This series marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, which falls in 2024. It is dedicated to Bruckner’s symphonies, all recorded in new transcriptions for organ by Hansjörg Albrecht. The second recording was made on the impressive organ of the Brucknerhaus Linz, Austria. A bonus track on each volume will be a brand-new composition for organ that references Bruckner the composer. Two or three volumes will be released each year, with the project reaching its conclusion in 2024. So, stay tuned. “Memorable performances, high-tech sonics and informative annotations complete this superb and innovative first installment that sets my imagination alight.” (Classical Music Daily on the previous volume in the series)

Classical Music

Far away from the metropolis of Munich, music culture also blossomed at the court of the prince bishop of Freising: in his role as episcopal Kapellmeister, Placidus von Camerloher shaped the city’s musical life for almost forty years. To mark the 300th birthday of the composer, lutenist Christoph Eglhuber has compiled and recorded his Compositions for Solo Lute. Most of them are world premiere recordings. Eglhuber is joined here by Hans Bruderl, Theona Gubba-Chkeidze, Angelika Fichter and Sabina Lehrmann. Christoph Eglhuber attended the artistic Camerloher Grammar School in Freising. There followed studies at Munich Music Academy and at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. During this time, he also specialized in performing on period plucked instruments, in particular on basso continuo and ensemble performance with different types of lute and theorbos, up to and including early guitars. He has been an associate professor at the Department of Musicology and Music Education of Regensburg University since 2001.

For L’Invisible, like his other two most recent operas Bernarda Alba’s House and Medea, Aribert Reimann has turned to a text of world literature, adapting it himself as his own librettist. With it, he returns to his “home” opera house the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Four of his stage works were commissioned by that opera house and the world premiere of his new, ninth opera was also given there. It was staged by Vasily Barkhatov, one of the most interesting Russian directors of his generation, who made his debut at the opera house on Bismarckstraße after having worked at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre and the Mariinski Theater in St. Petersburg. The premiere was conducted by the Principal Conductor himself, Donald Runnicles.

Elena Denisova is one of the outstanding personalities in the elite class of Russian violinists. Her exceedingly high degree of musical maturity, individual interpretation and superlative virtuosity are recognized by audiences and critics alike. This could be heard recently at the Festival Opening Celebration of this year's Salzburg Festival in the Kollergienkirche.

The heroine dies. Not of a deadly disease, not of a broken heart, not in ecstasy nor by her own hand. There is no final aria, no perpetual drawing-out of the last breath, no resounding lament, no congregation of mourners. Only briefly does the music echo bygone happiness. This might sum up Janácek’s enchanting opera, recorded live in the usual top quality at Frankfurt Opera in April/May 2016. The Cunning Little Vixen was written between 1921 and 1923, with libretto adapted from a 1920 serialized novella by Rudolf Tesnohlidek. The opera incorporates Moravian folk tunes as it recounts the life of a clever fox and accompanying wildlife, as well as a few humans. Although it is described as a comic opera, it contains some serious themes, and some reviewers have called it children’s entertainment, while others insist it is a tragedy.

Marimbist Fumito Nunoya has enjoyed international fame as one of the most in demand marimba players of our day. A native of Odate Japan, he is currently based out of Herford in Germany, where he teaches at the Academy of Music in Detmold. In addition to performing across Europe, he frequently gives concerts in the United States and Japan. For this release, he has chosen classic works, which he arranged for his instrument, like Chopin’s Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Op. 60, and selections from Bach’s Partitas and Sonatas. Nunoya is joined on this recording by pianist Momoko Shano and fellow marimbist Hiroya Honda.

Pianist Sophie-Mayuko Vetter presents the world premiere recording of a reconstruction of around 70 pages of sketches for Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 6 in D major (fragment) by Nicholas Cook and Hermann Dechant. Another special feature of this release is that the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 0 in E flat major, WoO 4 is heard in period style, performed on a fortepiano made by the London piano manufacturer John Broadwood in 1806. The expressive and harmonically rich vocabulary of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19 clearly demonstrates the young Beethoven’s development as an autonomous Viennese classicist. Sophie-Mayuko Vetter has been praised as an artist of extraordinary expressivity and versatility by press and colleagues alike. Her previous recording on OehmsClassics received an ICMA nomination and was awarded a Supersonic rating by Pizzicato: ‘Deeply felt performances of two Mozart concertos, where Sophie-Mayuko Vetter’s playing can be compared with that of Clara Haskil, Geza Anda or the young Barenboim.’

Renowned tenor Maximilian Schmitt began his musical career with the Regensburg Boys’ Choir at a young age. It was shortly after that time that he premiered as Tamino in The Magic Flute before accepting a four-year position with the Mannheim National Theatre. Schmitt tours and performs in all of Europe’s major opera houses, and frequently records. This is his third CD with OehmsClassics. Schmitt shows in this recording his sensitivity while performing these romantic operas from Flotow, Lortzing, Wagner, and more. He is accompanied by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, conducted by Patrick Lange.

This recording combines a selection of Weinberg's early works with the piano quintet and some of the children's notebooks from the last two years of the war. Born in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg fled to Moscow in 1939. There he made friends with Shostakovich, who always supported him. Weinberg wrote numerous works, including 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets and numerous chamber music as well as his operas Wir gratulieren! (OC990) and Die Passagierin. Weinberg dies in Moscow in 1996. In addition to the pianist Elisaveta Blumina, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Shanshan Yao, Máté Szücs and Bruno Delepelaire also perform.

