Joseph Beer was the operetta's rising star during the early 1930's and his Polish Wedding promised to bring him a major breakthrough. However, Nazi rule abruptly and tragically ended his career. Paul Abraham's librettist Fritz Lohner-Beda had taken Beer under his wing and did everything in his power to promote his success. Abrahama nd Beer had a lot in common - Jewish roots, a nervous disposition and above all, a bold stylistic mix combining folklore and jazz. All the characteristics of the operetta genre are united in concentrated form in Beer's music - buffo duets of folk character in the manner of Kalman, operatic finales a la Lehar and "Abrahamic" dance hits with rhythmic pep. An Austrian magazine wrote in 1934, "Surprises in the field of the operetta have become rare. The successes of recent years have been associated with a few names that one can count on the fingers of one hand. And now a young man of twenty-four by the name of Joseph Beer suddenly comes along and presents a work with an extraordinary musical appeal, sumptuous and personal invention, firm execution and an instrumentation that is a delight ot hear." Franz Lehar was forty years older than Beer and only a few months before Giuditta, his last work, had celebrated it's premiere at the Vienna State Opera - the crowning culmination of an operetta epoch that quite noticeably was nearing it's end. The time was ripe for a new generation, and Joseph Beer seemed to be just the right composer to lead it into the future.

The Loreley is one of the most famous figures of the romantic era, and even today the massive rock in the Rhine is notorious for threatening the river’s skippers with shipwreck. The legendary female figure with her seductive beauty today no longer haunts the river, but her story continues to resonate in the imagination. In 1861, when he was a mere twenty years old, Max Bruch, a Rhinelander born in Cologne, devoted an opera to the Loreley, a work based on a libretto by the great Emanuel Geibel himself. This opera in four acts is only rarely performed and until now has never been recorded on album. The Munich Radio Orchestra will now change this state of affairs: in a concert performance initiated by cpo the orchestra presented the work under the conductor Stefan Blunier, who was the General Music Director of the City of Bonn – that is, in the vicinity of the Loreley – when the recording was produced. The marvelous Michaela Kaune interpreted the title role in a top-quality performance, and Thomas Mohr was her male counterpart. Bruch set the Loreley story, in which everything, both in ambience and action, constituting a “Grand Romantic Opera” (thus the work’s subtitle) is present, in a highly romantic musical language. It is not without reason that Hans Pfitzner lent his support to this forgotten gem throughout his life.

At long last CPO is now releasing Ernst von Gemmingen’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 as world-premiere recordings, again interpreted by one of the most versatile musicians of our times: Kolja Lessing, who both as a violinist and a pianist has lent strong impulses to music culture with his interpretive and musicological insights. CPO also has him to thank for the exemplary interpretation recorded here. In his booklet text he himself writes: "We as yet know only a little or almost nothing about the human being and artist Ernst von Gemmingen, whose extant music library, however, offers eloquent testimony to his select taste. An autodidact and a visionary, borne by a wealth of violinistic invention almost boundless for his times with respect to double-stop and bel-canto playing, no less in view of sophisticated figurations up to the highest registers, in his four broadly dimensioned violin concertos he created what practically amount to theatrical scenarios. The Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 recorded here for the first time reveal these scenic qualities, paired with violinistic character and expressive eloquence surging far head into early romanticism – in even greater measure than in his first two concertos." A symphony by François-Joseph Gossec, Gemmingen’s contemporary and the principal composer of the French Revolution, complements the two concertos.

Das Fuerstenkind (The Prince’s Child) has always been an “insider’s tip” in Lehár’s oeuvre, and the composer himself regarded this robbers’ tale from Greece premiered in 1909 as one of his best works. It was also his problem child because it never became a sensational success. The reason may have been due to the works blurring of boundaries between opera and operetta.

Premiering in Munich in 1903, Le donne curiose numbered among the greatest and earliest successes of the German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. No Wagnerian pathos or turn-of-the-century bombast here: Wolf-Ferrari’s merry work is based on a Carlo Goldoni comedy in the spirit of a newly discovered rococo. Le donne curiose formed the basis of his world renown as a composer whose dramatic talent was always overshadowed by the subtle humor of his buffo operas. Ulf Schirmer again presents a convincing case on his behalf (previous release: Wolf-Ferrari, Orchestral Works: cpo 777 567-2).

The thought of Spain filled many French composers of the 19th and early 20th century with musical yearning – one has only to think of Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen", Maurice Ravel's "Rhapsodie espagnole" (1907), or his famous "Boléro" (1928). Ravel was already inspired by things Iberian in his first work for the stage: "L’heure espagnole" ("The Spanish Hour"), a one-act musical comedy set in Toledo, which premiered in Paris on May 19, 1911. Here he combined fantasy and comedy in the action with “spoken music” full of local Spanish colour. The short opera ends, for instance, with a fiery habanera. Ravel masterfully and wittily integrates the clocks chiming in the workshop of clockmaker Torquemada into the score, together with the sound of their ticking, and of all kinds of chimes or mechanical music machines producing cuckoo calls when striking the hour. Emmanuel Chabrier's rhapsody for orchestra with the promising title of "España" was composed in 1883 and premiered in Paris. The music was inspired by a Spanish journey that Chabrier had undertaken the year before, during which he had noted down many original motifs and rhythms. Spanish folklore is ever-present; in addition to the melodies, it is above all the rhythmic motifs and movement patterns that, when combined, achieve a complexity that was still unknown in art music at that time. These are live recordings of these two magnificent works.

