Piano-Drums Duos are the preferred playing arrangement of pianist Irene Schweizer. Her mastery of duets with important drummers of contemporary jazz are documented on numerous Intakt CDs. Han Bennink, Pierre Favre, Louis Moholo, Gu¨nter Baby Sommer, Andrew Cyrille and Joey Baron among them. The Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, born in 1955, and Irene Schweizer, born in 1941, have performed together on numerous occasions both in Europe and Chicago. Together they have appeared on the Intakt CD "Irene Schweizer-Fred Anderson-Hamid Drake". At the 40th anniversary festival "Kontrontationen in Nickelsdorf" (Austria), Schweizer and Drake were the highlight of the event. A celebration of the moment and a declaration of love to South African songs along with their thrilling energy and rhythmic lightness produced a firework of improvisation. A parade of successful interplay. The CD Celebration is released on the occasion of Irene Schweizer's 80th birthday (2. Juni), accompanied by a catalogue of the pianist's works on Intakt Records.
The "Stabat mater" by the Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorák, well-known in it's later orchestral version, was initially composed with piano accompaniment. This rarely-heard original version has now been recorded for BR-KLASSIK, featuring the excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus under the direction of Howard Arman, and accompanied by Julius Drake on the piano. The young Dvorák was a well-studied and experienced church musician. Having graduated from the organ school in Prague, he spent three pious years as an organist in the city's St. Adalbert's Church. The search for a "truly sacred music" preoccupied him from the very start. The contemporary Caecilian Movement for church music reform led him, like many of his colleagues, to re-examine the Palestrina style, which represented a return to the more modest, less ostentatious and yet at the same time contrapuntally ingenious church music of a previous epoch. He duly composed a "Stabat mater" without orchestral splendour and with a simple piano accompaniment. Shortly before Dvorák wrote down this first version of his "Stabat mater" between February 19 and May 7, 1876, a heavy blow had struck the young family. On December 19, 1875, his daughter Josefa died two days after she was born. Dvorák did not set all the verses of the hymn to music, and chose an ensemble of four soloists, a choir and a piano. This original version from the spring of 1876, with it's seven-movement structure, is not a fragment, draft or piano reduction but an independent and self-contained work in it's own right. In the autumn of 1877, when he composed the missing four verses and scored his "Stabat mater" for a large orchestra, he effectively created a new and different work.
