The human factor determines the path. The Clarinet Trio op. 114 by Johannes Brahms more or less represents the DNA of the Quantum Clarinet Trio, and the piece was one of the driving forces behind the founding of this young chamber ensemble, whose members first met at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in 2014. At that time, Italian clarinettist Elena Veronesi had been searching for fellow musicians to collaborate in a late work trio, and she found them in the German cellist Johannes Przygodda and Korean pianist Bokyung Kim. What started as a project has now evolved into a permanent ensemble. This great Brahms trio has continued to be a enterprise in which life converges with art.

Cellists, pianists and clarinettists usually come together when a work requires such a constellation, the line-up going their own separate ways once the project is completed. Compared to piano trios or string quartets, these particular instruments unfortunately rarely come together as a fixed ensemble. The Quantum Clarinet Trio is a welcome exception to the rule, making this encounter with one of Brahms' most important works much more than just a "fleeting liaison".

Vol. 2 of the portrait of the exceptional cellist who died far too young. Francoise Groben's fascinating dedication to music, her large number of international concerts and her encounters with the most prominent artists of her time - that is what this collection shows par excellence.

Inspired by Franz Schubert's late lieder compositions and works by Johannes Brahms, among others, in which voice and piano are enhanced by another melody instrument, we have taken a completely new approach to our lieder recital repertoire. The result can now be heard on this CD: Songs of the Romantic period, freshly arranged for soprano, violoncello and piano.
In art songs, as in chamber music in general, there are often concealed lines within the piano movements which gain greatly in expression through the accompaniment of a solo instrument. For this reason, we feel that our combination of voice, piano and melody instrument is particularly effective and has an enriching effect on the listening experience of the art songs presented here. The contrasting registers of soprano and cello complement both the music and the substance of the text from different angles, the timbre of the cello being ideal for the hues and shades of these songs as its solo role augments these delicate arrangements. The work"Auf dem Strom" by Franz Schubert - also on this CD - is one of the best-known original compositions of this genre.

A re-release of his critically accalaimed recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach´s Secular Cantatas. Recordings from 1994 - 2000, part of the project The Complete Bach on 172 CDs. hänssler CLASSIC is proud to present Helmuth Rilling's landmark recording of the Secular Cantatas in a new collector's edition. Rilling was the first conductor to ever record the complete Bach cantatas and still, 25 years after they were first released in celebration of the Bach tercentennial in 1985, they remain the standard by which all other interpretations are judged. This box set includes timeless performances featuring many of Europe's finest singers at the height of their careers.

Friedrich Theodor Frohlich: Johannes & Esther (Ian Bostridge, Julius Drake) Friedrich Theodor Frohlich (1803-1836), long disregarded, is now seen as the most important Swiss composer of the Early Romantic era. He left a large number of music manuscripts, which disappeared into private hands and were soon forgotten, though most of them have survived. His works are now being increasingly rediscovered and made available to listeners.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the keyboard concerto—a lifelong relationship, challenging and exhaust¬ing, altogether fruitful, brilliant, and even spectacular into the bargain. As a 19-year-old (under the eyes of his father, so to speak) he wrote in Leipzig his first keyboard concerto; at the age of 74 in Hamburg he finished, in the year of his death, his last example of the genre. In-between lies a treasury of fifty keyboard concertos, colossal and fathomless.
It is a wonder that this uncommonly rich and stylistically influential genre of the composer is only now coming to light. Of all the genres of composition, C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard concertos have guarded their secret longest as unpublished music—that is, precisely the genre of works that qualify as the most personal and most advanced of his compositional oeuvre. He himself says of this: “Because I have had to create most of my works for particular persons and for the public, I have therein always been more constrained than with the few pieces which I prepared just for myself. Among all my works, especially for keyboard, are just a few…concertos, which I composed with total freedom and for my own use.”

“In addition to working together with living composers, the rediscovery of undeservedly forgotten works is an immense enrichment for us instrumentalists, who all too often find ourselves in the role of reproducing a few well-known pieces. It is for this reason that my joy was all the greater when one day Oliver Triendl told me about a genuine treasure: during his extensive research on composers from the Balkan region, he had unearthed a number of completely unknown works for bassoon and piano and immediately had the intuitive idea of recording them on CD.