This outstanding album contains 15 famous arias from the operas of Verdi, sung by the most influential Verdi voices of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. All of the recordings featured on this album are radio recordings, and were made between 1962 and 1984. The live recordings offer an interesting alternative to the studio recordings of the same works by the same performers. The selections are arranged chronologically by date of composition, and are a broad representation of the career of one of the finest operatic composers in history.

Just after the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth, CPO are releasing a concert performance of his rarely performed sung poem "Feuersnot" under the baton of Ulf Schirmer. The satirist Ernst von Wolzogen, who wrote the libretto for this "Bavarian burlesque" founded the first literary cabaret in Berlin, the Ueberbrettl.

Rarity – German version of Mozart's "Finta gardiniera. 5 years ago, the Munich Radio Orchestra under Andrew Parrott performed Mozart's singspiel "Die verstellte Gärtnerin" - the rarely performed German version of "Finta gardiniera," which can now finally appear on cpo. When this opera was first performed, Mozart was 19 years old - an age at which most composers had not even begun. Wolfgang Amadeus' career as a musician - and as a composer - had been in full swing for several years, however. The work belongs to the genre of opera buffa, within which it follows the type of opera semiseria (half opera) popular at the time. Accordingly, in addition to buffa parts, there are also semi-seria parts and even a pure seria part. The music is of great richness. Mozart shows himself here as a true master of opera buffa. At the same time, the music already points beyond these to masterpieces such as Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. The first two acts of the opera contain large-scale, effective finales. In the second act, Mozart combines the finale with several preceding arias and recitatives to create a grand scene that transcends the boundaries of contemporary number operas.

Anett Fritsch is dignified as Heinrich’s betrayed wife Catharina, but Julia Sophie Wagner is the pick of a more than passable bunch in the trouser role of the page Eduard. The choral singing has spirit, the recording (in Munich’s Prinzregententheater, though it doesn’t sound live) is nicely balanced, and it’s all swept cheerfully along by conductor Ulf Schirmer. - Gramophone

This new release features poignant soul music for moments of contemplation. Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary's suffering as Jesus Christ's mother at his crucifixion and has been set to music by many Western composers. This 4 album box presents timeless interpretations of the most important compositions of Stabat Mater. Soloists featured on the release include Margot Guilleaume, Ingeborg Danz, Marta Benackova, Elisabeth Höngen, James Taylor, Thomas Quasthoff and many more.

The highly talented Eduard Kunneke is known above all as a German operetta composer. The operetta Der Vetter aus Dingsda (1921) became his most famous work. Since he had not exactly experienced positive things in the United States, he evidently was not so eager to go into exile. As a result, during the Nazi era he became known as the "Master of the German Operetta," even though he hardly made concessions to the regime and repeatedly ran into trouble because he refused to separate from his "half-Jewish" wife Katarina. Along with his operettas, Kunneke regularly composed »serious works« for the concert hall that were almost completely neglected – wrongly so. For example, his Piano Concerto is a work very much displaying higher aspirations and qualifying as top-quality musical entertainment. His concerto is certainly the most original and spirited example of a genre of works engaging in dialogue with classicism and swing in the 1920s and including contributions by Gershwin and Ravel. The "game of musical catch" played by the orchestra and piano at the beginning of the first movement is simply astonishing. In the Gypsy Melodies and Serenade for Orchestra, pieces with which Kunneke demonstrated his early mastery around 1907, he styled himself as a very creative heir to Brahms and the late romanticist Max Reger, who had taught him the craft of composition.

Born in Slovakia in 1979, Pavol Breslik made his professional singing debut at the age of twenty-one. Since his debut, he has progressively added more and more to his repertoire however he continually finds himself returning to Mozart. Warmly praised by critics, he has no qualms with his decision to return to Mozart: "When I go back to Mozart after excursions into other repertoire - like Lensky or bel canto - and feel at home with Tamino, I know I have done the right thing."

Ivan Repusic, the new chief conductor of the Munich Rundfunkorchester, devotes his first album on BR-Klassik to works by the composers Maurice Durufle and Ottorino Respighi, both of whom took a major interest in the melodies and harmonies of Gregorian chant. The French composer Durufle’s “Requiem” is based on the Gregorian “Missa pro defunctis,” the Latin Mass for the Dead, and the Italian Respighi, in his “Concerto Gregoriano,” used Gregorian chant as a source of inspiration for the harmonious sound of the concerto and for the song-like treatment he gives to the solo violin. Maurice Durufle’s “Requiem” became especially well-known. Its first performance in 1947 was one of the high points of his career; the work not only helped to establish Durufle as a successful composer but also brought him fame far beyond the borders of France. This self-contained, homogeneous and contemplative composition is based on themes from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead. In his work, Durufle succeeded in fusing Gregorian chant, Baroque polyphony and colorful orchestration into a unified whole, and the spiritual, inward-looking character of the chants harmonizes most effectively with the composer’s personal style.

Walter Braunfels studied law and economics at the university of Munich until, after seeing a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, he decided to shift his focus to music. He went on to study with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna before returning to Munich to study composition with Felix Mottl and Ludwig Thuille. His earliest success came with the opera Die Vogel. With the rise of the Nazis to power, however, he was dismissed from his positions and listed as being half-Jewish. Luckily, the war passed peacefully for his family, he returned to the public eye after the war was over. On this release, the Munchner Rundfunkorchester with violinist Henry Raudales, violist Norbert Merkl, and hornists Karl Reitmayer and Marc Ostertag present Braunfel’s String Quintet in F sharp minor in its version for String Orchestra, and his Sinfonia Concertante op. 68 for violin, viola, 2 horns, and string orchestra. These are world premiere recordings.