REVIEW:

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Piano Quintet, Op. 18, nearly 45 minutes long, is the major work on this CD. It is in five movements and in a minor key. But unlike Shostakovich’s quintets in the same key, that by Weinberg is immediately communicative, at times admittedly with mysterious restraint, at others very direct and ample.

Pianist Elisaveta Blumina has long championed Weinberg’s work, and she has reunited an ad hoc ensemble for this recording that excitingly expresses the contrasting music. As a result, her interpretation reveals both an introverted and a very defiantly aggressive Weinberg, who struggles to come to terms with his life in Poland, where he lost his family.

Shortly after Weinberg fled Poland for the Soviet Union, he began composing a cycle of pieces, which he compiled into three so-called Kinderhefte. During this time, he also became acquainted with Shostakovich, who also happened to be working on a series of piano pieces. Shostakovich’s pieces were composed for his young daughter Galina and they are technically very simple. Weinberg’s pieces have much higher technical requirements. For Elisaveta Blumina, this seems to have been a spur, for her interpretations are of the greatest refinement, finely differentiated and always rhetorical.

-- Pizzicato

For the specific atmosphere of Oberon Michael Hofstetter found it crucial that the performance was played on the period instruments Weber composed for. In Giessen, he worked with four natural horns, natural trumpets, finely tuned trombones and not least flutes made of wood instead of metal. This produced an inexhaustible wealth of acoustic colors, enabling us to sensually experience what might really be meant by the concept of German Romanticism on the musical level. Michael Hofstetter conducts at many well known opera houses, orchestras and festivals, include the Bavarian, the Hamburg, the Hanover and the Stuttgart State Operas, Theater an der Wien, the Royal Opera Copenhagen, the Welsh National Opera, the English National Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Canadian Opera Company Toronto and many others. Future engagements will see him again at the International Handel Festival in Halle, with Orchestre National d‘Île de France in Paris and at the International Gluck Festival Nuremberg.

Fumito Nunoya is considered the custodian of the marimba. In the preface to this album, the Japanese musician explains why the marimba is still not a main instrument in the classical music scene. But with an exciting programme ranging from the Baroque to Modernism, he impressively proves the opposite, at least for the inclined listener of this recording. Marimbist Fumito Nunoya is gaining international recognition as one of today’s leading marimbists. Born in Odate, Japan, he currently lives in Kreis Herford, Germany. He has taught marimba at the Hochschule fur Musik Detmold in Germany since 2009. In addition to performances in Germany and around Europe, he regularly travels to perform in Japan and the United States.

What is the attraction of permanence? That which is eternally constant is a great enticement; do we long to hang on to what is fleeting but yet makes us happy? In Goethe‘s Faust we read “moment, do stay, you are so lovely” – and Korngold entitled his cycle with this word: Unverganglichkeit (Permancence). It is the core of this programme – it opens, runs through and closes it. All the other songs are arranged thematically around this thread of permanence. After the enormous success of the first recital by Michaela Schuster on OehmsClassics (Best List of German Recording Critics, CD of the Month of the journal “Opernwelt”, etc.), the sympathetic artist presents another very extravagant programme here. Michaela Schuster will make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in March 2018 as Klytamnestra in "Elektra" by Richard Strauss.

The Sanskrit word "Turangalîla" roughly means "dynamism" and "vitality" - Olivier Messiaen, expert on Indian rhythms, gave this gigantic opus this title and christened it "Hymn to Joy". The Nationaltheater-Orchester Mannheim is dedicated to this exuberance with general music director Alexander Soddy, who brings over a hundred musicians to the stage: among them the Turangalîla interpreters Tamara Stefanovich and Thomas Bloch. Crazy tempos, rhythms, keys: Messiaen's “love song” is a Dionysian sound frenzy that is second to none. A production by the Musikalische Akademie des Nationaltheater-Orchester Mannheim e.V. in cooperation with the Nationaltheater Mannheim.

Dark Spring is an opera about four young people under extreme pressure: the pressure to overachieve academically, to score high in the popularity contests at school or at college, and to perform romantically or sexually. The pressure has become entirely internalized as parents or teachers are absent and the protagonists are left alone with late capitalism’s demands of permanent self-optimization. The conflict between the expectation to succeed on the one hand and the sense of powerlessness and unattainable self-determination in an era of constant stagnation on the other hand grows increasingly acute until it eventually flips into violence: into Melchior’s sexual aggression and Moritz suicide. The opera focuses less on the narration of the four young protagonists’ story but rather on their attempt to articulate and understand the often contradictory feelings that come with it: Feelings of meaninglessness and alienation in a society that values only productivity and success but makes it unreachable for almost everyone; feelings of pain both as suffering and as sexual experience; feelings of love and kinship that briefly appear between the protagonists that nevertheless bring a sense of vulnerability. In a hyper-competitive world the display of emotions is seen as a weakness and a liability. The longing to open up to someone else, to reveal and feel oneself and one another, and to find an expression for that longing seems unsettling and dangerous. The four protagonists of Dark Spring sing songs. They articulate their feelings through the mask of the distancing formalization of rhyme, meter, stanza, and refrain. Under the surface of the objectified schemata of song an almost raw and undomesticated sound-world simmers, though, that breaks through at crucial points of the plot – a sound-world of noise, screams, and silence.