Julius Berger writes of his new release: "Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites for cello solo are arguably the purest form of music, works that require no explanation or background knowledge. Johann Sebastian Bach made one of his most profound affirmations, a Gradus ad Parnassum, which in six stages sets out an intellectual and technical challenge that is and will probably remain peerless in the history of music for our instrument. My colleague and friend, Prof. Peter Langgartner from the Mozarteum University of Salzburg pointed out to me that the Prelude of the first suite contains Luther’s chorale “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her” (from Heaven above, from thence I come). I had always presumed so and was grateful for confirmation that the cello suites make allusions to chorales and religious messages. I have therefore found a musical way of opening a spiritual door to the suites and added chorales to Suites 1, 3, and 5 in the mould of sounds from John Cage’s work One 8, chorales that in my opinion are definitely consistent with messages conveyed in the suites. I find that John Cage’s music shares similarities with Bach’s. His music allows for inner reflection, providing a contemplative point of calm. Cage said the purpose of music is “to cleanse the soul and bring it peace, thus making it amenable to divine influences”. My son Immanuel intones the chorales to this special music; each chorale is followed by two Bach suites."

The combination of organ and violin goes back to the Baroque era. Many sonatas for violin and basso continuo can be executed just as well on the organ as on the harpsichord, sometimes even more colorfully than with harpsichord accompaniment. It was this tradition that Henri Marteau followed when he wrote his Fantasia for organ and violin op. 27, recorded here for the first time. The world-famous violin virtuoso and educator was also a highly productive composer, who apart from his chamber music wrote two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony, an opera and several organ works, to which he was inspired by the warm Romantic registers of the pneumatic organ then in use in his new home of Lichtenberg in Upper Franconia.

Edgar Krapp directed an organ class at the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt, was a guest professor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and assumed a professorship at the Munich Musikhochschule, holding that position until his retirement in 2012. He has served on the juries of such celebrated international competitions as the ARD Competition in Munich, ION Nürnberg, Linz Bruckner Competition, Grand Prix de Chartres and the Musashino Competition in Tokyo. In recognition of his artistic and educational services, he was awarded the Frankfurt Music Prize and the E.T.A. Hoffmann Prize of the City of Bamberg. With solo performances in greatest concert halls of the world including the Berlin and Munich Philharmonic; the Kennedy Center, Washington; Avery Fisher Hall, New York; Tonhalle, Zurich; Goldenen Saal, Vienna or the Scala, Milan; working with directors like Sergiu Celibidache, Charles Dutoit, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Yehudi Menuhin, Jun Märkl, Andris Nelsons and Marcello Viotti, Ingolf Turban commands a repertoire of works, some of which have rarely been performed on stage.

For Russian musicians, the romances of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov have always been a test of their artistic maturity. The very name of the genre carries a great many shades of meaning in Russian, denoting what at times are very varied forms of musical utterance. The vocal chamber works by these two composers, who are usually mentioned in the same breath as luminaries of Russian music, really do exhibit the vast range in artistic expression of their creators. You listen to a recording by the young musicians Lena Belkina and Natalia Sidorenko, who have begun the difficult journey along the road that leads to a perfect blend of tone and the discovery of a personal inflexion in these diminutive, yet complex masterpieces. It is significant that the mezzo-soprano Lena Belkina - for whom Russian, with it's awkward intonation, is a mother tongue - lives and works in Austria, Germany, Italy and France. This has given her an awareness that romances by great Russian composers are part of a worldwide musical heritage. There are several themes running through the romances brought together on this disc that pose demanding artistic challenges for their performers. Spring: from tender green leaves that have barely sprouted to luxuriant blooms of flowering lilac, rushing streams and the burble of the nightingale's song. Night: descending on us with it's unexpected warmth, sometimes stifling, sometimes melancholy, giving rise even in the midst of a storm to cradle songs, serenades and dreams of a happy life, which often dissipate on awakening. Love: past and future, lamented and desired, 'familiar to everyone and eternally new', as one of the romances puts it.

