As we reflect on Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons, we are all too likely to overlook the fact that there were six sons from two marriages who “inclined towards Music”. True, Maria Barbara’s third son Johann Gottfried Bernhard, born in Weimar in 1715, more or less disappeared from view in 1737, and it is plain that Anna Magdalena’s first son Gottfried Heinrich, born in 1724, was mentally handicapped: “A great Genius, which however was never developed,” wrote his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel in the family chronicle. For thirty years, making and writing music, he had been the musical front-runner in Saxony and Thuringia: the vanguard was located wherever he was, in his hands and at his writing-desk. Increasingly, twenty-year-olds and a few late starters in their thirties were coming on to the market and showing Bach a new way forward: the galant style, spreading north from Naples ever since 1715, and the flamboyant, ever more richly ornamented music of the late Baroque, constantly threatening to break down under the weight of emblematic connotation and religious symbolism, in contrast to that simpler form, written by mortals for mortals, distinguished by its slow, easily comprehensible harmony and its truly singable melodies in what was at most an expanded two-part structure.

Seen from a musical and historical point, Mozart´s concertos for piano and orchestra are the veritable beginning of this genre and at the same time climax. With his great concertos, Mozart achieved works which represent to a large extent the quintessence of what is possible in this genre. Rightly so, music researcher Alfred Einstein ascertains that Mozart´s piano concertos are “the culmination and acme of his instrumental creativity, at least in the area of orchestral music.” Twenty-three concertos for piano and orchestra have been preserved, among which is one for two pianos (No. 7 K.365 and 316a respectively) and one for three pianos and orchestra (No. 10, K.242). Haiou Zhang has already received widespread recognition by critics and audiences in Europe, North and South America, and the Far East. He has performed in esteemed concert venues and at renowned festivals, and has been given several awards for his performances. Besides his concert career, he is also the founder and music director of International Music Festival Buxtehude, Altes Land & Harburg in Northern Germany.

Classical Music

Michael Rische writes: "After recording 18 piano concertos, the artist is entitled to draw up a preliminary summary. Bach said that he wrote this series of works for himself. He confessed to the exploiting of all the freedoms he needed. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven recognized this and admired it. It is anything but inevitable that this formidable series of works is now at last reaching us. The question of why is, however, less the focus of my work than the claim to be giving this wealth of music a voice in our own age. The certainty, indeed the self-assurance, with which we musicians of today perform the masterpieces of bygone ages is, however, anything but a foregone conclusion. The interpreter, who possesses only the aural sensibilities of his age, catches the spark of the music during performance, and the performed work responds with it's intellectual depth. The artist and the work are brought together, entirely regardless of the chronological distance between the two. This is how masterpieces live among us. They came into being because the creative spirit laid down standards that are not limited to it's own era. Our admiration for the visionary power and instinctive rigour of it's formulation is not without justification." The musician of our time has in his mind, consciously or not, the musical thinking of Debussy and Ravel, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and of Messiaen and Ligeti - a large radius of musical experience that reaches into the present day and suddenly reverberates in a piano concerto by Bach. The constant refining of our ears, for which we thank the great composers, finally allows us to do justice to the piano concertos of Emanuel Bach; something that was denied them in a previous age.

Nineteenth-century opera arrangements for flute and piano form an extensive body of work that has so far received little attention in the annals of music history. Its neglect by researchers is in stark contrast to the prominence of such arrangements in the performing practice of the period. Through these pieces, opera lovers have access to works that often disappeared from the repertory not long after their premiere and for the most part are not available in modern editions. These works lie forgotten in libraries and archives; the arrangements are testimony to their former popularity. In order to reproduce the flute sound of the time in all its diversity, Dorothea Seel has chosen three different flutes for this recording: a flute by Ignaz Ziegler (c. 1830) with 10 keys, an instrument by H.C. Stumpel (c. 1860) with 11 keys, and a conical ring-key flute (c. 1890). Dorothea Seel specializes in the transverse flute of the 18th and 19th centuries and is active in leading period instrument ensembles. She is the artistic director of the Barocksolisten München. (Munic Baroque Soloists) and has released albums of orchestral music with her ensemble, as well as chamber music in collaboration with Christoph Hammer. Beyond standard repertoire such as the flute sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, she is dedicated to exploring new musical territory, as her recordings of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s sonatas for flute and pianoforte, arrangements of bel canto opera, as well as the sacred music for large chamber ensemble of Johann Zach demonstrate.

Classical Music

Missa Solemnis, Beethoven's sacred masterpiece, has thrilled audiences since its premiere with its monumental splendor and grandeur of vision. Even the master himself described it as "the greatest work that I have written so far." Helmuth Rilling, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, the Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart and a quartet of vocal soloists have achieved worldwide acclaim in producing a reference recording of this great masterpiece, now available once again in a new edition as part of the “Great Choral Works” series. “A production of the highest professionalism.” - FONO FORUM

Classical Music

“The young pianist glows with enthusiasm…but then proves that for all this vigor and exuberance, she also has a keen sense of what lies between the notes and a sensitive awareness of tempo.” remarked the press. From surveying the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it can be established that of the more than 600 compositions he left for posterity, about a sixth were dedicated to the piano. In contrast to the other two masters of Viennese classical music, Haydn and Beethoven, Mozart’s music for solo piano was less of a field for formal experimentation or for expression of individual musical soliloquy. Mozart wrote his piano sonatas mostly for quite specific practical purposes, whether for performance on his travels, for musical events among a smaller circle of people, or as exercise material for his students.

