the three-part series “Franz Schreker’s master classes in Vienna and Berlin,” pianist, violinist, and tireless treasure hunter Kolja Lessing takes an in-depth look at the outstanding and multifaceted talents who emanated from the talent factory of Franz Schreker – the German-speaking world’s most important composition teacher of the 1910s and ’20s, alongside Busoni and Schoenberg. In 1912, the year of the spectacular world premiere of his opera Der Ferne Klang in Frankfurt, Schreker became the successor to his mentor Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Academy of Music. He soon gained recognition as an authority on progressive pedagogy. His circle of students in Vienna included such figures as Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, Artur Rodziński, Joseph Rosenstock, Felix Petyrek, Karol Rathaus, Wilhelm Grosz, and Max Brand. In 1920, at the pinnacle of his fame, Schreker was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule. Along with him went Krenek and Hába, followed by the likes of Wunderkind Ignace Strasfogel, Berthold Goldschmidt, Jerzy Fitelberg, and many others, as well as – rather exceptional for the time – the female students Grete von Zieritz and Zdenka Ticharich. Wilhelm Grosz, one of the earliest and most gifted students from Schreker’s time in Vienna, and Berthold Goldschmidt, Schreker’s student in Berlin, represent the large group of Schreker’s pupils of Jewish origins who were proscribed as “degenerate” during the Third Reich. Both emigrated to England. Zdenka Ticharich and Vladas Jakubėnas, on the other hand, represent the typical fate of Eastern European composers whose careers were overshadowed by the establishment of totalitarian systems in their homelands. Ecklebe and Fiebig remained in Germany during the Nazi dictatorship but without allowing their oeuvres to be used to serve the criminal regime. Avoiding a self-sufficing “art for art’s sake” attitude, they stand for an aesthetic movement that primarily arose from Hindemith’s milieu around 1930 (after the most disparate new forms of musical expression had been explored in the “Golden Twenties”).

The 1930s saw composers in Berlin beginning to use the saxophone as a classical instrument – the alto sax paired with the piano being a particular favorite. But alas, the heyday of the classical saxophone in Germany was all too short. The Nazis’ cultural policy was the kiss of death for this pariah instrument. Yet a good number of works for the concert saxophone still emerged in the face of this restrictive environment. Some appeared in Berlin, others were created in the exile that many composers had to choose after 1933. Only a handful of works for alto sax and piano were written in Germany after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that this format finally enjoyed a rebirth. The four-part series “Music for Saxophone from Berlin / Music for Saxophone from Germany” offers a selection of works for this distinctive liaison of instruments – from pre-war Berlin, post-war Germany, and again from Berlin’s flourishing musical life at the turn of the millennium. Most of these are world-premiere recordings. The second CD in this series, “Music for Saxophone from Berlin Vol. 2,” connects right up to Vol.1, presenting works composed after the National Socialists had taken hold of the country. It highlights the hardships that the saxophone and the composers who used it had to bear under the new rulers’ restrictive cultural policy. As an instrument deemed “degenerate” (entartet), the saxophone was partly even prohibited during the Third Reich. Gustav Bumcke was dismissed from his teaching post at the conservatory, Erwin Dressel and Edmund von Borck were drafted into military service, and Paul Dessau and Bernhard Heiden fled from Nazi Germany. A group of hard-pressed composers, a stigmatized instrument, and a collection of striking works for alto saxophone and piano from 1934 to 1938, in which the spirit of resistance manifests itself by way of musical expression.

Engelbert Humperdinck exemplifies the destiny of the “one-hit wonder” like few others. His opera Hänsel und Gretel, premiered in 1893, has remained a mainstay at opera houses throughout Germany and the world ever since. But this single international hit drew attention away from the rest of his oeuvre – which remains underappreciated to this day. After all, this supposedly good-natured “Märchenonkel” (“fairytale uncle”) was still a modern, cosmopolitan figure who ranked among the great musicians of his time. Humperdinck won the coveted Mendelssohn Award for composition in Berlin at the age of 25. He was an assistant to Wagner in Naples, Venice, and Bayreuth, studied Spanish and Arabic culture on prolonged scholarly travels, and taught at the conservatory in Barcelona, where he wrote a theory of harmony in Spanish. He was also a member (and, for a time, vice president) of the Royal Academy of the Arts in Berlin, honorary member of the Académie française and the Academia Santa Cecilia in Rome. And his works were included in the repertoires of the likes of Weingartner, Kleiber, Brecher, Blech, and Strauss – the greatest conductors of his time. Most of his catalogue remains largely unknown: not only his greatest works, such as his depth psychology-inspired fairytale opera Die Königskinder (which was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910), but also the stage pieces created for Max Reinhard’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin, his chamber music and a great many art songs from every period of his career. These are original pieces, subtle post-romantic art song with Humperdinck’s characteristic, often surprising, expansive harmonies. Of roughly 100 documented songs for voice and piano, about one third have disappeared, while many have not been published and only exist today as manuscripts. Save for a few scattered pieces on so-called “motto CDs,” there are no recordings of Humperdinck’s songs. And virtually no one performs them today. We intend to close this gap with the 29 pieces offered here. Covering a period of nearly 50 years, they are intended to show the breadth of his song-writing spectrum.

The 1930s saw composers in Berlin beginning to use the saxophone as a classical instrument – the alto sax paired with the piano being a particular favorite. But alas, the heyday of the classical saxophone in Germany was all too short. The Nazis’ cultural policy was the kiss of death for this pariah instrument. Yet a good number of works for the concert saxophone still emerged in the face of this restrictive environment. Some appeared in Berlin, others were created in the exile that many composers had to choose after 1933. Only a handful of works for alto sax and piano were written in Germany after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that this format finally enjoyed a rebirth. The four-part series “Music for Saxophone from Berlin / Music for Saxophone from Germany” offers a selection of works for this distinctive liaison of instruments – from pre-war Berlin, post-war Germany, and again from Berlin’s flourishing musical life at the turn of the millennium. Most of these are world-premiere recordings. “Music for Saxophone from Berlin Vol. 1” kicks off the series – and brings to life the enthusiasm which renowned composers from the 1930s had for this relatively new voice in the choir of classical instruments. The “ultimate discipline” of the sonata comes alive in exciting and rebellious pieces for alto sax and piano by Erwin Schulhoff, Wolfgang Jacobi, Ernst-Lothar von Knorr, and Erwin Dressel. Humorously jazzy, classical and elegant, soberly linear, romantically opulent. This is the diverse palette of styles that composers explored around 1930–32 – just before the National Socialists seized power.