Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This extraordinary album sheds light on a phase in German cultural history never before documented with such encyclopedic depth. Here the pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, who has just received further important recognition as an interpreter of twentieth-century music as the recipient of the ECHO Classics Prize 1998, presents music by select composers from the Bauhaus movement. Joseph Matthias Hauer devoted himself to synaesthetic ideas throughout his life and lamented the separation of painting, architecture, and music. This alert, highly imaginative thinker came up with a thousand dodecaphonic "Zwolftonspiele" alone- to the delight of fellow creative artists like Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who is also represented with a work on this album. Along with such caricatures, this album also includes an anthology of fascinating, strange, and surprising pieces off the all-too-beaten path of music history: a morbid tango by Stefan Wolpe, a piano piece with the intriguing title "einsames getropfel" (lonely dripping) by Wladimir Vogel, and the sonatina "Death of the Machines" by the bad boy of the music world, George Antheil.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Luigi Boccherini’s contemporaries ranked him with Joseph Haydn, but during later times the high esteem enjoyed by his music faded – when everything of Italian origin that was not an opera was generally dismissed. The young musicians of Scala köln believe that it is high time to reopen Boccherini’s case and are now presenting the results of their new investigation: a delightful program demonstrating that Boccherini’s treasure trove holds more in store than just his famous Minuet. The musicians of Scala koln, led by the violinist Christoph Mayer and the oboist Monika Nielen, bring this music to the stage in fresh new interpretations that are historically informed and feature period instruments. The mixed instrumentation with winds and strings comes with a guarantee of richly varied listening pleasure- boredom is absolutely out of the question!

Classical Music

World premiere recording of undiscovered gems from the estate of Norman O'Neill, an English member of the Frankfurt Group, from the end of the 19th

Five hundred years ago the Reformation occasioned an upsurge in the production of church music, and even today Luther’s powerful sacred hymns continue to be mainstays in Lutheran religious services. However, Luther’s fruitful juxtaposition of “transmitted” and “modern” music shows that he was also fond of drawing on songs from the “old church.” The Lutheran chorale masses recorded by Hermann Max with his Rheinische Kantorei on vinyl more than thirty years ago represent a special form within these parallel- or shared- relational worlds. Even then the MDG sound engineers used the latest digital technology for the recording. Along with the chorale masses by Christoph Bernhard, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, and Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, Hermann Max presents three works that were highly modern during their times. Schein’s composed interpretations of his source texts ventured onto terrain normally reserved for theologians- at least in the old church. But this too is in the spirit of the Reformation: the “priesthood of all believers” can of course not be excluded from the musical sphere! And so this valuable new edition expands our view of Protestant church music, from a much too rarely considered but welcome perspective.