The year 2012 marks the Wergo label's 50th anniversary. For half a century, Wergo has been synonymous with contemporary music. The label's catalog reads like a virtual who's-who of modern music, both in terms of composers and performers. From the beginning, the intent of founder Werner Goldschmidt (from whom the label derives it's name) was to provide listeners with a snapshot of current musical activity and innovation. Goldschmidt's label and mission, now managed by the publisher Schott, is maintained to this day by a dedicated staff that is constantly striving to bring the best new music to the attention of the world. This specially-priced commemorative set features five discs, with one from each from the label's five rich decades. Featured composers include Cage, Nono, Schnebel Stockhausen and Stravinsky.

The four orchestral compositions by Hans Werner Henze which are assembled on this CD combine works from the time of his third opera "King Stag" of the middle of the 50s with e.g. "La selva incantata", in which Henze refers directly to that opera - an almost unique procedure in his list of works. A comprehensive interview (Peter Ruzicka with Hans Werner Henze) in the booklet describes that the score of "King Stag" marked something like a very important "attempt to free himself from the twelve-tone system", the dogmatic chains of the Darmstadt School.

First CD recording of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Tierkreis" ("Zodiac") in the version for organ released by WERGO: Originally composed for music boxes, the work has been arranged for organ and recorded by the young organist Dominik Susteck at St. Peter in Cologne. The thirty-three-year-old, who has been organist at St. Peter for four years, realized this project not only at an unusual venue but also on an unusual instrument. Since the 1980s, this Catholic chappel combines the church with contemporary art: The "St. Peter's Art Station" has become not only a much sought-after venue for exhibitions of contemporary art but also a special venue for new music due to numerous concerts and services with 20th- and 21st-century music. In addition, the "St. Peter's Art Station" is provided with an instrument built by Willy Peter which was designed for contemporary music: The four-manual great organ and the three-manual choir organ currently have 104 stops, including such unusual sound additions as siren, saxophone, and percussion orchestra with cymbals, drums, or xylophone. The organ, inaugurated in 2004, is worldwide unique because of it's design and structure. Dominik Susteck describes his interpretation of Stockhausen's work as "frozen musical movement. The instrument no longer sounds like an organ but proves to be a colourful, agile and dynamic being".

In an interview, the composer Sergej Newski remembered, "The voice was the ideal path for finding my own idiom. In the late 1990s I began to transfer expressive vocal sounds into syntactic systems that obstruct their expressivity. I set out to find the primordial element of the voice." This recording includes his works Blindenalphabet, Alles and J'etais d'accord performed by the Ensemble Mosaik and Arbeitsfle�che performed by the ensemble MusikFabrik.

Both the piano work Hamamuth - Stadt der Engel and the piano concerto Wer sind diese Kinder are composer Rolf Riehm's attempts to substantially broaden the spectrum of political music. Hamamuth - Stadt der Engel focuses on the omnipresence of violence experienced during the Iraq War. Both works show that it would be insufficient to look for their political facets exclusively on a semantic level. The physical understanding of music appears to be almost equally important. These powerful works are performed by the SWR Sinfonie Orchester Baden-Baden conducted by Beat Furrer.

Classical Music

Our focus with the CD 'Coronation' is not on blue blood or kingly power. In processes that are positively vegetal, the music on this CD sends up its shoots and produces blossoms like crowns. '(co)ro(na)', by Vykintas Baltakas, springs from a cascade of motivic branchings, its roots in a cycle of works named after the alchemical Ouroboros, a snake that swallows its own tail. Its 'dragon's blood', so the legends say, is cinnabar red - like the hue that shines in 'cinnabar' by Rebecca Saunders. Magnus Lindberg's 'Joy' expresses itself through its profligacy with spectral harmonies and the resonant snapping of the strings of a demolished piano. Iannis Xenakis creates sieves that proliferate until they transform into archaic dances, refulgent with the brass tones characteristic of so many musical moments: This is the sound that crowns the affair.

This CD is dedicated to early works by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov: "Avant-garde is an attempt to break out of an enclosed space into a more open one. In the attempt to break out of this space, the fireworks of avant-garde artists are like the outbursts of the Romantics. In my first works, I made it my goal to achieve a lyrical atmosphere." As early as 1967, Silvestrov - who calls himself a "lyricist and poet in music" - formulated with these words his compositional Credo, which has remained unchanged throughout the years. The symphony for chamber orchestra "Spectrums" was originally created as music for the film "Kiev Frescoes" by the famous director Sergei Paradschanow - a project that could never be realized, however.

