Zoltan & Peter Katona write: “A couple of years ago we were invited to play a Hollywood themed programme in Grafenegg/Austria. We quickly arranged a handful of well-known film music pieces and performed them along with some original compositions for two guitars by M. C. Tedesco, a prolific film music composer in the forties and fifties. We couldn’t omit the king of gypsy jazz: Django Reinhardt, whose compositions often enliven Hollywood films. The concert was a huge success and we received an unusually high number of requests for a film music themed record. From this, our Hollywood and Swing album was borne. Some of our choices of repertoire might seem over ambitious, especially when reducing the whole orchestral sound to two guitars. We hope nevertheless, that our interpretation of these iconic Hollywood film scores like “The Deer Hunter” or the beautiful tunes from the “West Side Story“ will provide the listener with as much pleasure as we had playing them.”

Max Reger (1873-1916) set about composing a requiem many times. One year before his death he succeeded in creating a work in which he appeals against being forgotten, without making explicit reference to Christ, with the score for the poem Requiem by Friedrich Hebbel. The music on this CD puts the composer, who died in 1916, alongside his contemporaries Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942). The Basel Chamber Orchestra is recognized as one of the leading chamber orchestras in the classical music scene. Invitations to the most important worldwide concert houses and festivals shape their agenda, as well as their own subscription concerts in Basel. Various recordings on classical labels like Sony, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and Warner classics, many awarded with prestigious prizes, are witnesses to the excellent quality of the musical ensembles joy of playing together. Precise vocal control, clear diction, intelligent musicality and an ability to get to the heart of everything he sings all ensure Christoph Prégardien’s place among the world’s foremost lyric tenors. Especially revered as a Lieder singer, he kicks off the 2019/2020 season with concerts at the Schubertiade Hohenems and the Oxford Lieder Festival. He then performs in the US on tour with pianist Julius Drake, before the pair give joint recitals at London's Wigmore Hall and in Madrid.

The personal story of the cello played braced against the shoulder (violoncello da spalla) began when Sergey Malov first listened to a vinyl recording of Bach’s cello suites played by the legendary Pablo Casals from his father’s collection. Later on, when listening to the recordings he could not get rid of the feeling that this light and dancing music does not fit that well with such a heavy big instrument as a cello. Although perhaps he just wanted to play these amazing pieces himself. Malov was dreaming about playing them authentically. He had no idea though what that authentic way was or how he could place such a huge bass instrument on his shoulder. One cold winter day in 2009 he accidentally found a video recording of Allemanda from the 2nd Bach Cello Suite played by Dmitry Badiarov - a violin maker, co-author of the violoncello da spalla revival project and an inspiring violinist himself. Suddenly his boldest dreams and phantasies came true in a most detailed way.

Mezzo soprano Megan Kahts, born in South Africa, was trained at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where she has been based since 2009. She sings internationally, specialising in the performance of Early and Contemporary music and has won coveted prizes in prestigious competitions. She is both a stage animal and a chamber musician at heart, having begun her musical training as a pianist and having embarked on a childhood singing career as a teenager in South Africa before honing her skills at the heart of the classical music tradition in Europe. The Carestini Ensemble Wien was formed by Megan Kahts out of musician colleagues with whom she has closely worked on various baroque opera and chamber music projects. The ensemble mainly specialises in works composed in the eighteenth century. Handel, Hasse, Gluck, Caldara and other composers composed parts and roles for the voice of the castrato Giovanni Carestini, after whose spirit the ensemble is named. All members of the ensemble are based in Vienna and specialised in Historical Performance Practice, performing on historical instruments.

