It would be worth striving towards a style that can combine the highest level of craftsmanship, originality, and high quality with the greatest popularity and folksiness.' – Hanns Eisler. This latest release in Capriccio‘s Hanns Eisler Edition contains songs and chansons from all periods of Eisler’s creative life. It also contains some of the fascinating orchestral suites that he had mostly assembled as adaptations of film scores from the 1930s. Notably, the programme contains the world premiere recording of his incidental music for Die letzte Nacht – the epilogue to Karl Kraus‘ monumental, satirical work The Last Days of Mankind. The mastermind behind this project was the great composer, conductor, and chansonnier HK Gruber, arguably one of the greatest authorities on Eisler.

The Isabella Scelsi Foundation promotes the production of contemporary music in a wide-ranging and structured manner, with particular attention to the work of it's founder, Giacinto Scelsi. In this vein, the Scelsi Collection series has been created, in close collaboration with the Stradivarius label, which features the Maestro's works performed by great musicians and renowned vocal and instrumental ensembles. The CD we present here is the most extraordinary that one can imagine, in the true sense of the word: in fact, it documents and bears witness to Giacinto Scelsi's unique creative process. The project, conceived under the presidency of Prof. Irmela Heimb�cher and edited by composer and musicologist Friedrich Jaecker, presents the heart of Scelsi's universe, with two recordings of the composer's improvisations, which generated the pieces that would take shape in the subsequent process of 'materialization', alongside the relative 'musical products', with performances of the highest caliber. Giacinto Scelsi's 'mystery' is thus, for once, unveiled, along it's innermost path! The CD is a unique accomplishment, created as an example, in order to allow everyone - musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts - to have an insight into the extraordinary epiphany that was renewed in Scelsi with each of his pieces and gave rise to works considered among the greatest masterpieces of late 20th-century music. Gianni Trovalusci President, Isabella Scelsi Foundation

Inspired by Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and Calvino's deconstructive analysis of the classic Roman recasting of Greek myths, John Aylward's Celestial Forms and Stories establishes musical analogs to Ovid's way of depicting the world. Featuring musicians from Klangforum Wien in chamber formations, Celestial Forms and Stories encapsulates the transformative nature of myth, constantly being reimagined and reinterpreted over generations and retellings. Aylward writes: “The entire nexus of Greek mythology is in constant need of new analysis and artistic interpretation lest it become stale and unable to reflect the ‘universal contiguity’ Calvino so aptly recognizes. Even Ovid’s stories were not his own, but rather the myths of the day retold under his own artistic renderings. And so perhaps Ovid is one of the first to abide by the old adage that the act of writing is to rewrite the already written. I would like my Celestial Forms and Stories to be received also as an act of rewriting these myths that Ovid immortalized, in my own way, and through my own revelation of transformation.”