Trombonist Mike Svoboda's Wergo release entitled Da Lontano (from a distance) surveys rarely heard works written by four heroes of new music that are 'outside' of the ordained list of masterworks by these composers. Each has an element of indeterminacy, which allows Svoboda to place a personal stamp on the performances. Scelsi said he received the music for his Mantram - Canto anonimo from other spheres, merely acting as an intermediary between two worlds. For Solo for Sliding Trombone, excerpted from Cage's Piano Concerto, Svoboda devised a version for eight trombones which he plays all by himself. Signal zur Invasion I is excerpted from Stockhausen's opera Dienstag aus Licht. It consists of 126 fanfares from the opera. In Nono's Post-prae-ludium per Donau, the sound of Svoboda's tuba is multiplied and rearranged by electronic musician Holger Stenschke to create a unique spatial polyphony.

Earle Brown's involvement with the fine arts led him to reject previously fixed ideas of musical form and supposedly sacrosanct rules of composition in the early 1950s. His graphic notations, which are primarily oriented toward Jackson Pollock's painting procedures, guarantee the opening of time and space which leads to the liberation of the sound and the expansion of the meaning of form. "[...] mobility of the sound elements within the work and the graphic provocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-performance process - were for me the most fascinating new possibility for 'sound objects' as they had been for sculpture and painting." (Earle Brown) On this CD Sabine Liebner performs important works for piano by Earle Brown: "Home Burial" for piano, based on a poem by the American poet Robert Frost was written in 1949. The manuscript of the piece was only recently rediscovered. The performance here is therefore the work's first recording. Among the pieces gathered under the title "Folio", "December 1952" is surely the most famous. On a piece of paper without staves, the actions of the pianist are indicated through lines of varying length which indicate points in a sound-time-space continuum. "Twenty-Five Pages" consists of 25 single pages, each of which is an independent entity. The decision on the number of the instruments involved as well as on the order of the individual pages is left to the performers. "Four Systems" for any number of chosen instruments was written in connection with the birthday of the pianist David Tudor on 20 January 1954, who premiered the piece shortly thereafter. "Summer Suite '95", written after Brown's almost 30-year abstinence from the piano, is dedicated to the pianist David Arden. Brown sketched out his ideas about the structure of the work graphically, as had been his previous practice. However, after writing the piece down, he realized it on a keyboard and with the help of a computer.

Cage composed his Number Pieces during the last six years of his life. Their titles indicate the number of performers or parts. Their notation is based on fixed and flexible "time brackets." the fixed brackets show when a musician should begin and end a pitch or tonal event. With the flexible brackets, the interpreter decides, within a predetermined time frame, when an instrument enters and when it falls silent. This disc featuring pianist Sabine Liebner explores two of Cage's late masterworks.

“This music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it.” (Christian Wolff) “With the present recording, it is impossible to imagine it could be anyone but Malcolm Goldstein and Matthias Kaul playing, with their very personal vocabularies.” (Peter Niklas Wilson) This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award. At their first face-to-face encounter, at a milk bar in Frankfurt’s main train station, Goldstein and Kaul decided to play several concerts as a duo. Since then they have given many concerts in Germany and abroad. The focus of their collaboration is on improvisation or compositions that give the performers a great deal of free play. For more information on Matthias Kaul please visit his website: www.matthiaskaul.de

Harry PARTCH (1901-1974), one of the greatest and most individualistic composers of all time, who created dozens of incredible instruments for the performance of his music, created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century. Closely connected with his name is NEWBAND, an ensemble founded by Dean Drummond, which received custodianship of the original Harry PARTCH Instrument Collection in 1990 and has since been involved with resurrecting PARTCH's great works.

What if 60 composers from 18 countries wrote 60 pieces under 1 minute each for solo piano?Anderson, Thomas Jefferson - Andreoni, Roberto - Andriessen, Louis - Aviram, Eilon - Baas, Danielle - Bailie, Joanna - Baiye, James - Beaudoin, Paul E. - Bermel, Derek - Bolcom, William - Brooks, Richard - Cahallan, Patrick - Caravaggio, Pepe-Tonino - Carrick, Richard - Cody, Joshua - Cotel, Ketzel - Culpo, Christopher - Eggert, Moritz - Eidschun, Robert - Ekimovsky, Victor - Engel, Barbara - Escriv, Brian - Faia, Carl - Fox, Donal - Frahm, Frederick - Goldschneider, Isak - Gosfield, Annie - Haven, Walter - Hinton, Newt - Hippel, Paul von - Katz, Jonathan - Khyrsh, Atanasio - Kleier, Roger - Landau, Daniel - Lann, Vanessa - Lauer, Fritz - Leach, St�phane - Mancuso, Giovanni - Maral, Alper - Martinez, Patricia Elizabeth - McLoskey, Lansing D. - Nez, Ketty - Norton, Jonathan - Pallante, Sergio - Pritsker, Gene - Robert, Martial - Rovan, Joseph - Sainsbury, Lionel - Sanchez, Walter - Shadle, Charles - Sharp, Elliott - Shockley, Alan Frederick - Stewart, D. Andrew - Togawa, Yohichi - Tran, Tuyet A. - Vaglini, Riccardo - Warburton, Dan - Wit, Sophie de - Yoshinaka, Atsushi - Zebrowski, Marcin J�zef.

