Mike Svoboda, an American who has spent half his life in Germany, knows how Wagner is seen abroad just as well as the passions that he sometimes ignites here at home. Unaffected by servile declarations of respect he approaches this monument impishly: slyly and without false respect. He presents his engagement with the self-styled composer god as a historical-satirical revue, as a roller coaster ride through the heights and depths of Wagner's reception over the past hundred and fifty years, though a trace of Svoboda's respect for the work is nonetheless always found beneath the surface. Adaptations of Wagner's pieces are confronted with Svoboda's compositions. Rock riffs, jazz improvisations, funk grooves and the sound world of the avant-garde are woven into it, a circus polka is shredded up and a musical melody is vocalized in harmony; recitative bumps up against recitation (Nietzsche, Marinetti, Satie). - It's a wonderful musical journey!

For many years the phenomenon of wilderness has determined and influenced the compositional work of the Cuban-American-Austrian composer Jorge E. López. He lived near the wilderness of the US-American mountains for several years; now he explores the intensive world of Austrian mountains which have become his home. The main themes the composer addresses are, on the one hand, the astonishing and awe-inspiring aspects of nature, and on the other hand the driving forces behind human activity. López continuously employs dream sequences and nightmarish imagery relating these to each other. This recent work, "Gebirgskriegsprojekt – Mountain War Project" for video projection and pre-recorded orchestra using 8-channel spatialisation, is no exception; here, López examines the Alpine front during the First World War, in and around the Dolomites. The central repertoire of sounds and images for this multi-media work comes from natural and composed orchestral sounds, mountain imagery and historical film material.

The works for piano presented here cover a time period of a good 20 years and document the great variety of Hindemith's oeuvre.

As a composer Barbara Heller was always en route - in search of new forms of expres-sion, of possibilities of articulation, and of forms for her musical language. As an artist she always took a path toward ever-increasing openness and formal freedom, including graphic notation, tape collages, sound installations, and collaborative projects. It is sensuous, playful music that Barbara Heller composes, characterized by being both contemplative and experimental. Like a scarlet thread the idea of a "game" passes through all of her compositions. She describes the space un poco, she initiates the rules: resulting in constantly new and constantly different motion in which the figures and the sounds develop in continuously new and endlessly varied constellations.

Achim Bornh�ft studied composition with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith at the Folkwang University in Essen from 1988 to 1994. The works he has chosen for this portrait CD are not merely acoustical simulacra captured on a sound recording. What he has committed to disc here, resounding from the loudspeakers, has been adapted to suit the possibilities and limitations of a stereo CD. Bornh�ft has anticipated the virtual auditorium during the production phases and modified the sound mixtures and the spatiotemporal proportions of the original scores accordingly. He has embraced the 'compact disc' situation.

Poetry is the writer's world of language which conveys to us images, moods, archetypes, and essential situations of existence in a concentrated form. The lyric metaphor inspires the musician, gives him a creative impulse, provides him with visions in sound. Conversely, the concreteness of the words is transcended by the immateriality of music into a spiritual and emotional world. The five works on this CD subsist from such a reciprocal interplay of music and literature. Although all the compositions of Norbert J. Schneider (who is internationally well-known for his music for numerous feature films) were written within a period of just seven years, they are surprisingly varied. The Hesse songs of 1983 are still in a style indebted to Webern and Messiaen while the "Trakl-Traume" [Trakl Dreams] of 1987 use polyperiodic procedures and processes of addition and subtraction, and "Gemeinsam einsam" [Alone Together] of 1990 is quite unabashedly filled with postmodern disjunctions.

Percussion instruments have occupied a particularly important place in Gerhard Stabler’s compositions for many years: In his works, the percussion instruments never have merely a rhythmic function; instead, their possibilities for magical and ritual (sound) effects are fully explored. His goal is always to stimulate the listener’s senses and fantasy, to awaken them to new and unexpected possibilities of perception and thinking, e.g. by using elements such as gestures or (dance) movement, light direction, or even the use of olfactory elements - or uncommon instruments as he does in "X fur Verschlusse [for fasteners]. Soprano Annette Robbert and Schlagquartett Koln are the ideal interpreters for this adventurous music.

