One of the most spectacular water bird sanctuaries of the world - the Keoladeo Bird Sanctuary which was declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 1985 - can be found in between Jaipur and Agra, less than 200 km south of India's capital New Delhi. Consisting of lakes, marshes, thickets, scrub, and dry savannah, the Sanctuary provides a singular opportunity to observe a huge variety of birdlife. The number of birds to be found in winter - the season when the recordings on this CD were made - is, in fact, so large that it is almost impossible to single out any particular species. What presents itself to the visitor of the Sanctuary is a big chorus of many, many different voices, with some of them coming to the centre of the stage in especially dramatic moments. The CD "Opera of birds" is a guided soundwalk through the Sanctuary which provides you with an overview of the most prominent species of birds to be found in Bharatpur in the winter season - and may also be used for a relaxing listening experience.

More than 50 composers from 13 different countries contributed to this collection of music with computers. Their pieces represent major directions of how avantgarde composers utilize the potential of new technology. The Historical CD of Digital Sound Synthesis. Randall, James: Mudgett, Monologues for a Mass Murderer/ Sound examples of Jean-Claude Risset's Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds.

Anyone performing John Cage's music cannot avoid silence. In all the works performed in this collection, percussionist Matthias Kaul deals with silence and how it can be realized in the most concrete way. Kaul is not only a percussionist, he is also a composer and therefore equipped for such a task. In Variations I, Cage plays with various forms of silence. The score consists of transparent sheets with dots and lines and the performers generates concrete tones, sounds and "pauses". The playing instructions for Inlets are still more rudimentary; there are three performers, each of whom has four conch shells. The shells are filled with water and turned round and round; then a fire fueled by pine cones begins, and the piece ends when one of the shells blown like a horn. In Child of Tree, the performer must toss coins to determine how many sections to divide the eight minutes into and which instruments to use in which sections. For this major project, Kaul used 90 different instruments and objects altogether.

Oytsres, the seventh production in the "Jewish Music Series" edited by Rita Ottens und Joel Rubin, contains many of the musical personalities described in their book "Klezmer Music" (B�renreiter/dtv), the colorful social history of Yiddish wedding and celebratory music spanning centuries and continents. These rare, mostly historical recordings are all issued on CD for the first time and stem from the National Sound Archives (Jerusalem), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York) and Gratz College (Pennsylvania), as well as from the archive of DeutschlandRadio and private European collections. - "Some of the best digital remastering I have ever encountered." (Jewish Quarterly)

More than 50 composers from 13 different countries contributed to this collection of music with computers. Their pieces represent major directions of how avantgarde composers utilize the potential of new technology. Andreas Gutzwiller: shakuhachi / The University of New Mexico Percusssion Ensemble / Christopher Shultis: director / Cecil Lytle, Clark Griffith, David Burge: piano.

Rabbi and Cantor Isaac Algazi (Izmir/Turkey 1889-1950 Montevideo/Uruguay) ranked as the greatest Sephardic singer of the first half of the 20th century and the most important interpreter of the Turkish-Jewish musical tradition. These rare 78 rpm recordings containing synagogue chants for the Holy Days and the Sabbath in Hebrew, religious and folk songs in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) were provided by collectors from all over the world.

In the beginning of the 1950s, Hans Werner Henze wrote two radio operas for the former North West German Radio. The genre was developed around the 1930s and means a form of opera without any visual elements and hence without a stage. Under such circumstances the plot has to reach the listeners' ears by other means - by making the text exceptionally easy to follow, and by means of acoustic special effects like echo or sound collages. With this CD, WERGO publishes the premi�re of the revised versions on Sept. 27, 1996, in the Philharmonie in Cologne: Franz Kafka's oppressive surrealism in "Ein Landarzt" (A Country Doctor) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer's scathing satire in "Das Ende einer Welt" (The End of a World). In "Das Ende einer Welt", Henze himself took the role of the narrator, which underlines how topical the subject matter of this work remains for him. On the occasion of the premi�re of the revised versions of these two operas the composer wrote of the "inner connection" between the works: "There is, first, the state of a man who has taken leave of his senses, of being exposed, of the most terrible isolation, as if 'ordered' by invisible powers acting on a 'higher level.' There is talk of deception, of self-deception, of deceiving and being deceived, of the volatility and unreliability of life matters, beginning with the most simple (or most banal) and ending with the metaphysical and the grotesque." It is also conceivable that the increasing disquiet that took hold of Henze in the early fifties with regard to an evolving society that nonetheless remained the same at it's core ("Everywhere the old was not yet old enough, while the new pointed to a future that did not look very promising, " wrote the composer in his essay "Nach dem Krieg" [After the war]) took musical form in his two radio operas: on the one hand, a nightmare vision of horror; on the other, a cynical farce.