However, the result of his research was so extensive that several CDs could have been filled with the works he had found, and so we played through piles of sheet music for half a night until we finally arrived at our selection for this CD. With this CD, I hope to contribute to the expansion of the repertoire of my instrument, and also to promote a wider dissemination of the classical musical tradition of the Balkan region, which has so far been under-represented, and not only in the bassoon repertoire.” Theo Plath

Dora Deliyska: "It was an exciting and challenging process to record the complex structure of 24 études and préludes. Some of the etudes belong to the most difficult pieces in piano literature, and the préludes have intense musical potential. I decided to record the pieces over a short period of time, in order to keep the spontaneity of the interpretation. I am very thankful to the Teldex Team (René Möller and Jakob Bötcher) and the piano technician Gerd Finkenstein for sharing this musical experience together, and creating an exciting recording.“

REVIEW:

La Cremona / Italian Concertos - The Italians are uninhibited composers, brilliant, vivacious, expressive, profound, noble in thought, slightly eccentric, free, dashing, brazen, overblown, at times negligent in tempo; but they are also lyrical, cajoling, tender, touching and inventive. They write more for connoisseurs than for music lovers.’ (Johann Georg Pisendel) The violin – that most versatile instrument which right up until the 1950s reigned supreme over European music, most notably in orchestras – was developed between 1500 and 1550 in workshops of luthiers around the three north Italian towns of Mantua, Brescia and Cremona. It was the outcome of solid craftsmanship and astute understanding of the physical possibilities.

The chamber music of Johanna Müller-Hermann is distinguished by its focus on pure melody, which often gives the music a lyrical character, but which she is quite willing to interrupt with stringent use of rhythm and contrast. The Austrian composer Johanna Müller-Hermann (1868-1941) was born in Vienna on January 15, 1868, to government official Alois von Hermann and Antonia Freiin von der Decken zu Himmelreich, who was eighteen years his junior. Known in her girlhood as Johanna von Hermann, she was the second of three children. The growing family enjoyed the life of the upper middle class in the inner city of Vienna. Johanna Hermann learnt the piano with Heinrich von Bocklet, who was later made Professor. She attended the Vienna Conservatory, studied musicology with Carl Navratil and historical counterpoint with Josef Labor, took violin and piano lessons, and participated in the exercises of Guido Adler.

Müller-Hermann also enrolled for the composition class of Josef Bohuslav Foerster. She published her first opus in 1903, “Seven Lieder for solo voice and piano”. The premiere of one of these songs the following year drew public attention to Müller-Hermann, and her Violin Sonata was first performed in 1905, attracting a good deal of positive comment. Critical interest was increased by the publication of her String Quartet op. 6, which celebrated its premiere six years later. The quartet was written during a period of instruction from Alexander von Zemlinsky. There is no known evidence of this teaching, nor are there any drafts, but the quartet is dedicated to Zemlinsky “in gratitude”. Public recognition came in 1917, when she was appointed Professor at the Vienna Conservatory in succession to her former teacher Josef Foerster. Her public profile benefited from her two orchestral works and even more from her choral works with orchestral accompaniment.

Brahms composed his “Geistliches Wiegenlied” in 1863 as a wedding present for two friends of his, the famous violinist Joseph Joachim and contralto Amalie Schneeweiss. Brahms and Joachim both loved the sound of the viola, a chamber instrument that was only just developing a concert repertoire.
This Classical composition was the starting point for the programme of the present CD, which combines original works for trio from three centuries in the formation voice-viola-piano, including two specially written vocal cycles by Sarah Nemtsov and Walter Zimmermann. The programme represents a kind of musical engagement with themes that are gaining new relevance today: persecution and expulsion, homelessness and homesickness. The texts and their settings sometimes enter into an unexpected dialogue.

Matthias Manasi is rated as one of the most sought-after and most outstanding conductors of his generation, earning himself a distinguished name both on the opera and concert podiums. With a diverse repertoire range he is recognized for his knowledgeable and insightful interpretations, encompassing the great symphonic and operatic repertoire, contemporary scores, and historically informed performances. He is celebrated for the extraordinary combination of precision and temperament of his conducting and the convincing depth of his musical understanding, The Austrian newspaper ‘Heute’ wrote after a concert: “Matthias Manasi delivered an outstanding performance in the legendary, heavenly acoustics of the Golden Hall of the Musikverein Vienna”. The ‘Factanet Rome’ wrote after a concert: “It was a great interpretation that added value to Manasi’s work and that proclaims him as one of the most important conductors of our time”.