The poet Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg met in Rome in 1866. At this time, Ibsen was working on the dramatic poem "Peer Gynt" based on Norwegian fairy tales by Peter Christen Asbjornsen. Ibsen reworked it into a stage play and commissioned Grieg to write the music for it. The premiere took place on 24 February 1876. A few years later, Grieg used this music to create two purely orchestral suites, which are among the best-known works of Romantic music - and finally a very colourful and atmospheric arrangement for four-hand piano. Grieg was inspired to write his Piano Concerto in A minor op.16 as a student when he heard Clara Schumann play her husband Robert's piano concerto in Leipzig in 1858. He became a great admirer of Schumann. Grieg chose the same key as Schumann, A minor, for his own piano concerto, which was written 10 years later in Denmark. The premiere in Copenhagen in 1869 was enthusiastically celebrated. When E. Grieg met Franz Liszt in Rome in 1870, the latter played his piano concerto - a great honour and joy for Grieg - and the piano concerto and the two Peer Gynt suites are among the most beautiful and popular piano works of Romantic music. Margarita Hohenrieder have known the Icelandic composer Hjalmar Helgi Ragnarsson and his music for several years. She became acquainted with his piano pieces through his sister, her long-time friend, the pianist Anna Ragnarsdottir-Hoffmann. She was also the wife of her former teacher and well-known piano virtuoso Ludwig Hoffmann. Hohenrieder herself was looking for several pieces specifically for the left hand at the time: she was planning joint performances entitled "2 linke Hande " (2 left hands) together with the painter Bernd Zimmer. While Bernd Zimmer painted a picture live in front of an audience using only his left hand, Margarita Hohenrieder played pieces for the left hand. It is a creative and unique project. Hjalmar Helgi Ragnarsson wrote the left-hand piece "Stilla" for her, which for the artist on a trip to Iceland was a fascinating and mysterious reflection of the mostly light green moss-covered volcanic landscape with it's glaciers and the endless expanse and silence. When she played Stilla, she even felt as she can briefly see the northern lights again in some places. Mrs. Hohenrieder first heard the Finnish-born pianist Antti Siirala as a juror at the 1997 International Beethoven Competition in Vienna. He was 17 years old at the time and won first prize. He is now her colleague at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich.

Ever since it was founded, the Swiss chamber ensemble Trio Fontane has consisted of Andrea Wiesli , Noëlle Grüebler and Jonas Kreienbühl. The trio was formed in 2002 and received instruction from Ulrich Koella and Stephan Goerner (Carmina Quartet) at the Musikhochschule in Zurich. The ensemble was judged the best piano trio at the 2007 Migros Culture Percentage chamber music competition and accepted into the “Young Musicians” artist exchange. The three performers received further support from the Thiébaud-Frey Foundation, the Hans Schaeuble Foundation and the International Herzogenberg Society. The Music Department of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich 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 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. The Central Library wishes to put the materials entrusted to it to the best possible use in many different ways. Accordingly, it has begun a series of releases with music from its acquisitions, from tenor songs by Zwingli to music of the late 20th century. It also runs its own lunchtime concert series Mittagsmusik im Predigerchor in which each programme features at least one work that is held in the Central Library as a manuscript, first edition or early printed document. On the album you can hear the New Year's pieces of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich: the Piano Trio op. 20 by Hans Huber and the Piano Trio op. 1 by Hermann Goetz.

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazil Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organized classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something different. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. On the album now being released by Solo Musica together with the casalQuartett “Ballads & Quintets” there are two works by Fazil Say in addition to the Piano Quintet in E flat major op. 44 by Schumann. The casalQuartett, which has won numerous awards, has developed itself a unique sound and style that sheds new light on the heyday of the string quartet. The 3 Ballads op. 12 for Piano Quintet were originally solo piano ballads, which were rearranged especially for this publication for piano quintet. The piano quintet "The Moving Mansion" breathes new life into stories of the past. The background is a spectacular tale about the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Just like Johann Sebastian Bach before him, Ludwig van Beethoven played a significant role in the development of the cello. His six sonatas for cello and piano, three cycles of variations and the Triple Concerto all enhanced the instrument's expressive scope to an extent that has not been bettered to date. With his unparalleled ability to endow the instrument with highly lyrical and elegantly cantabile qualities, he blazed the trail for composers who would follow him. So in what way and to what extent did Beethoven's last sonata, the through-composed and visionary op. 102, no. 2, influence Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, two composers with such very different and idiosyncratic styles? The present album takes listeners on a journey through the German Romantic repertoire encompassing the power of tradition, the effect of original ideas and the ramifications of the innovative. In his last Sonata for cello and piano, Beethoven breaks with the traditions of the genre, as if he wanted to appeal to future generations. When this met with incomprehension in his contemporaries, he simply responded: "You will come to understand." Estelle Revaz's special passion is chamber music, and she regularly performs in numerous European countries, in Asia and South America. François Killian has won prizes at many of the most famous international music competitions, including the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the Artur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, and the Piano Masters of Monte Carlo.