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.

“Das mollsche Gesetz” (English: Moll’s Law) was established in the summer of 2004 as an improvisational research project. Two significant laws have been applied to the work:1) No piece lasts longer than 60 seconds2) Each piece is followed by a break of the same length (as the piece itself …)These simple yet radical rules change to a profound extent the way that music is created, but also how it is perceived by the audience. On stage the format requires the greatest possible degree of clarity and precision as well as quick decision making. In the auditorium it requires focusing on the moment (the perceived present lasts 30 seconds) and increases the likelihood of becoming unnerved, thus resulting in a sharpening of the senses. The breaks invite the audience to shift its focus from finite to infinite and they serve as resonance space in time. Following the headline „Catalogue of Improvisation“,Das mollsche Gesetz arranged a 6-part concert series in 2007. The basic idea was to give the audience the possibility to experience six quite diverse approaches towards improvisation in music. Thanks to the constant aesthetic factor represented by "Das mollsche Gesetz", the individual approaches of the guests are provided with a clear framework which makes them comparable with insight. Additionally, for each concert the basic parameters of improvisation, such as time structure for sound and silence, choice of material etc, are negotiated anew with the guest of the evening. The guests represent very diverse genres of current musical activities: experimental minimal-techno (Institut fur Feinmotorik), New York Downtown-Avantgarde (Elliott Sharp), contemporary music (Tilbury, De Alvear, Mitterer), media arts (Negron/Orozco) and avant-garde Scandinavian vocal experiments (Endresen). This variety is complemented by "Das mollsche Gesetz" with its clear conceptual framework. The audience experiences the creation of music at its origin. By revealing the most important parameters, "Das mollsche Gesetz" creates an additional intellectual excitement to follow the course of the sounds. Integral part of the “Catalogue” is a documentation which consists of a lavishly designed catalogue with CD.All concerts were accompanied by the internationally renowned photographer Philip Lethen and the music journalist Raoul Morchen, who contributed photos and essays for the catalogue. All concerts were meticulously recorded; the highlights are published on this CD.

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.

The international Vorarlberg Rhine Delta Nature and Bird Reserve, situated where the Rhine flows into Lake Constance, and also the fenlands and reedbeds of the Bodanruck, a range of hills or low mountains lying between the Gnadensee and the uberlinger See, are priceless gems of the Lake Constance landscape. Walter Tilgner has selected some of the most remarkable and interesting among his collection of documentary recordings made largely in springtime over more than 20 years, to compose a marvellous and richly varied work, the "Wetland Wildlife Chorus".

For further information on Walter Tilgner, please visit his website: www.natur-tilgner.de

The music seems to dance - whether it's Henze's "Ballett-Variationen" of 1949, his "Vokaltuch der Kammers�ngerin Rosa Silber" [Vocal fabric] or his full-length opera "Boulevard Solitude" of 1951, of which we can hear the symphonic interludes on this CD. Henze's "Concertino" for piano and wind orchestra with percussion is "an amusing thing, spielmusik-like", referring to the French compositions of the time, whereas his "Kammerkonzert" of 1946 for piano, flute, and strings, reminds us of the composer's early teacher, Wolfgang Fortner.

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 1926 Hindemith encouraged the composition of a new kind of original music for wind ensemble (military band) for chamber music performances at Donaueschingen and helped raise the genre to a level of achievement which continues today. Three of these works from 1926 are published on this CD, together with Hindemith's famous masterpiece Symphony in B flat and Ernst Krenek's Dream Sequence.

"My aim is to cast creative distrust on what I'm able to do. In this way I hope to preserve my identity and, at the same time, to keep myself in motion. Perhaps the best way of achieving authenticity is to avoid trying to cultivate it." (Isabel Mundry) Born in 1963, Isabel Mundry is a composer of the young generation who has self-confidently yet unpretentiously attracted attention with her music in the scintillating hubbub of the New Music scene. Her scores convey a mixture of candidness and commitment, searching and discovery, and a creative outlook that has caused people to perk up their ears. The chamber music and ensemble pieces presented on our CD offer a selection of her work from the past five years, conveying a variegated mosaic of her instrumental style. Her approach of constructive skepticism has led to thought-provoking non-ideological music which, though devoid of political baggage and weighty semantic puffery, is nonetheless challenging and unyielding in its structural demands. It is interesting to observe how fundamentally radical notions of complex polyphony, computer-aided arithmetic series, and asynchronous temporal progressions govern such works as "no one" or "Le Voyage", only to appear undogmatically fractured, stylistically multifarious, and highly personalized on other levels. What remains untouched is a realm in which the musical structure begins to emanate poetry.