On the occasion of Wilhelm Killmayer's 75th birthday, in August 2002, WERGO publishes a collection of the works for piano solo by the Munich composer. These works, written between 1975 and 1999, were enregistered by Siegfried Mauser in close co-operation with his former teacher, the multiple-prize-winning composer Wilhelm Killmayer.

Early in 1920, the young brash composer George Antheil decided to leave his home country, the USA, and conquer the concert halls of Europe as a pianist, travelling first to London and then to Germany where he set up headquarters from July 1922 to June 1923, well-prepared to dazzle Europe with his daring compositions and bold pianism. Most of his experimental piano music was composed in Berlin in just this one year. Many of these works can be heard together for the first time on this recording thanks to new discoveries and scholarly research – exquisitely performed by Guy Livingston who is one of the foremost performers promoters of Antheil's music today.

Born in Tennessee, with degrees from Yale, NEC, and the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands, pianist Guy Livingston wowed critics and audiences with his successful 'Don't Panic' CD. He is based in Paris and Amsterdam and travels widely as a pianist and director. Livingston has already recorded two CDs of the music of George Antheil, organised the Paris Antheil Centennial Concert, and was Artistic Director for the 2003 George Antheil Festival in Trenton in honour of the 1920's futurist. In addition Livingston has been the focus of two television documentaries on Antheil, as well as appearing in the film 'Bad Boy Made Good'.

The relationship between Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen was one of great mutual respect. The German composer admired the British conductor and composer for electrifying performances of Henze's own and other composers' works. Knussen was an untiring and enthusiastic champion of his friend Henze's music. The recordings collected here display Knussen's deep understanding of Henze's music. Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in sensitive and meticulous performances of compositions ranging from the composer's middle period to his last completed work. Los Caprichos transforms the bitterness and sarcasm in Francisco Goya's famous series of etchings into a tender and melancholy "Fantasia per orchestra" that makes only sparing use of contemporary stylistic devices. The large orchestral work Heliogabalus Imperator - a programmatic depiction of the life and death of the notorious Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus - also provides evidence of Henze's self-assured and idiosyncratic interpretation of modern music idioms. The Englische Liebeslieder for solo violoncello and orchestra express a wide range of emotional states, which are brought to life by cellist Anssi Karttunen.

Works for voice with ensemble after poems by e.e. cummings and Arthur Rimbaud as well as chamber music works show the numerous facets of Matthias Pintscher's compositional technique. Presented by well-known interpreters, who are specialists in New Music, and under the direction of the composer himself, the CD offers a comprehensive insight into Pintscher's "penetrating the instant of time".

Michiko Hirayama inspired Giacinto Scelsi to write his twenty-part cycle "Canti del Capricorno" between 1962 and 1972. To this day the Japanese singer (b. 1923) is a unique performer of this spiritual yet energy-filled work for solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment for certain songs: Scelsi's notes in his own hand in the score; that is her treasure, when she comes to Ulm in May 2006 to give a concert in the series neue musik i'm stadthaus. Michiko Hirayama is a vocal power station; she is once again very young. On this WERGO CD, it has been recorded: a document of lived, immediate music. This is to be her legacy, she says openly.

German contemporary composer Gerhard St�bler studied with Nicolaus Huber (composition) and Gerd Zacher (organ) at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold and the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen. Winning the 1982 Cornelius Cardew Memorial Prize was the first in a series of accolades he has received as a composer. St�bler's music often transcends the conventional framework. His catalogue of works contains only five pieces for organ, all of which are recorded here by Dominik Susteck.

