The German Music Council campaigns for Germany's vibrant existence as a land of music in all areas of life that are connected to music. In it's renowned Contemporary Music Edition, the Council set itself the task of creating a basic listening library of contemporary composition in Germany. This release features a selection of five works by composer Annesley Black. As a special bonus, this release includes a DVD computer game entitled This Feels Great, developed specifically to pair with this CD.

One of the great composers of our time turns 80. On this occasion, WERGO publishes Hans Werner Henze's two Orpheus works, "Aristaeus" (world premiere recording) and "Orpheus behind the Wire". Live recorded at the 10-years celebration concert of the Berlin Rundfunk Orchester und Ch�re on 1 February 2004 in the Berlin Konzerthaus."Orpheus behind the Wire" (composed in 1981-83; texts by Edward Bond) are a political beacon against the Argentine military government, which sanctioned kidnapping, torture and murder."Aristaeus" - Henze's story of renunciation and loss after ancient ideas with the protagonists Aristeo, Mopso, Tirsi, Eurydice, and Orpheus from 2003: magical and touching, refreshing and entertaining.

Born in 1962 in Sofia (Bulgaria), Emil Naoumoff was discovered at the age of 8 by Nadia Boulanger, with whom he becomes one of the principle disciples for 10 years, until her death. Already at the age of 19 he is covered by diplomas for piano, composition, conducting, and he becomes teacher at the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau, and then the Conservatoire de Paris. It is in 1981 that Schott in Mainz decided to represent Emil Naoumoff, making him their youngest composer; but it is at the end of 1984 that Naoumoff's career as a soloist takes off. Emil Naoumoff: piano.

This CD of works by the Hungarian composer Gy�rgy Ligeti represents an extremely interesting combination of several of his serene works for harpsichord, organ, and wind quintet with two electronic compositions from the late 1950's. Antoinette Vischer: harpsichord / Bl�serquintett des S�dwestfunks Baden-Baden / Elektronisches Studio des Westdeutschen Rundfunks, K�ln / Zsigmond Szathm�ry: organ / Karl-Erik Welin: organ.

Classical Music

Adriana H�lszky�s music has a unique sculptural quality. "Where does the sound come from, and where does it go?" This question is central to her entire creative output and essential for the development of musical content in her works. H�lszky's third music theater piece, "Trag�dia (Der unsichtbare Raum)" [Tragedy: The Invisible Room] marks an extreme within her compositions: The changing constellations of the music bring the �Tragedy� to life - plot and language are radically excluded. The 18 instrumentalists, together with live electronic effects and pre-recorded material, produce a tremendous variety of sound recollections, shock gestures, and colors. �One is permanently aware of the absence of characters, constantly expecting someone to appear, but this state of anticipation is sustained until the end of the piece - and left unresolved.� (H�lszky) Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

The focus of the pieces by Alvin Lucier on this CD is on the phenomena of resonance - sympathetic vibration - in many variations. "Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece," says Alvin Lucier. The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsessed, to make Lucier's music of ideas a music of the ears. Someone of precisely the type found in this production - Matthias Kaul.

The first works of Cage are experimental and related to the future. "The Future of Music" - a Credo" is the title of his first manifesto, and this future bears the name "all-sound music". Peter Roggenkamp: piano / Schola Cantorum Stuttgart / Clytus Gottwald: conductor / John Cage: speaking part.

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.

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.

The scenes from the music theatre stage work "Niebla", written by the composer in joint authorship with director Matthias Rebstock, are the heart of the CD. The work is based on the eponymous novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno. "Those who don't merge the things will themselves become bewildered." The "things" here are the constantly interweaving levels of reality and fiction in Miguel de Unamuno's novel "Niebla" of 1914. The philosophical core of his book is the pleasure he takes in blurring the boundaries between them. It is this core that Elena Mendoza drew on when she chose Unamuno's novel as the basis of her full-length piece of music theatre. In the novel, the enigmas and intangibilities of human existence are captured in a central image: fog. They determine the formal shape of the theater piece in that identical situations proceed differently, are viewed from different perspectives, or are peopled with different characters. "Fe de erratas" similarly pursues the idea of inventing a musico-theatrical situation by constantly correcting things just heard. Six textual fragments by Felipe Ben�tez Reyes on the subject of the literary imagination, coupled with sharply delineated musical modules, are shuffled semantically and compositionally in ever-new ways to form a sort of isorhythm between music and text. The title of Mendoza's "Gram�tica de lo indecible" ("Grammar of the inexpressible") for instrumental ensemble was inspired by a saying from Ludwig Wittgenstein that is interpolated into the composition at the end of the spoken material. As in "Fe de erratas", here canonic and isorhythmic techniques function as framing sets of rules. As in Mendoza's other works, the result is a sonic and semantic kaleidoscope of extraordinary sensual presence, an ambivalent game with realities that resists any form of pigeonholing.

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.

“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

Ten years after their first highly estimated Cage CD "Works for Percussion" (WER 62032), Quatuor H�lios are presenting a second one with works by the inventor of the prepared piano. In the wake of this process comes the series of the five "Imaginary Landscapes". "Credo in US" is another heroic work, particularly in the ambiguity of it's title: is Cage patriotically referring to the United States, or is he simply humanistically proving allegiance to the first person plural? And then again, doesn't this Credo relate to the 1937 manifesto whose title it reflects? Collages, layerings and overlaps clash with omnipresent wild and scattered piano bits, strewn with explosions and streaked with silences that are in themselves aggressive. In "Inlets", the performers do offer Nature what we could call a choice gift: letting it do the composing... The crackling fire or the water gurgling in the conches redefine music! Quatuor H�lios has always been open to collaboration with composers in order to develop new contemporary percussion languages, often associating "classical" instruments, new technologies and musical theater.

Vinko Globokar - composer, interpreter and improviser - polemicizes against a virtuosity that merely "develops muscles and produces perspiration." He expects musicians to think about the score before beginning to play. On the basis of the mental process they should develop gestures that will produce the sound. Naturally these gestures often are very complex and place high demands on speed, dexterity, and sensitivity. The virtuosity that results, however, is purified of purely mechanical elements by the filter of the intellect. Matthias Kaul, who himself is a composer and improviser, is the ideal interpreter of Globokar's works for percussion. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.