With the new WERGO production "Initiale - Lieder und fr�he Kammermusik" (Initials - Songs and Early Chamber Music), the complete Lied compositions by Bernd Alois Zimmermann are now available as a recording for the first time. The eleven songs were all interpreted by the adorable singer Anna Prohaska. The up-and-coming 27-year-old star currently captivates the opera world with her light and lyric soprano voice. Except for "Sonate" of 1950, all works compiled on this CD were created between 1939 and 1946. WERGO thus closes a gap in Zimmermann's repertoire and puts a focus on the beginning of the career of this great composer: Never had Zimmermann been as close to the neo-romantic tonal language as in his song compositions in which he set texts by Rilke, Klabund or Nietzsche among others to music. This genre - to which he never returned again - reflects both the expression of intimate feelings and his strong interest in literature.

Listening to the sounds of the forest, when the trees are arrayed in all the glory of their autumn colours, is a very special experience. Autumn is also the most important time of the year for the Red Deer, the rutting season, and in the song of birds too you can already hear a faint hint of the spring courtship to come. Booklet contains several sonograms and detailed explanations to the various sounds of the rutting season. "Merlin’s totem animal, the red deer, is the focus of the CD King of the Forest. It transports the listener to a forest clearing at night ... A red deer is quietly roaring. Tree frogs croak. An older deer responds to a rival in the distance. More and more deer approach the rutting-place. The clash of antlers in battle. A loud cry. The deer withdraw into the denser undergrowth. A robin titters. The day awakens... Recordings from the National Park at Darss, a few hundred meters from the beaches of the Baltic Sea." (Die Zeit) For further information on Walter Tilgner, please visit his website: www.natur-tilgner.de

With a score derived from star maps - the "Atlas Australis", a book of maps of stars as they can be seen from Australia - and the "I Ching" (64-choice Old-Chinese chance manual) "Etudes Australes" is a quintessentially Cageian work. Grete Sultan is an active recitalist who has performed music both classic and contemporary around the world. "When I wrote the 'Sonatas and Interludes', it was with Maro Amian in mind", Cage said. "David Tudor was in my mind when I wrote the 'Music of Changes'. Without Grete Sultan in mind, her quiet, indomitable strength, her devotion to the piano (which I also love), her discipline, her determination to transform music from the paper into life, I would not have embarked on this project. Now of course I am delighted that I did." Grete Sultan: piano.

These Cagean masterpieces have in common a grandness of conception - they take a single idea and explore it exhastively, at length. Cage is among the few figures in modern art of whom it could be said that the world would have been different had he not come - not just the music world or the art world, but the world we experience every day. (Richard Konstelanetz) "These works of Cage as performed by Joshua Pierce are fascinating to consider; fascinating to listen to." (The New York TImes) "Outstanding exponent of the Cagean prepared piano... This recording is excellent!" (The Musical Quarterly)

Beside his preference for pieces with objectives and for instrumental theatre, it is especially the principle of writing "unique" works that defines the works of the Russian composer Victor Ekimovsky. Each work must embody a new and original structural idea as well as employ technical and stylistic expressive means that have not appeared in any earlier compositions. The works on this CD represent the whole range of Ekimovsky's musical ideas: A key work is "Symphonic Dances". The underlying literary programme evokes the vision of an endless dance marathon, and because of the apocalyptic reference the work appears like a "danse macabre". Two works for percussion were written especially for the six members of the Pekarsky Percussion Ensemble: "The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin" is a minimalist meditation in which Ekimovsky consciously avoids the loud and rhythmic playing that is typical of percussion instruments. His "27 Destructions" are ruled by the principle of 'destruction' which is realized by the change of rhythm, texture, melody, dynamics, tempo and instrumental colour at the junctures of the 27 different miniatures. "The Mirror of Avicenna" is based on a common cultural archetype, the movement "from darkness to light". Ekimovsky who dedicated this work to himself based his work on words of the philosopher and healer Avicenna. Ekimovsky wrote the violin concerto "Attalea princeps" after reading the eponymous story by Vsevolod Garshin who had expressed his feelings of being trapped in a brutal environment.

The Bluethroat is a delightful bird which quickly endears itself to anyone fortunate enough to observe it. Although the playing time of a CD is not enough to demonstrate the full repertoire of a singing Bluethroat, the listener should gain a clear impression of this virtuoso's song from the recordings presented here: The longer you listen, the more you become aware of the seemingly endless variety of the song with it's numerous and deceptively accurate imitations of other birds' voices and even mimicry of frogs, crickets, peals of bells, and other sounds from the breeding grounds and winter quarters. Little wonder that the Sami people of Lappland call the Bluethroat "the bird of a thousand voices". These recordings of the Bluethroat's song were made with the Sony Digital System PCM 2000 (DAT-Recorder); the Red-spotted Bluethroat with a Neumann RSM 190 stereo-microphone with windshield, and the White-spotted Bluethroat with 2 Sennheiser MKH 30 microphones using the "Bl�mlein" technique; here too, a shield had to be used because of the strong wind.