Poèmes are wayfarers crossing borders between language and music. What had mostly been called Lied/Song before, has often been seen as poems in the past 200 years: Richard Wagner gave his Wesendonck-Liedern the titel Five Poems for Female Voice and Piano and Francis Poulenc composed around 30 Poèmes to be sung and accompanied musically. Just as with Lied, which also exists without words (Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), a Poème does not necessarily have to be based on a text. Alexander Scriabin, for example, composed 20 Poèmes for piano solo at the beginning of the last century. Francis Poulenc, the Janus-headed French composer, is difficult to grasp – it is impossible to peg a label on him. Yet, he has always remained stylistically faithful in his adherence to tonality, the empasis on melodic elements, the refined simplicity of texture and his effort for clarity and comprehensibilty true to his motto: „There is also room for new music , that does not mind applying the chords of other people.“

Some of Jean-Nicolas Diatkine's singer friends have ended their careers, but their magic is irreplaceable in his eyes, or rather in his ears. He misses them, just as he misses the Schubert, Schumann and Brahms songs they sang. Well, there is only one person who can compensate for this loss, and his name is Franz Liszt. The main aim of transcriptions was to make orchestral works known to a wider audience, at a time when there were far fewer orchestras, and public access to symphony concerts was very limited. But Liszt gives transcriptions a new meaning: he puts the orchestra into the piano, since his style is particularly suited to outsized extravagance. Thus he opens up unprecedented pianistic possibilities, where virtuosity is no longer mere exhibitionism but rather transformed into the art of illusion. His arrangements of Wagner are so convincing that they become his own personal creations. Laurent Bessières, piano tuner at the Paris Philharmonic, suggested for this recording a Schiedmayer piano of 1916 made in Stuttgart, which he had completely rebuilt in collaboration with Antoine Letessier-Salmon, director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and Stephen Paulello, piano maker and inventor of the strings that bear his name. This instrument has almost never been used in concert, however excellent work by Laurent Bessières convinced us to try it out in this very special repertoire.

Impressions d’enfance, Ensemble Raro’s and Gilles Apap’s new recording, is dedicated to chamber music works of George Enescu. The Piano Quintet in D is one of his earliest compositions. Written in 1896 at the age of fifteen during his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, it is certainly inspired by Brahms’ chamber works. Enescu himself confessed about Brahms’ enormous influence on his development: “the God of my youthful adoration is Brahms and I wrote my early works in the style of the immortal Johannes in an almost flagrant way”. The Quintet was premiered in 1897, in Enescu’s first recital of his own works in Paris at the age of sixteen; Massenet and Cortot were in the audience. The two charming works for Piano and String Trio, Aubade and Serenade Lointaine, illustrate the point that Enescu’s beloved teacher Gabriel Fauré expressed very beautifully: “the greatest technical ability is not worth anything without poetry”. Even in the cleverly constructed short piece Hommage for Piano, which is based on a motive representing the letters of Fauré’s name, the poetic, dreamy quality prevails. Enescu’s late masterpiece Impressions d’enfance for Violin and Piano takes us back to the very first occasion when three year old George heard a street fiddler for the very first time. Impressions is an evocation of a childhood through a sequence of dreams, memories, imperceptible sensations and sounds. It results in one of Enescu’s most glorious climaxes where the old fiddler’s tune merges with cosmic piano harmony and the the noble, healing force of music triumphs over all. In Enescu’s own words: a man always “carries the music in himself. In the loneliness of the mountains and plains, it is his comrade; it calms his fears, it helps him sing his dor, that inexpressible nostalgia that breaks his soul”.

One of the greatest innovations of Baroque music is undoubtedly the thoroughbass, or basso continuo, of which Bach himself wrote: “Thoroughbass is the entire foundation of music, it is played with both hands, so that the left hand plays the written notes, while the right hand adds consonances and dissonances, creating an agreeable Harmony to the glory of God and to the proper enjoyment of the senses. Because there is basso continuo, the melody can unfold in all its fullness, with that resonant profile that is so characteristic of the Baroque aesthetic. The great majority of the pieces are Preludes, that is to say, they anticipate a continuation: usually a sung chorale, the theme of which is to be found in the Prelude, where it sets the tone for the assembly; these hymns were sung during Lutheran services. And they are lacking because we have concentrated on the instrumental side. Bach and his composing colleagues have made some small contribution to this, by leaving us instrumental works that directly touch the soul and seem to speak for themselves. The pieces on this album are taken principally from two collections of Bach’s works: the third part of the Clavier-Übung and the eighteen great Preludes for organ. Saya Hashino is a virtuosic concert pianist, organist, harpsichordist who brings life to a diverse musical repertoire with finesse and expressivity. Truly versatile and versed in early, chamber, orchestral and contemporary music, she plays her keyboard instruments regularly with highly-acclaimed and established orchestras such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Ensemble Contrechamps to name a few. Saya is titular organist of Saint-Germain Church in Geneva, where this recording was also made on an impressive 18-stop organ built by the German organ builder Lukas Fischer.

