It is the year 1966, in the Soviet Union. While Shostakovich is enjoying the success of the world première of his Second Cello Concerto, the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze is putting the finishing touches on his own new work. In their respective concertos, these two composers draw their own psychogram: a sombre landscape intermittently illuminated by rays of light, brightened up with a few prudent dabs of color here and there. German shooting star cellist Maximilian Hornung releases here his first album on the myrios classics label. Born 1986 in Augsburg, Hornung studied with David Geringas, Thomas Grossenbacher and Eldar Issakadze, to whom he dedicated the album. It was Issakadze who introduced him to the fascinating music of Sulkhan Tsintsadze, one of the most celebrated composers of Georgia. The musical link of Tsintsadze’s Second Cello Concerto to the late work of his Soviet colleague and contemporary, Dmitri Shostakovich is at the core of this gloomy, yet enchanting album. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the baton of the Latvian conductor Andris Poga provides perfect musical partnership.

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REVIEW:

Because both concertos were composed in 1966 we get a new-to-disc work by the more or less forgotten Georgian composer, Sulkhan Tsintsadze. It shares with fellow Georgian Giya Kancheli an inclination for melancholy and contemplativeness but stops well short of the latter’s violent dynamic contrasts. Play it a few times in a row and it will grow on you.

– Records International

Both works date from 1966 and both leave the soloist a huge degree of expressive liberty. Tsintsadze is very good at disguising folk roots in his music and Shostakovich, by this time, is an unassailable master. This is quite a cello feast.

– Norman Lebrecht

This album marks a milestone in the extensive discography of the Hagen Quartett – myrios classics is honoured to present their first recording of a Brahms string quartet. The quartet op. 67 is paired with Brahms’ piano quintet op. 34. Here, the Hagen Quartett is joined by their regular collaborator, pianist Kirill Gerstein. The unprecedented three-decade career of the Hagen Quartet began in 1981. Its early years, marked by a series of prizes in chamber music competitions and an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon that was to produce around forty-five albums over the following twenty years, enabled the group to work its way through the virtually un- limited quartet repertoire from which the distinctive profile of the Hagens has emerged. Collaborations with artistic personalities such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt and György Kurtág are as important to the Hagen Quartet as its concert appearances with performers including Maurizio Pollini, Mitsuko Uchida, Sabine Meyer, Krystian Zimerman, Heinrich Schiff and Jörg Widmann. The group’s concert repertoire and discography feature attractive and intelligently arranged programmes embracing the entire history of the string quartet, from its pre-Haydn beginnings right through to Kurtág. The Hagen Quartet also works closely with composers of its own generation, whether by reviving existing works or by commissioning and premiering new pieces.

This release is a compilation of Lieder, instrumental works, and poems both composed by and inspired by Franz Schubert. Julian Pregardien joins with Marc Hantai, Xavier Diaz-Latorre, and Philippe Pierlot for this recording. The musicians performing are early music specialists with high credentials.

Imaginary Pictures

Schumann, Knussen & Liszt: Piano Works

FANTASIA UND FUGE

For this new release, the Hagen Quartet presents Mozart String Quartets K. 387 and K. 458. These two works are part of a group of six quartets that were dedicated to Joseph Haydn. The Hagen Quartet recorded this album using the ‘Paganini Quartet,’ which is the only complete set of Stradivarius instruments owned by Niccolo Paganini that is known to exist today.

An die Geliebte

The year 1841 finally marked Robert Schumann’s breakthrough as a composer for orchestra. That year, he created no less than two works: his First Symphony, also known as the “Spring Symphony”, and a piece which he initially planned as a "Symphonic Fantasy" in one movement, and which would later become his Symphony in D Minor. The Spring Symphony was composed in the coldest winter. Full of longing, it is a work that knows only one direction: growing, blossoming, the path to light and new life. The Symphony in D minor seems much more somber and intimate, “a work from the innermost depths of his soul”, as Clara Schumann noted in her diary. However, the audience could not warm up to this bold, impetuous work, and Schumann set it aside. Ten years later, after a major revision, he published it as his 4th Symphony. This album pairs the Spring Symphony with the original version of the Symphony in D minor, the version which friends such as Johannes Brahms preferred over the later edition. Schumann never heard it again in his lifetime, and it was not until 1889 that it was performed in public once more, by the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne under the baton of Franz Wüllner. François-Xavier Roth, the Gürzenich Orchestra’s current chief conductor, also prefers the original version. With its leaner orchestration, it is certainly the more radical one, and thus requires a higher degree of commitment from the orchestra musicians in forming crescendi, melodic phrases, and extended arcs of formal development.