Song of robin and wren by the stream... drumming of a great spotted woodpecker... The hare once again comes down the slope... rustling dry leaves... scolding alarm of a passing blackbird... deep buzzing of hornets flying to their nest... - Walter Tilgner manages with his "Sylvan Concert" to bring us the four seasons of the forest into our livingrooms! Walter Tilgner, author and producer of more than ten Natural Sound CDs with WERGO, has succeeded again in eliciting concertlike sound pictures from meadows, valleys, and forests. With these extraordinary natural sound pictures, he not only attempts to convey a feeling of joy, relaxation and inspiration, but also wants to encourage the listener to walk among the trees of a wood, eyes and ears alert, to penetrate the secrets of the sylvan world, and thus to achieve a true experience of nature. Digital recording technique and a dummy-head stereo microphone have made it possible to record sounds like the wind rustling the trees, rain, and thunder that are so natural and lifelike you might easily believe yourself transported to the middle of a wood as you listen to them. Thus, in the quiet of your own home, you can listen to the voices of birds, toads, and a chorus of frogs by a woodland pool, or the roaring of stags during the red deer rut. "Well known as a photographer of woodland and forest scenes, Walter Tilgner has captured in his pictures not only the surface layer that which strikes the eye immediately but also the very essence of the woods. In his recordings, his natural sound pictures, he has taken this fundamental view of woods and forests much further, above all the emotional aspect" (Prof. Hannes Mayer, Vienna). For more than twenty years, Tilgner's main activity has been the documentary recording of the sounds of the natural world, the creation of sound pictures.

Thinking of... is an homage to the double-bass player and composer Stefano Scodanibbio who died before his time in 2012. This project gathered the "cr�me de la cr�me"of the modern double-bass world. The performers' individual biographies read like a Who's Who of contemporary music. Eleven players with very distinct personal styles recorded separately with 10 different sound engineers in 7 different countries - Japan, USA, France, Norway, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Sebastian Gramss, as the producer, composer and one of the players, pays respect to Scodanibbio's work in two ways - by leaning on his music, and by continuing his work through the exploration of new forms and approaches, pushing the limits of double bass playing even further. Due to the unpredictability of the players' contributions, Gramss decided not to write long, continuous compositions, but instead to create a number of shorter combinable modules, which were connected after the recording was done. The second part of the album is a collection of the most personal solo contributions - in these 11 pieces the players share their individual, personal connection to Scodanibbio's work and show the wide scope of their musicality. The album ends with a treat - a bonus track "Virt�", unpublished before. The track is a live recording of a duo by Stefano Scodanibbio and Sebastian Gramss from the Altstadtherbst Festival in D�sseldorf in 2008. This piece ties the whole album together and let's us enjoy Scodanibbio's playing with the creator of "Thinking of...".

WERGO presents Morton Feldman's more than four hours lasting trio "For Philip Guston" with the ensemble Breuer Engler Schrammel. Feldman disagreed with those who regarded his pieces since the 1970s as too long. "In music, it's very difficult to distinguish between a thing's proportions and it's form," he wrote. "My pieces aren't too long - they seem to fit the temporal landscape I provide. Would you say that 'The Odyssey' is too long?" Morton Feldman wrote the piece in memory of his best friend for more than 20 years, the American painter Philip Guston. The initial motif, C-G-A-flat-E-flat, refers to John Cage who had introduced Feldman to Guston in 1950.

Hessisches Staatsorchester Wiesbaden / Siegfried K�hler: conductor / Bl�ser Ensemble Mainz / Klaus Rainer Sch�ll: conductor / Kreisler Trio / Bodo Hersen: viola.

These two CDs present a live recording of the premiere in the Nationaltheater Mannheim in March 1987. Under Peter Schneider as conductor and Friedrich Meyer-Oertel as stage director, the ensemble offers up a forceful performance. "Heiner M�ller's text 'Die Hamletmaschine' from 1977 is an intellectual turning point, an 'endgame' of drama: There are no continuous plot and no assigned parts any longer; time has become a lumpy sphere, and multi-layered images pass like an imaginary theatre. [...] With his partly impetuous, partly excessive lyrical music, 'polluted' by quotes and pseudo-quotes and thus also being 'open', Wolfgang Rihm managed to 'grasp' this unwieldy text and achieve a great success at the world premiere of 'Die Hamletmaschine'." (Fono Forum)

As if in slow motion, librettist Thornton Wilder summarizes a series of Christmas dinners celebrated by the Bayard family over a period of ninety years and fuses them into a single long meal. The concentration of the characters and their standardization are all things that Hindemith's setting picks up on: he counterbalanced them musically by means of development, individualization, and variation - thus designing a kind of music that expresses contingency - significant coincidence - as an attitude toward life. The view of what Wilder calls the "mill of time" is thus always a view of the future as well - whether we perceive that as misfortune or consolation or both at once.

In Wolfgang Rihm's compositions, there is a continual energy inherent in the sound objects themselves that the composer senses and liberates. Rihm coined the term "vegetative composing" for this particular relationship to the material; elsewhere he has spoken of reacting "seismographically". By means of inscription, contrafacture and overpainting Rihm creates absolutely new works out of works composed earlier within a compositional row. "Frage" stands out for it's two essential design approaches from the visual arts - linearity and the planar, objectlike - and it's use of two painting techniques: overpainting and inscription. More than that, however, the work is embedded into a network of references to the visual arts. Whereas in "Frage" elements of various ages were recombined into a montage, in "Sph�re um Sph�re" a model is completely reworked, namely, in the form of a contrafacture. Both works of this CD were premi�red by ensemble recherche, and "Frage" is also dedicated to this ensemble specialized in New Music. - First recording! Coproduction with Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

Siegfried Mauser, who has already recorded Hindemith's complete works for cello and piano for WERGO with Julius Berger, inaugurates with this CD a complete recording of Hindemith's piano music on five CDs. The booklet reprints an extensive, essential essay by Friederike Becker that provides an introduction to the young Hindemith's aesthetic world and a detailed commentary on the piano works included here. Siegfried Mauser: piano.

As in his jazz-project "H�loise" (WER 80082), the principle of improvisation is not only followed up within theme and harmony, but also includes in particular historic styles from the European tradition back to the Middle Ages. The music develops itself by transforming the material of the compositions rather than by creating a collage.