For those pieces still missing from the complete recording, the Heidelberger Sinfoniker have been proceeding since Volume 25 in chronological order, to better chart the development of Joseph Haydn the composer. We are thus in the midst of a young, wild Haydn, a Sturm und Drang Haydn. “Heidelberg Haydn is a paradigm of dynamism, freshness, wildness, humour and constant surprise. I am glad we are continuing the journey, completing the cycle. My musical encounters with the Heidelberger Sinfoniker have always been journeys into happiness. Idealism, love of music and technical perfection join forces here with the will to create something really special. Which is exactly right for the symphonic world of Joseph Haydn. I look towards the future in eager anticipation!” - Johannes Klumpp

Johanna Senfter (1879–1961): Works for viola and piano – In the male-dominated world of the time, in which women who performed and composed required special assertive skills, Johanna Senfter consciously refrained from a career in the wider world and limited her creative field to her birthplace of Oppenheim am Rhein near Mainz, not least because of her unstable health as a result of a severe bout of diphtheria in her childhood. This pragmatic self-limitation has given way to an interesting, decades-long debate, not least because her compositional legacy at the Cologne Musikhochschule is available to all interested researchers and musicians and has led to new editions or first recordings of her compositions.

“The decision to record works by my great-grandfather was actually made some time ago. Back in 2006 I founded the Hohenstaufen chamber music festival, which takes place annually in September and of which I am the artistic director. We play chamber music from absolutely all eras at this festival, in a wide variety of scorings. This is how we came to engage with the chamber music of Robert Kahn and produce the first CD with hänssler CLASSIC in 2013. I was aware of Kahns´s composiotns at the end of the 1990s. Kahn was a senator of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Professor at the Musikhochschule in Berlin for chamber music and piano.”

For over 60 years, repeated efforts have been made to capture on recording Robert Schumann’s Complete Works for Piano solo, a fascinatingly broad and varied spectrum ranging from highly virtuosic pieces for the concert hall and valuable literature for teaching purposes. This attractive and yet challenging assignment was not always approached with the necessary intellectual rigor, quite apart from any purely artistic shortcomings, and so none of these sets can justly be deemed “complete”. Schumann had published a string of works in two more or less divergent versions, so that it is highly questionable whether an edition can be labelled “Complete Recordings” if it only contains one of those versions or worse still, makes a misguided attempt to combine two of them. Meanwhile, works that were published at remote locations or remained unpublished have hitherto been taken into account only in exceptional cases.

The first true complete recording of Robert Schumann’s works for piano solo on 17 albums (in 15 volumes), played by Florian Uhlig, seeks for the first time to offer imaginative compilations containing all original works for pianoforte written between 1830 (Abegg Variations op. 1) and 1854 (Ghost Variations) according to the newest critical editions and/or first editions. Several of these albums also contain premiere recordings, often of fragments that were amenable to completion. After the project was completed in 2021, it was evident from a further critical inspection of the five Studien- und Skizzenbücher held in the University and State Library in Bonn, and from the volumes of the complete piano works for two hands that have so far appeared in this comprehensive and groundbreaking edition, that there is a string of either very short complete or longer fragmentary pieces dating from about 1830 to 1837 that are worthy of attention.

The STUMM family stands alongside Schnitger and Silbermann as one of Germany’s most famous organ-building dynasties. It was founded by Johann Michael Stumm. He and five generations of his descendants built some 400 organs between Cologne and Karlsruhe, Luxemburg and Amorbach – a tradition unique in the history of German organ building. The oldest surviving organ by Johann Michael Stumm, in the Lutheran church in Rhaunen, dates from 1723. The latest findings show that it was built as early as 1715 – with Johann Michael working alongside his instructor Otto Reinhard Metzenius. The last instrument from the Sulzbach workshop was built for Niederhosenbach in 1895. The sixth generation of the organ-building dynasty includes Gustav Stumm, who had his last workshop in Kirn in the Rhineland-Palatinate. That was where he built the organ for the Catholic church in Rhaunen in 1893. He died in 1906, his final work for Traisen left unfinished.

Peijun Xu, born in Shanghai, is one of the leading violists of her generation. As a soloist, Peijun Xu has performed in renowned venues such as the Shanghai Concert Hall, the Laeiszhalle Hamburg or the Alte Oper Frankfurt. Her chamber music partners include Paul Rivinius, Evgenia Rubinova, Alexander Sitkovetsky and Veit Hertenstein. German violist Veit Hertenstein plays with “brigthly ringing, luminous and finly finessed sound (The Strad Magazine 2022).

Veit Hertenstein is Professor for Viola at the Musikhochschule Detmold, Germany since 2015.