On his final recording, the great actor Bruno Ganz narrates Tennyson’s poem, Enoch Arden, with its echoes of the everlasting stories of Odysseus and Robinson Crusoe. In a unique synthesis of words and music, Tennyson’s verse is further deepened by R. Strauss’ flamboyant musical depiction, played here by pianist Kirill Gerstein. Bruno Ganz; 22 March 1941 – 16 February 2019) was a Swiss actor whose career in German television and film productions spanned nearly 60 years. He was known for his collaborations with the directors Werner Herzog, Éric Rohmer, Francis Ford Coppola, and Wim Wenders, earning widespread recognition with his roles as Jonathan Zimmerman in The American Friend (1977), Jonathan Harker in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Damiel the Angel in Wings of Desire (1987).

This book + 2-CD set will ship on or after 21 June 2024.

Read about it in the New York Times!

Music in Time of War, the new double album from pianist Kirill Gerstein, places the music of Komitas, pioneer of ethnomusicology and founder of the Armenian national school of music, alongside that of Claude Debussy, a seminal composer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who held a deep admiration of Komitas’s music. This 2-CD release comes with a 172-page hardcover book.

Both composers were profoundly affected by the implosion of their worlds – Komitas by the Armenian Genocide, Debussy by the First World War – and their music reflects a close emotional alignment. Music in Time of War grew from Gerstein’s fascination with music’s power to reflect a narrative. The project will be released as a double CD album and will be accompanied by a hardcover book containing a series of illustrations and detailed essays in three languages commissioned by the pianist.

Gerstein pairs Debussy’s 12 Études from 1915 and Komitas’s Armenian Dances for piano, composed the following year, and includes a selection of Debussy’s late piano pieces composed to raise funds for the war. The artists featured on the album include Armenian soprano Ruzan Mantashyan, and pianists Thomas Adès and Katia Skanavi – they join Gerstein in a selection of works for voice and piano, piano four hands as well as for two pianos. Accompanying the recording are four in-depth essays from historians Annette Becker and Khatchig Mouradian, musicologist Artur Avanesov and composer Heinz Holliger, that explore the impact of war and genocide on society, and the reaction of artists to such events. These essays give socio-historical context to the music of Debussy and Komitas, and their response to creating in times of catastrophe.

Music in Time of War epitomizes both Kirill Gerstein‘s creative curiosity and his insightful approach to curating projects. The album will be released as a double CD including the high-quality 172-page hardcover book by myrios classics.

To date, countless composers and Bruckner scholars have attempted to undo the body-snatching and reconstruct the manuscripts of the fourth movement into a whole "in the spirit of the composer". François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne remain true to the original three-movement version in their highly acclaimed Bruckner cycle, and this album marks an important milestone in the work's discography.

Francois-Xavier Roth and the Gurzenich Orchestra Cologne explore the beginnings of Anton Bruckner's symphonic oeuvre on the way to the complete recording of the symphonies. Between Linz and Vienna, the organist from the modest provinces, "half genius and half fool", as contemporaries described him, found his symphonic language. At the age of over 40, he composed his first "real" symphony.

Mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter interprets Gustav Mahler's Wunderhorn Lieder and Kindertotenliederwith great emotional depth and subtle creative power - two cycles that illuminate human fate in all itsfacets like few others. In the Wunderhorn Lieder we encounter tender childhood memories and bizarre stories - a worldbetween irony, folk song and deep melancholy. The harrowing contrast is provided by theKindertotenlieder, in which Mahler sets the pain of the loss of a child to music with poignant clarity andtouching restraint. Together with the Gurzenich Orchestra Cologne under the baton of Jordan de Souza, Anna Lucia Richtergives these songs a new, very personal dimension with her highly nuanced voice.

Hardly any combination of instruments is more appealing than a string quartet and a clarinet; together they make a magical melange. The Hagen Quartet and Jörg Widmann have recorded Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, a 'work among friends', in this irresistible blend. Jörg Widmann, clarinettist and composer in equal measure, picks up on the omnipresent themes of 'floating, love, and chant' in Mozart's notes and creates a weighty counterpart to Mozart's popular work with his own clarinet quintet, which is available here in a world premiere recording.

Bruckner‘s Third - a creative history that is unique even for the great Austrian romantic. No other of his symphonies has been revised, reshaped and reissued more often. Yet the first version from 1873, which François-Xavier Roth has chosen for this recording, bristles with boldness and the joy of experimentation. Here, the reminiscence of Beethoven‘s Ninth and the works of the dedicatee Richard Wagner is almost tangible. With this recording, François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln continue the highly acclaimed Bruckner Symphonies cycle and, with great attention to detail, once again present the „unvarnished“ Bruckner, groundbreaking, virtuosic and refined.

In a unique collaboration, Kirill Gerstein teams up with his mentor and inspiration, the great Hungarian pianist Ferenc Rados, for an album of four-hand duets by Mozart. An icon for generations of musicians but one who has mostly avoided making recordings, this fascinating disc reveals Rados’s distinctively characterful art at its captivating best and finds both partners in a stimulating musical conversation.