The accordion is the ultimate global instrument. As a catalyst of popular music it spread around the world in the 19th century like wildfire. 26 rare 78rpm recordings from Africa, Latin America, the US, the Caribbean and Europe display the enormous variety of early accordion styles. You will glimpse a wild folk music that hardly exists today. The invention of the "accordion", as it was named in the patent granted to Viennese organ and piano builder Cyrill Demian in 1829 was a musical explosion, which triggered a chain reaction of global dimension. The accordion was louder than any string instrument, and it was portable. It also had fixed tuning. But it's biggest advantage was it's format as a one-man-band. Even when pressing the wrong notes within a melody it still sounded pleasant. Therefore the accordion was seen as a "miracle box" which immediately allowed everybody without any formal musical training to participate actively in music making. It may truly be claimed that the accordion gave birth to popular music.

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 is the last and only unfinished symphony in his complete oeuvre. On September 5, 1910 Mahler wrote his last notes: exactly 100 years later, the 23-year-old conductor and composer Yoel Gamzou presented with great success his new reconstruction of this extraordinary work. The world première with the International Mahler Orchestra took place at the Ryckestrasse synagogue in Berlin as part of the Jewish Cultural Days 2010. Yoel Gamzou first came in contact with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony when he was about 12 or 13 years old, whilst fishing curiously amidst a jungle of books and scores in a local library. Already at first glance, it was obvious to me that this symphony has – or indeed would have had, considering it was almost lost and forgotten for decades – a unique meaning in musical history. "When I discovered that it was only the first movement of a large unfinished symphony, I instantly started investigating. I became indescribably fascinated and intrigued, in fact hypnotized, by the sheer magnitude of meaning and content hiding within this manuscript. It was immediately clear to me that the piece was entirely thought-through and that the meaning behind this hurried testament was an almost unbearably painful albeit thoroughly planned legacy. It seemed like the sketch was staring at me demanding to be heard, like a message in a bottle that hasn't really been found, let alone entirely understood, for almost a century.“ - Yoel Gamzou

A brilliant pianist and organist, Shchedrin has appeared throughout the entire world as a successful performer of his own works. A second CD with recordings from 1964 and 1983 of his own piano works has appeared within the Edition Rodion Shchedrin on WERGO. This CD chiefly introduces his early works for piano, with the exception of "Notebook for the Youth", which was written in 1981 and which is, in contradiction to the title, not only meant for young people, but also for the advanced concert pianist. Shchedrin recorded this CD in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, "the place with the best acoustics in Moscow" - at night, when the team got the desired peace and quietness which is absolutely indispensable for recording quiet and "transparent" music. "Yes, we were children of our time and of our country where we were born and where we lived. You cannot run away from that. Time always leaves it's mark," says Rodion Shchedrin.

A woodland stream, a word from Joyce, ships' horns in Beirut harbour, architectural sketches: the composer Oliver Schneller frequently proceeds from extra-musical patterns, models, and objects trouves in his search for ‘the song present in all things’. Yet he is equally far removed from Messiaen's birdsong and Cage's start charts. His music is neither a "personal confession," nor does he want to extirpate the auteur. Instead, as in Aqua Vit, he subjects the babblings of a woodland stream to spectral analysis and transforms it into a fully autonomous score. Schneller, who studied with Tristan Murail among others, strikes a balance with the dynamics inherent in the material itself. His precisely calibrated compositions always sound at once rigorous and open-ended, and they frequently conjure up surprising associations in the listener. A micro-intervallic canon for piano and live electronics can give rise to a sea of pealing bells, a string trio to an apocalyptic scenario, thanks to his consummate command of digital technology. Born in Cologne in 1966, Schneller comes from a generation of composers who take the computer for granted as one resource among many, as is apparent in such sound installations as his polyphonic urban collage “Polis” for Berlin's Martin Gropius Hall. In his most recent works Schneller, who received a composers’ prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation in 2010, has directed his interest toward himself. “Stratigraphie”, for example, is the archaeological model, but not the findings, of a journey of self-discovery. Here, too, his music makes room for the listener's own experiences and emotions in the secret life of sounds, allowing for magical moments of the sort that occur only to those who refuse to force them.

'Qawwali', ecstatic Sufi song from Pakistan, is a tradition of music over eight hundred years old, deeply rooted in the Islamic Sufi tradition and first made widely accessible to a Western audience by artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri Brothers. With the ensembles Bahauddin Qutbuddin Qawwal and Asif Ali Khan Manzoor Hussain Santoo Khan Qawwal, "Flight of the Soul" presents rarely heard traditional sounds of this mystic, rousing music. - This is the last recording with the meanwhile passed-away qawwali master, Qutbuddin!