The music for CHOROS made for texts from the 7th to 5th centuries BC came about through an intensive approach to the ancient world of sound: the instruments reconstructed by Paul J. Reichlin formed the basis of the music. These are the result of over 20 years of intensive collaboration between an instrument maker and a music archeologist. Instrument parts in various museums, countless vase paintings and reliefs from the period 700 to 500 BC served as sources, as well as literary documents. Another important source of knowledge as to how ancient Greek music might have sounded are the peculiarities of the ancient Greek language, which allow conclusions to be drawn about the music. This extraordinary album for the revival of dramatic choirs of Greek classical music follows earlier projects by the Ensemble Melpomen such as Olympionikais (Pindar’s Olympian Odes) for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens or Sappho and Melpomen, music for an Athens symposium, which have already been released on album.

20 years ago, Helen Buchholtz was an enigmatic unknown. In 1999, two suitcases containing around 250 music manuscripts were found, which have since become accessible in the archive of Helen Buchholtz in CID | Fraen. Only by chance had they survived: the notes, packed in sacks after the death of the composer, had been saved from a fire by a nephew at the last minute. Helen Buchholtz, daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, received early lessons in music. At the age of 36, she married a German doctor and moved with him to Wiesbaden. Widowed early, she returned to Luxembourg, where she frequented poets and musicians. There her music was performed in concerts and on the radio. The double album presents a selection of her best 51 songs and ballads, which are selectively placed in a dialogue with contemporary music: Inspired by Helen Buchholtz’s late Romantic music, Catherine Kontz, Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska, Stevie Wishart and Tatsiana Zelianko composed four new songs.

This valuable box combines all three previously released, worldwide highly acclaimed CDs Dimensionen World, Otherworld and the CD Innerworld, awarded with the Opus Klassik 2020 in Germany, with an additional newly recorded production NewWorld with 7 newly recorded songs sung by the unique soprano Marlis Petersen and accompanied by her long-time accompanist Stephan Matthias Lademann.

In 2019 she was seen and heard in new opera productions of "Salome" and "The Dead City" in Munich and she was Artist in Residence of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Kirill Petrenko. In 2021 she will be on an extensive European tour with the Lied Program of Dimensions.

Four CDs take us there and invite us to wander like a protagonist through different chapters of being.

Carl Loewe, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Franz Liszt, but also Hans Sommer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Stenhammer, Reynaldo Hahn and many others are our musical companions on this journey into the dimensions and back to oneself... Be HUMAN again in the SONG!

“Who would I need to be to be able to talk about a man who is still growing…” (Adam Zagajewski: “The late Beethoven”) Margarita Höhenrieder and I have known it all our lives: the elucidations of Carl Czerny or Rudolf Kolisch, the latest Urtext editions that will lead us to “faithfulness to the text”, the disquisitions from Romain Rolland to Eleonore Büning – we read, we discuss, it all seems helpful and necessary. At the end of the day it is the mature individual, the serious exponent, who makes the decision led by the promptings of conscience, and who simultaneously senses this “growing” of which Zagajewski speaks. We climb a steep path, in order to approach Beethoven more closely. The summit of this path is visible, but not attainable. That is why we keep returning to this path, endless as it is. Beethoven lives in us, as he changes, as we change. Life aspires to art, art is a way forward, life is our way forward. Beethoven changes us through his “growth”. We grow with him!

Schonere Welten

Heart

My love affair with historic recordings began long before I started to play violin. Recordings by Heifetz, Ginette Neveau and Ida Haendel were what made me decide to become a violinist. What I wanted to do is more or less go back to the days when making records was rather different to what it is now: set the microphones very close, use almost no reverb, record as much as possible in full live takes, and - if possible, use vintage equipment. I think it makes for a more authentic experience, which is exactly what I wanted to recreate: a trip back in time. - Dunja Lavrova