In the course of their research for the five-part recording production "Beethoven's World 1799-1851" (2020), the casalQuartett came across not only Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven's two pupils, represented by his 28th String Quartet in A flat major, but also the Viennese composer Anton Eberl (1765-1807), who was Mozart's friend and pupil. As an outstanding pianist and composer, he achieved great popularity and, after returning to Vienna from St. Petersburg, had even more prominent supporters than Beethoven. His life ended unexpectedly at the zenith of his success in 1807. His music, as can be seen in the excellent recordings of the symphonies by Concerto Köln and the piano sonatas by Luca Quintavalle, is often surprisingly modern for its time. Like Mozart's late works and those of the new Beethoven, they augur the revolutionary dawn of Romanticism. The casalQuartett has received numerous awards, including the ECHO KLASSIK 2010, 2015, 2017, the Pizzicato Award Luxembourg, the DIAPASON Decouverte, the DIAPASON d'Or, the German Record Critics' Award and has been nominated three times for the ICMA Award and the American Grammy.

Variety of subject and era give German-Chilean soprano Josefine Göhmann a stylistic range stretching from the late Renaissance through Mozart, Strauss and Messiaen to contemporary music, forming the core of her artistic endeavor. In duo with pianist Mario Häring, Josefine Göhmann presents her debut album in co-production with Deutschlandfunk under the title “réBelles! portraits lyriques” on the topic of female empowerment and 100 years of the movement for women’s rights. In planning this program, the artist took her cue from postcards of museum visits: The paintings say a lot about how women were seen in the 20th century and how women saw themselves in self-portraits (e.g. by Frida Kahlo, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Anita Rée). She has developed the idea that if song and painting are set in analogue, the album could correspond to a visit to a museum. There are four different rooms. The first is Vierge with representations of virginity in the context of the biblical testament. Then there is the second room on the Sirène type of woman, which is more about ethereal femininity. In Héroïne, the woman is primarily portrayed as a heroine. And finally, Ophélie is dedicated to the literary Shakespearean figure, which stands on its own but also combines the aspects of Vierge, Sirène and Héroïne. This album is an aesthetic offering for the discourse on femininity, on being a woman today and for a hundred years. In addition, the artist's very personal feelings play a role in which pieces are combined in which way. Josefine Göhmann wanted to look not only at texts, works and interpretations by women, but at our cultural heritage.

Active as interpreters in the European musical world, Scandinavian composers in the 19th century were interested in shaping their own style and incorporating it into European music. They were greatly influenced by folk music of different regions in Sweden, Norway and Finland. The Swedish violinist and violin pedagogue, Tor Aulin (1866-1914), was committed to the great romantic music tradition. In 1899, Aulin composed his “Four Watercolors” for violin (or cello) and piano. Also on the disc is the Sonata for violin and piano No. 1 in F Major by Edvard Grieg and following are four miniatures by the composer Jean Sibelius. On the voyage of discovery of traditional sounds of Nordic music, one arrives almost inevitably to Nordic folk music, which inspired the classical composers. Folk melodies are usually interpreted by a group of string instruments, or accompanied by guitar, flute and accordion, and are available today in collections according to the traditional mostly oral transmission. Fritz Froschhammer arranged these versions for violin and piano on this album in cooperation with the Duo Froschhammer in 2017. The Duo Froschhammer features siblings Felix Froschhammer (First Violinist of the casalQuartett and Concertmaster of both the Ensemble Symphonique Neuchâtel and Sinfonietta de Lausanne, Switzerland), violin, and Julia Froschhammer, piano. Founded in 1998, the Duo has since performed in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, Malta and at the famous Atheneum in Bucharest. Together they are prize winners of the International Wolfgang Jacobi Competition for 20th century chamber music and have been recipients of scholarships from the Bavarian Music Fund.

The trio was founded in 2017 by violinist Marina Yakovleva, her fellow-violinist and brother Mikhail Yakovlev and cellist Lev Sivkov. They chose the name “Trio Amani” in honor of the Russian composer Nikolay Amani (1872-1904), whose string trio they discovered in 2018 and premiered that year in Zurich. After a highly successful concert series, Marina, Mikhail and Lev invited violist Vahagn Aristakesyan to join them on the present recording of chamber music for strings in various scorings from Russia and Switzerland. The trio presented this programme in 2019 in a series of concerts in the composers’ homelands.The repertoire of Trio Amani comprises a wide variety of compositions for various formations, from duo to piano quintet. The release will be released in the series "Musik aus der Zentralbibliothek Zürich". The Music Department was set up in 1971 and rapidly established itself as an academic collection of European status. Alongside large holdings of printed and recorded music, the Music Department is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Wagneriana and now serves as a major repository of Swiss music manuscripts from the past 200 years.