The composer Conlon Nancarrow, who died in 1997 at the age of 84, is regarded as an exceptional figure in the field of contemporary music. It is especially his compositions for player piano that made Nancarrow go down in history. Apart from his central work "Studies for Player Piano", Nancarrow's �uvre can be classified in three groups of live instrumental compositions: the early works (ca. 1930-1947) - this period covers compositions such as "Septet" (1939) which was rediscovered only in 1990 and is now presented on this CD, or the cycle "Suite for Orchestra" composed in 1940 which is contained on the present CD as well. How far transcriptions can deviate from the original source is shown by the piece "Nancarrow Concerto" by Paul Usher who was guided by the 'spirit' of Nancarrow. It appears at the end of the CD programme as a shining example of the further creative development of Nancarrow's music.

In his early years, Hindemith confides that he adores Christian Morgenstern's poems, "perhaps because he is as crazy as I am, or vice versa." In his "Lustige Sinfonietta" Hindemith refers more to the atmosphere of Morgenstern, and in no case does he trace the single poems literally in music. Grotesque musical results arise from an intended discrepancy between the sovereignly mastered musical devices and the expressive content of the music. "Rag Time (well-tempered)" is the first work in which a stylized piece of "popular" modern dance music was directly related to the music of Bach. Bach was here rediscovered as a composer of "functional" music, and Hindemith was only too aware of this rediscovery: "Do you think Bach is turning in his grave? He wouldn't think of it! If Bach were alive today, perhaps he would invent the shimmy or at least take it over into respectable music. Perhaps he might even also take a theme from the 'Well-tempered Klavier' by a composer who might be to him what Bach is to us." First Recording.

John Cage (1912-1992) had a particular predilection for poetry. "[Poetry]," he wrote, "is not poetry by reason of it's content or ambiguity, but by reason of it's allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words." And about Stefano Scodanibbio who transcribed the "Freeman Etudes" and "Dream" for contrabass and in this recording also serves as the conductor of "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" and "Radio Music": "Scodanibbio. I thought he played beautifully. He played 'Ryoanji' absolutely better, than anyone I ever heard. - I haven't heard better double bass playing than Scodanibbio's. He's really extraordinary. His performance was absolutely magic."

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.

Aaron is Moses. Leonard Bernstein's affectionate aphorism about his friend and mentor expresses exactly Aaron Copland's importance in the development of a truly American music. Copland, born 1900, influenced as did no other the emergence of America from a country whose aspiring musicians, with few exceptions, had to go abroad in order to receive adequate training, into a mecca for musical training and a center for new artistic impulses. His personal involvement together with his popularity smoothed the way for innumerable composers and was instrumental in awakening the interest of the American public for it's native musical language. The scope of Copland's language as a composer is defined by two extremes: his so-called "severe" style, determined by serial techniques and stringent formal structure, and his simple style, in which he tried to write music that would be more accessible to a broad public. American musician Nina Tichman has been acclaimed as one of the leading pianists of her generation (Neue Musik Zeitung). Winner of numerous international competitions and being at home in the major music centers of the world, Nina Tichman has been particularly interested in contemporary compositions and their roots in traditional music for the piano. The music of Sch�nberg and Debussy, whose complete piano works she has presented cyclically (also released on the WERGO label), as well as that of contemporary American composers such as Copland and Elliott Carter, plays a central role in her repertoire.

Percussion Today is intended to provide an insight into the broad spectrum of contemporary percussion composition and performance. Hochschul-Percussion Trossingen / Hermann Gschwendtner: conductor.

La Cubana is (nothing but) a vaudeville, and the music for it makes no contribution to the problem of worker's music: from a certain point of view it is '�litist' (cum grano salis). The standpoint from which I wrote the music is, however, not free from grim dialectic, which perhaps does not matter, as long as listening to and seeing the whole piece is pleasurable. But you should not rank this music with attempts to create art that can be employed in the class struggle. It makes no such claims, it is not so conceived and in any case that kind of thing would be out of place in a vaudeville. (Hans Werner Henze).

Am�riques" - a symbol of renewal, adventure, and discovery - is a symphonic eruption that earned a place in the twentieth century's list of scandals at it's premiere. The version on this CD for two pianos, eight hands introduces the musical world to a work of extreme pianistic virtuosity, both delicate and ecstatic, a work whose wild activity could not be more different from the almost motionless introspection of the Feldman pieces. As Feldman said: "Instead of inventing a system like Schoenberg, Var�se invented a music that speaks to us with it's incredible tenacity rather than it's methodology. When listening to Var�se, we ask ourselves, 'How did he do it?' and not 'How was it done?'