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.

On her sixth album for the Myrios classics label, Romance Oubli�e, Tabea Zimmermann has chosen a selection of miniatures for the viola, including almost entirely forgotten works by popular composers of the 19th c. like Liszt, Vierne, Vieuxtemps and Weiniawski. Amongst the world's most respected and honored violists, Ms. Zimmermann's many current activities include her international solo concert career, performances with the Arcanto Quartet an ensemble she helped co-found in 2002, Ensemble Resonanz Artist-in-Residence and Viola Prof. At Academy of Music "Hanns Eisler" Berlin.

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.

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).

Schumann, Knussen & Liszt: Piano Works

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.

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

An die Geliebte

Once a towering inspirational figure in the musical life of Berlin, later a crucial influence on musicians as diverse as Sibelius, Varèse, Schoenberg and Weill, Ferruccio Busoni is now being rediscovered by a new generation of performers and listeners. Kurt Weill wrote: “Ferruccio Busoni has been called the last Renaissance man. It is strange enough that such a phenomenon appeared in our time. We are bound to think of Leonardo. In him also we find that comprehensive spirituality which strives to open up all attainable spheres. Such individuals are immortal not only through their work but through the radiation of their personality, through the gradual influence of their humanity.” Busoni’s sui generis five-movement Piano Concerto is a work that bears comparison to Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Eighth. This revelatory new recording by pianist Kirill Gerstein with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus conducted by Sakari Oramo is a landmark in the wider acclamation of a singular genius who mapped a sublime 20th century alternative to the modernist revolt of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

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REVIEW:

The performance is so well thought-through and so expertly performed, as well as so perfectly recorded, that this must now surely qualify as one of the top choices for this work. Hopefully it will encourage many others to take the plunge and explore this multi-faceted behemoth. Like any cliff-face, it’s intimidating at first, but renders many rewards when you work at it, and in this company those rewards are all the richer. I’d be very surprised if this isn’t one of my discs of 2019.

– MusicWeb International (Simon Thompson)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.