"Credo - a profession of faith. belief, confidence and trust in a time that is challenging for all of us. Faith in the power of music, in art and in the ability to rise up and persevere. These duet recordings were created with these thoughts in mind, making their way through Handel's opera and oratorio duets, right up to the final creative phase of his life."
Anna Korondi and Zvi Emanuel-Marial

Kubelík’s star began to wane in the years before World War I. Some felt he had gone off the boil but it was more a question of his public turning to new idols, Elman and Vecsey. In 1915 he retired to take composition seriously, not resuming his concert career until 1920. He toured Britain 20 times from 1900 to 1934 (packing the Royal Albert Hall with 7,000 people in 1926) and the U.S. many times up to 1938 (6,000 heard him at the New York Hippodrome in 1920-21). He commanded a wide range of music and in Central Europe he is remembered as a great musician. He died in Prague on 5 December 1940. The main fruits of Kubelík’s five-year break were his first three Violin Concertos, published in Prague in 1920. Of the eventual series of six, Pavel Šporcl says: ‘They are technically very demanding and musically extremely interesting.’ The First Concerto in C major, which he plays here, is a melodious Late Romantic work, well tailored to a front-line virtuoso’s strengths, and it should not have fallen out of the repertoire. Kubelík emerged from his purdah to première it at the Grosse Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on 29 January 1917, Nedbal conducting the Tonkünstler Orchestra.

In 19th-century Vienna (where Brahms spent much of his professional life), the practice of writing “music for the home” (which should in no way be pejoratively construed as a retreat into carefree seclusion) experienced a boom that reached as far as the imperial court of Franz Joseph I. The music-making in many Viennese households was on a par with public performances and boasted enormous variety. Special reference to this recording: on the evening of May 11, 1895, Johannes Brahms played this very CD-programme at the Vienna home of the culture-loving Fellinger family, with whom he was very well acquainted, having received from Simrock the galley proofs of the rearranged versions of the op. 120 sonatas for violin and piano. His partner for this soirée was the violin virtuoso Marie Soldat-Roeger, who was one of the eminent female musical figures of the 19th century, on a par with the likes of Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn), Pauline Viardot-García and others. Soldat-Roeger was the first Austrian woman to gain prominence in European concert halls. So Brahms had made just the right choice for the domestic context of this soirée, as have the two performers on this release: in making this recording, they have brought a piece of historical performance practice from the salons of the 19th century into the living rooms of our time.

The starting point for the recording of the album ROOTS was a concert in which Shirley Brill performed Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Sonata for the first time and was deeply moved by its overwhelming emotional power. Being Jewish herself, she resonated deeply with the rich Klezmer folkloric elements expressed so intensely in this Sonata. This experience ignited her passion to explore the integration of national sentiments into classical music, with a particular focus on the neighbouring countries of Germany and Poland.

In ROOTS, Shirley Brill has curated a collection of pieces that demonstrate a masterful integration of folkloric elements, exuding pride in original folk music and a healthy sense of national identity. Yet, this aspect also belongs to the folklore within the music that is heard here: over the course of the 100 years in which the recorded works were composed, an excessive embrace of radical ideologies has slipped into dangerous nationalism.

Weinberg's life and his Clarinet Sonata composed in 1945 serve as a poignant reminder of the catastrophic consequences of such extremism. The range of works presented on the album ROOTS sheds light on the delicate balance between the celebration of cultural heritage (as in the music of Schumann and Lutoslawski) and the intrusion of the destructive forces of nationalism (Weinberg). ROOTS testifies to the power of music to promote unity while simultaneously cautioning us to remain vigilant against the pitfalls of extremist doctrines.

This new release features poignant soul music for moments of contemplation. Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary's suffering as Jesus Christ's mother at his crucifixion and has been set to music by many Western composers. This 4 album box presents timeless interpretations of the most important compositions of Stabat Mater. Soloists featured on the release include Margot Guilleaume, Ingeborg Danz, Marta Benackova, Elisabeth Höngen, James Taylor, Thomas Quasthoff and many more.

Chopin shaped his two extended cycles of études into a pianistic cosmos that has a unique place in the literature for piano. The études for solo piano feature many technical possibilities composed with an accomplished sense of style. However, the main focus in each of the compositions is musical expression. Mechanical passages are nowhere to be found. The rich timbres of Chopin’s virtuosity thus emerge as the basis for a nuanced tonal world blending Romantic sensibility with a manneristic stylistic approach. All in all: Chopin's études constitute a separate musical domain. They go beyond their own limits, reflecting on numerous other works by the composer in order to establish themselves as “stylistically anchored pillars” within his piano aesthetics. Chopin redefined the genre. Without his pianistic and tonal innovations, the originality of later études – one need only think of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Debussy and Ligeti – would probably be unimaginable.

Music and lyrics by women and men. It is only natural that the spirit of the Romantic era should embrace, envelop and encircle the male and female composers and lyricists on this album in their depiction of wistful longing – the omnipresent theme of the era. But this is not the only point of reference behind this concept. The deeper one delves into the life stories and works of these artists, the more complex and far-reaching the network of associations proves to be.

“In Relation” is an invitation to plunge into the associative field of 19th-century words and music and it shows that the connexions between the two arts and their male and female practitioners were more extensive than one might imagine.