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”.

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.

Jean Muller continues his admirable cycle of the complete Mozart piano sonatas for Hänssler Classic with volume four. He was born in Luxembourg in 1979. At merely six he started piano training at the Luxembourg Conservatoire in the class of Marie-José Hengesch, and made his performing debut at seven. He then completed periods of study in Riga, Brussels, Paris and Munich, and has excelled in the world of international piano competitions, winning over a dozen first prizes. Muller’s performances are very fine. It is easy to sense being in the hands of a performer who is impeccably schooled in these works, and who presents them with precision and utmost sincerity. These endearing, compelling interpretations sound delightful enhanced by the lovely tone of Muller’s Steinway Model D concert grand. Mozart’s music can handle different performance styles. Muller’s stylistic confidence in giving fresh and vital performances, without superfluous decoration, works well here.

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:

“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.”

Christian Fink’s organ works include 5 sonatas, 2 fantasias [and a double fugue], 5 preludes [and a fugue], 30 chorale preludes and around 100 free recital pieces. His work lies in the temporal arc between the organ sonatas of Felix Mendelssohn and the chorale fantasias of Max Reger. During his training, Fink wrote, among other things, numerous fugues as study works for his tone-setting class; he kept a workbook for this purpose but did not take these pieces into account in his opus numbering.

Three Vienna-born composers and four elective Viennese performers come together in four challenging and deeply layered compositions that span 120 years of Viennese musical history. The significance and impact of the works, however, radiate far beyond Vienna itself. At the same time, the live recording also reflects a moment in contemporary history, as the concert, originally planned to take place before a live audience, eventually took place on 17 May, 2021 solely as a streaming event at Vienna's Arnold Schoenberg Center, due to the restrictions enforced by the COVID 19 pandemic. The title of this recording, Viennese Transfigurations, is ambiguous. Three pieces are arrangements of earlier compositions for a quartet with the rather unusual line-up of violin, piano, clarinet and double bass, while the other was written for a trio of clarinet, violin and piano. Two arrangements are by the composers themselves, and two are by violinist Maxim Brilinsky. Each of the works has the facility to arouse the curiosity of the listeners right from the beginning, and all end softly.

“And all, all was well again! / […] Love and pain / and world and dream!” So ends the fourth of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, settings of texts the composer had partly taken from the collection “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (the lad’s magic horn), recompiling and extending them. Inspired by Franz Schubert’s Wilhelm Müller song cycles, the brief cycle depicts the sorrowful tale of a lover who as a “journeyman” is no less than the Romantic “wanderer”. As with Schubert, Mahler’s protagonist transcends his crisis, the conclusion pointing “in the sense of an eternity that is to be expected” (Christian Gerhaher) to his redemption. But first he passes through various relay-stations that are part dreamlike vision, part earthbound reality. Konstantin Ingenpaß´debut album with works by Wolf, Liszt, Ullmann and Mahler in chamber-musical arrangements - under the headline: World and Dream.

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

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.

Within the realm of Romantic piano music, where new discoveries are constantly just around the corner, the contribution of Robert Schumann has always played a major part. True, he cannot rival the aura of Chopin’s works, of which Ignaz Friedman asserted that not only had Chopin opened the piano with them, he had closed it again. (Schumann paid his own tribute in his reverent review of Chopin’s op. 2 of 1831, the Variations on Mozart’s “Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben”). Nor did Schumann embed in the history of piano playing such milestones of technical mastery and manual dexterity as Liszt who – inspired by Paganini’s concerts and enabled by the double-escapement action developed by Sébastien Erard in 1821 – had practically reinvented the instrument by the time he wrote his Etudes d’exécution transcendante in 1837. And neither the sprightliness of Felix Mendelssohn’s keyboard idiom nor Charles-Valentin Alkan’s exaltation of virtuosity are characteristic of Schumann’s piano music, even if he proves in his Abegg Variations op. 1 (1830) and his Toccata op. 7 (1832) that he brilliantly commanded both approaches to the instrument.

In his Mass in A flat, Schubert set himself the great task of composing a “Missa solemnis”, as he later entitled the work. As with the Mass he wrote in the last year of his life, he severed the bonds imposed by tradition on the four earlier works of 1814-16. His highest ambition for the effect it might have on the world (there is evidence of his early intention to dedicate it to the Emperor Franz and his consort) is linked in the A flat major Mass with a deeply personal confession, the formulation of his own faith, of “true devotion”, as he put it in 1825. There can scarcely be another work upon which Schubert worked so long, so intensively and with such revision: begun in November 1819, the Mass was not finished until September 1822; given one performance at the end of that year and possibly another in 1823 in the Alt-Lerchenfeld parish church in Vienna, it was by no means “finished business”, being modified by Schubert by 1825.

Two Czech composers, one piano trio from each – that is the program of this recording. Not that they are contemporaries: the first composer, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904), was born about half a century before his compatriot Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959). Both composers came from Bohemia, Dvorák from the little town of Nelahozeves on the west bank of the Vltava, Martinů from Policka in east Bohemia. And in the history of “classical” music, both of them are representatives of the National Czech School. This was a movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century to match similar developments in other European countries. This national dimension continued to grow up to the middle of the 20th century. The core commitment of the National Schools is to be seen in the way numerous European composers alluded in their works to the folk music of their land, bringing out national color in the sound of their music. Both Dvorák, an early representative of the Czech School, and Martinů, a late champion of Czech nationhood, pay tribute in their compositions to the popular music of their Czech homeland.

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.

Looking ahead to 2028 and the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, the Alinde Quartet will annually release an album of Schubert string quartets for the next eight years, alongside a specially commissioned work. Finding the ideal sound world for Schubert’s quartets is by no means easy, yet the Alinde strikes a near-ideal balance between internal clarity and textural warmth, shone through by sparkling intonation. This Alinde Quartett has been warmly received at Europe’s most heralded festivals and halls, including Konzerthaus Berlin, the Kölner Philharmonie, Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival, Festepiele MecklenburgVorpommern, the Verbier Festival, Aldeburgh Residencies, Chamber Music European Meetings in Bordeaux, and Mozartfest Würzburg.

In summer 2018, the quartet participated in the Chamber Music Residency at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. The four have been fortunate to have studied with two giants of the chamber music world: following their studies with Eberhard Feltz at the Musikhochschule “Hanns Eisler” Berlin, they entered the class of Professor Günther Pichler (Alban Berg Quartett) at the "Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia" Madrid. Always keen to dig more deeply and expand their palette, they began studying with Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartett) in Basel as of Fall 2018.