Evgeni Koroliov turns 70! Evgeni Koroliov, born October 1st 1949, is known to be an extraordinary phenomenon on the international piano scene. Without disposing spectacular attitudes, Koroliov convinces his public through an enormous spiritual understanding of the works he performs and in whose service he puts the wide range of his artistic and interpretatory abilities. His repertoire ranges from Bach, the Wiener Klassik and the works of Schubert, Chopin and Debussy to the modern classics, Messiaen and Ligeti. He has a special affinity to Bach and performed the complete Well-Tempered Clavier in Moscow at the age of seventeen. Since then Koroliov has often performed Bach's greatest works in cycles, including the Clavierübung and the Art of the Fugue, which he recorded. The latter recording provoked a memorable reaction from the composer György Ligeti: "If there was only one musical work I could take with me to an uninhabited island, I would choose Koroliov's recording of Bach, because even when left pining away with hunger and thirst, I would still listen to this recording again and again, even to my last breath." Especially his interpretations of Bach elicited an enormous response from the international music press. Numerous critics not only gave him a prominent place among the new recordings of the Bach Year 2000, but count his amongst the most important Bach recordings in history.

Includes work(s) by various composers.

Very little is known today about the personal life of composer Antonio Salieri, if only because he left very few private documents to posterity. An autobiography of the composer, presented to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde among other papers by his grandson Eduard Rumfeld in 1865, is lost. To learn more of Salieri, then, it is necessary to refer to sources such as diaries and letters by close friends. One rewarding source has proved to be the diary of Joseph Rosenbaum, who married the daughter of Salieri’s teacher Florian Leopold Gassmann and was on friendly terms with the artist for many years. This recording seeks to bring us closer to Salieri the man – with works that he composed for performance among friends. They show the composer in quite a different light from the operatic works that he wrote to enhance the prestige of the Viennese court.

Praised by the Süddeutsche Zeitung for his “glowing, distinctive and exciting masculine tone" as “one of the great cello talents of our time“ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15.10.2013), cellist Valentin Radutiu was born in Munich and received his first cello lessons from his father at the age of six. He later studied in Salzburg, Vienna and Berlin with Clemens Hagen, Heinrich Schiff and David Geringas. Radutiu has released several album recordings: In addition to the 2011 debut release, an album with French works by Lalo, Ravel and Magnard is available, and the 2014 release of the complete works for cello and piano by George Enescu with Per Rundberg was praised by critics as a benchmark recording (Haenssler Classic). Radutiu plays a cello made by Francesco Ruggieri (Cremona, 1685). On this newest release, he performs works by J.C. Bach, Casadesus, Haydn, and Janson.

The present programme offers music for solo violin and orchestra by three 20th-century composers who share a common feature in their Jewish origins. Two of them suffered the consequences of Nazi repression in pre-war Germany. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the composer, musicologist and music theoretician Hans Gál (1890-1987) was obliged to resign his post as Director of the Mainz Conservatory after the National Socialists came to power in 1933 on account of his Hungarian Jewish ancestry. He returned to Austria but had to leave when Hitler’s Germany annexed his homeland in 1938. He went to England and spent the rest of his life there. Joseph Kaminski (1903-1972) was born in Odessa. His parents, who were Jewish actors, then moved to Warsaw with their family. The musically talented boy began playing the violin at six and at the age of 12 he was already playing as a soloist with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. He moved to Berlin in 1922 and studied at the College of Music there (winning high praise from Berlin music critics), then to Vienna (1924), where he continued his studies with Hans Gál and others. He emigrated to Israel in 1937, where he joined the Palestine Orchestra (renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1948) as lead violinist. The third composer on this album, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), had a very different start in life. The son of Jewish immigrants to the United States, he was born in Massachusetts in 1918. “Lenny” – as the world knew him – rose in the USA and then around the world to be a musical superstar.

Two of the greatest practitioners of High Romantic art song were, not surprisingly, also exceptional opera composers: Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949). While the former cultivated all-encompassing music dramas to the near exclusion of everything else, the latter worked successfully in genres ranging from chamber music to grand symphonies. German lieder attained a relative highpoint in the work of Franz Schubert, whose 600+ individual songs and organic song cycles deserve pride of place. However, that achievement must not overshadow the later evolution of the genre in generations from Mendelssohn to Schoenberg. Great lieder are distinguished by psychological commentary provided by purely musical means, whereby details of range, harmony and chromaticism, and the role of the accompaniment provide deeper reflection on (often) quite superficial love poetry. Such opportunities for richer exploration increased in the late 19th century as poets—along with philosophers and psychologists—probed deeper into the human psyche.