Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

From the four Books of Songs that appeared between 1597 and 1612, Hanna Thyssen and Susanne Peuker ('Fortune's Musicke') selected 15 of Dowland's most beautiful songs, weaving them together with several lute pieces into an atmospheric Dowland homage. It documents his great compositional mastery, and his instinct for unpretentious melodies and subtle text settings.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In his essay "The Coffee House as Will and Imagination", Hans Weigel states that there are many songs about wine, but few about coffee. That may be true, but there are at least a number of songs about the institution of the Viennese coffee house, and some of them can be heard on this release. Combined with texts by Weinheber, Altenberg, Chobot, Torberg, Kraus, Weigel and Marzik, Franziska Vondru creates a fascinating picture of an original Viennese institution. You can really get a little appetite and as Trude Marzik says in her poem about coffee: "Now I got it right on Gusto..."

Throughout his life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart repeatedly devoted himself to the genre of the accompanied piano sonata. He wrote the earliest works at the age of eight, to perform them either with his sister on the harpsichord and himself on the violin or with his father, the famous violin teacher, and sitting at the harpsichord himself. Leopold Mozart himself assured his son in a letter that he would count him among the best violin players in Europe - the composer himself preferred to see himself as a piano virtuoso and (of course) above all as a 'compositeur' who had a lot to say. The works recorded here also move within this area of tension. If the violin still plays a clearly subordinate role in the youth sonatas to the brilliant harpsichord part, which also leads in the cantabile slow movements, this distribution of roles changes over the time in favor of the violin. In the 'middle' phase of Mannheim, the renunciation of the violin would mean a painful loss, and in the later Vienna sonatas there is finally a true partnership between the two instruments with equal rights. The joyful virtuoso part is still reserved for the piano.

Classical Music

Classical Music