Until well into the second half of the eighteenth century it was the harpsichord which served at the very forefront as a sounding body for experimental and avant-garde. At the latest with the generation around Beethoven, the “modern” fortepiano had become the key instrument for this task. With the renaissance of the harpsichord toward the end of the 19th century, the interest of living composers in this instrument gradually awoke. A first peak was reached in the 1920s, when Manuel de Falla and Francis Poulenc created the first significant works with their respective concert pieces. Fortunately, music continues to be diligently composed for this “old” instrument. The performance of a recital on this release in 2004 is intended to document the liveliness and timeliness of new harpsichord music, even if the most recent piece from 1999 was written at that time.

“Royal… noble sound in a courtly context” is a short description of the music of the famous renaissance lutenist John Dowland, which is the focus of Stefan Koim’s second album. On the one hand, compositions by Dowland are presented; compositions that represent an impressive combination of heart, mind and intellect from the pen of a worldly musician of the 16th century. On the other side are the two important modern compositions by Benjamin Britten and Hans Werner Henze, which refer in their works to Dowland and the lute music of the Elizabethan era. Explicitly, this is done in Britten’s Nocturnal, a variation on John Dowland’s Air ‘Come Heavy Sleep,’ whose original form untypically appears only at the very end of the composition. Rather implicitly, the reference to Hans Werner Henze, who drew inspiration for his London-based cycle ‘Royal Winter Music’ in the works of the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare is known to be a contemporary of Dowland. Unimaginable, therefore, that he did not also have Dowland’s lute music in his ear when writing his work for solo guitar.

In the handwritten catalogue of his own works, Brahms recorded that he had composed the Second Symphony in Pörtschach; and already during the summer Eduard Hanslick received the information from Brahms that he would “have a symphony played for him in winter.” At the end of October 1877 Brahms returned to Vienna. During the first half of November he already worked on the four-hand piano score of the Second Symphony, and in December he gave a private performance, together with the pianist and composer Iganz Brüll, of the piano arrangement in Friedrich Ehrbar’s piano showroom. The orchestral rehearsals for the Second Symphony began at the end of December, and the premiere took place on 30 December 1877 in the large hall of the Musikverein in Vienna: Hans Richter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic from the manuscript. For his Violin Concerto, Othmar Schoeck let himself be inspired by something that greatly enthralled him: the violin playing of the erstwhile child prodigy Stefi Geyer. Her talent and striking beauty turned the heads of important composers, including Béla Bartók – and Othmar Schoeck fared no differently. In the autumn of 1910 Schoeck took up work on the Violin Concerto op. 21. Due to the motivic relationships between the individual movements, it comes close to a musical “fantasia” and demands a rich palette of finely graded timbres from the soloist. The first complete performance of the Violin Concerto, with Schoeck on the piano, took place on 28 February 1912 in Berlin; about a month later, the work was heard in Bern in the version with orchestra. The soloist of the first performances was the Dutchman Willem de Boer, the concertmaster of the Tonhalle Orchestra, which accompanied both the Bern and, a short time later, the Zurich first performances. Stefi Geyer recorded the Violin Concerto during the shellac gramophone record era.