The three main works on the CD are favourite pieces of mine that I often listened to as a student. One is the Suite No. 1 in E minor, BWV 996, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Another piece that I have always liked immensely, and which I thought that I will one day learn is the "Valses Poeticos" by Enrique Granados, and in the same way, I had started the "Sonatine pour harpe" op. 30 by Marcel Tournier, but never finished it. I then developed a plan to make a CD in order to create an additional project for myself using these three pieces as a basis.

I combined the three great works by Bach, Granados and Tournier so that they became ‘pathfinders’, so to speak, with the Renaissance pieces by Mayone connecting these three longer pieces with one another. This has the effect of creating a larger whole that can be experienced as a single concept. -- Markus Folker Thalheimer

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.

"Being able to release my first solo CD with the hänssler CLASSIC label is simply fantastic. The assembled works on this CD reflect my musical focus. The juxtaposition of globally renowned and beloved compositions with the quest for seldom-performed musical treasures captivates me in my profession. I have recorded a journey through the colorful world of fantasy. The sound journey with Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn Bartholdy shows famous, rarely played and unfinished piano works, which, besides a reference to nature, find their nucleus in Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata'.

"The three composers are united by the search for new possibilities of expression. There are (almost) no limits to the imagination. Ludwig van Beethoven takes center stage. His contrasting works Fantasy for piano Unv 12, an unfinished sketch, and the universally known 'Sonata quasi una fantasia' op.27 No. 2, more familiar to most as the 'Moonlight Sonata', are an exciting combination.Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Phantasie op. 28 'Scottish Sonata' harks back to Beethoven's love of nature. He wrote this fantasy in 1833 on his cultural journey through Italy, France and Great Britain. Here, Mendelssohn Bartholdy sets his impressions of the mood and landscape of Scotland to music. Franz Schubert's Fantasy op. 15 D 760 'Wanderer Fantasy' is a work that is close to my heart." - Maximilian Schairer

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.”

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.

“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

Carl Reinecke is famous for his beautiful melodies and amazing fondness of classical forms, to the point that his oeuvre comprises nearly all such forms that were practiced in his time. Krzysztof Penderecki, on the other hand, was an icon of the avant-garde and definitely preferred avoiding convention, rather than following the mainstream. The two had never met, which would have been impossible, as Carl Reinecke died 23 years before Krzysztof Penderecki was born. Nevertheless, flutist Krzysztof Kaczka has made the improbable come true – thanks to his efforts, the two musicians do finally meet, more specifically, two of their major pieces come together on one album. Both compositions are highly esteemed by critics and flutists alike, who gladly include them in their repertoire.

This recording contains guitar music by five Spanish composers of the 19th & 20th centuries, as well as one important Venezuelan master of today. The starting point for our attention here is the work of the Spanish composer, guitarist and guitar teacher Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909), whose "school" influenced numerous Spanish composers who, like Tárrega himself, saw the guitar as Spain's national instrument.

The 19th century was a time when large concert halls were being constructed, something which, as the guitar began to enjoy increasing popularity, became rather problematic for guitarists, particularly as far as the acoustics were concerned. It was the Spanish guitar maker Antonio Torres (1817-1892) who, basing his designs on those of previous guitar makers, combined with the most up-to-date research into acoustics, developed larger instruments, something which Tárrega found vitally interesting, so much so that he developed a new playing technique. Through the evolution of his style of legato fretting and his own particular perception of the diverse timbral possibilities of the guitar, Tárrega created sounds that virtually made the instrument sing.

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.

“Warm humanity that infuses everything technical with life and a sense of duty” - Numerous composers who were victims of Nazi persecution have been rediscovered in recent years. As in the case of many other outstanding musicians, one can only wonder why it has taken so long for Bernhard Sekles’s music to be rescued from oblivion. In Sekles’s case this question is very difficult to answer, since his works are truly of the highest quality and they enrich the repertoire in a number of different music genres. What is more, prior to 1933 Sekles was one of the best known personalities of his generation on the entire music scene; for a long time, he was pivotal to music life in Germany, both as a successful composer and author of many popular and frequently performed works and as an outstanding teacher of composition whose classes nurtured numerous famous musicians. Finally, he was, for almost ten years, the highly innovative Director of the Hoch Conservatoire in Frankfurt am Main, one of the most important, internationally acknowledged teaching institutions of its day in the field of music. He was very attached to the city of his birth; indeed, he lived there for almost all of his life.

All the songs selected by Cantor Nikola David for this recording have been transliterated by the Cantor from the original Ashkenazi pronunciation to follow Sephardic pronunciation. This decision parallels that made by Eliezer Ben-Jehuda when creating the basis for the modern Hebrew language. Cantor Nikola David has chosen from the rich Kirschner repertoire not only pieces which are sung each week on Shabbat, but also those sung on Yamim Noraim, the High Holy Days, and the Hagim, other holidays.

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.

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.

When Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his first two sonatas for piano and violoncello (op. 5) in 1796, he was entering new compositional territory. Violin sonatas already existed; Mozart had already written several, but the cello had not yet established itself as a solo instrument equal to the violin in chamber music. During this period, i.e. the second half of the 1790s, another composer emerged into the public sphere who was also on a par with Beethoven, if only as a pianist.

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.