GRAMMY®-nominated, award-winning (Gold Medal at the Global Music Awards in 2017 and 2018), a concert violinist since the age of 4, and hailed by American Record Guide as “marvelous in the tradition of Heifetz”, Elmira Darvarova caused a sensation, becoming the first ever (and so far only) woman-concertmaster in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. With the MET Orchestra she toured Europe, Japan and the United States, and was heard on the MET's live weekly international radio broadcasts, television broadcasts and albums for Sony, Deutsche Grammophon and EMI. As concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera she has performed with the greatest conductors of our time, including the legendary Carlos Kleiber. She performs with the New York Piano Quartet, the Delphinium Trio, the Quinteto del Fuego, the Amram Ensemble, and in a duo with Fernando Otero. VASSILY LOBANOV (born 1947) is not only one of the greatest Russian pianists of his generation (who was a piano duo partner of Sviatoslav Richter), but he is also a prominent composer about whom his teacher Schnittke said: “There are talented composers and there are talented pianists, but seldom do those two talents converge in such brilliant proportion as they do in Vassily Lobanov”. His SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO “IN SIX FRAGMENTS”, Op. 56 (World Premier recording on this album), dedicated to the great violinist Oleg Kagan (1946-1990), was a commission for the 1989 Glasgow Festival, where Kagan and Lobanov premiered it.

The Geneva Chamber Orchestra has always ardently championed renowned Geneva composers such as Ernest Bloch, Frank Martin, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Xavier Dayer or Michael Jarrell. Geneva-based cellist Estelle Revaz has been artist-in-residence to the Geneva Chamber Orchestra since 2017-2018. For her second release on Solo Musica, BACH & FRIENDS - a musical dialogue between Bach’s Solo Cello Suites and works by major contemporary composers – she commissioned a new piece from Geneva composer Xavier Dayer. In the context of her residency, the choice of Frank Martin’s works for cello and orchestra was obvious, all the more so as Dutch musical director Arie van Beek provided a link between the composer’s Swiss origins and the Netherlands, his adopted country. Adding an original piece by Xavier Dayer to the programme seemed another obvious choice. Cantus II for solo cello resulted from a most fruitful collaboration between composer and performer and Xavier Dayer’s international profile fully justified this unique programme combination.

This release commemorates four German composers who had to flee Germany during the Nazi era because they were Jewish: Paul Ben-Haim, Paul Dessau, Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe. Transylvanian-born Alexander U. Boskovich, who was also forced in 1938 to flee his homeland because he was Jewish, has been included in this programme because of his significance. The songs written by these composers in exile have so far largely remained unknown. The texts they were set to are to a great extent taken from the works of Hebrew poets and are presented here for the first time in German translation by Dagmar Nick. The evocative and sometimes shocking lyrics that seem so prescient even today range from the 7th century BC to the present day, from the prophet Isaiah through Chajim Bialik, Schalom Asch and Erich Kästner to the words of warning from Albert Einstein regarding the H-bomb. Dagmar Nick (Intertext, Explanations & translation) was born in 1926 in Breslau, and grew up in Berlin and is one of the most important German-speaking poets after 1945. She studied graphology and psychology in Munich. In addition to radio plays, short stories, travel guides and three narrative monologues, she has published a collection of thirteen poetry books since 1947. She is a member of the PEN and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and has received several literary awards. Dagmar Nick, who lived in Israel for over four years, wrote both the intertexts and the biblical and historical explanations and - with the kind assistance of Eitan Levi, Uri Shani and Assaf Levitin - translated the 25 Hebrew song texts into German.

The motto of this new release of Schubert’s Symphonies Nos. 3 & 7 in E-major might be “On to new horizons!” In general, this phrase has positive connotations, and it offers an apt description for the sparkling innovative force driving forward Symphony No. 3 in D-major. Here, Schubert is still in a state of experimentation characterized by youthful energy, having overcome the teething troubles which plagued the previous Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Does the phrase, however, also apply to the completion of the score fragment of Symphony No. 7 in E-major? One has to admit that the answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, the slow introduction of the Seventh in E-major sounds like something perfectly new (and something newly perfect), on the other, there may have been reasons why Schubert, who impatiently began composing straight into the sketched-out score, left the symphony a mere skeleton. Even in a version completed by another hand, this work is worth exploring, as it builds a bridge from the carefree Symphony No. 6 to Schubert’s late works, the Unfinished Symphony and the Great Symphony in C-major. Two departures for new horizons – and they are two different horizons – are what we seek to document with this recording.