Though the word music is feminine in all languages in which words have genders, the profession of the church organist has been overwhelmingly dominated by men up to the present day. Despite this prohibitive bias, the twentieth century has had a number of women who are internationally renowned concert organists. All of the recordings published on this ORGAN-CD, including some recordings from historical archives, exclusively feature female performers who have become known and celebrated well beyond the borders of France and who have achieved a superlative artistic level on the organ, their concert instrument of choice.

Convinced that the Revelation of Saint John was the response to questions that man has posed since the beginning of time, and that music has the power of evoking something and making it comprehensible even without using images, he turned to the overpowering subject of the Apocalypse, a subject that is difficult to grasp in human, artistic terms: visions of the end of time, of the goal and fulfilment of divine creation. Completed by the end of 1939, the premiere took place in occupied Paris on 11 June 1942 under the direction of Charles Munch. The passage in the text about the 144,000 children of Israel who were redeemed went unnoticed by the Nazi censors. The unusual orchestration of this fantastic oratorio includes a quartet of vocal soloists, a mixed chorus, organ, and two orchestras: the orchestra of heaven, which corresponds more or less to a large symphony orchestra, and the orchestra of hell, an ensemble of grotesque sound effects.

With this CD, WERGO publishes most of Henze's works for piano solo. Piano music occupies only a small part of his existing oeuvre, whereas Hans Werner Henze has written regularly for the piano in combination with other instruments, most of all the orchestra. These pieces on the present recording, played by Homero Francesch who has already played many world premieres of the composer's works, have one idea in common. Whether they date from forty years ago or from the more recent past, it is that the composer's thumbprint is instantly identifiable in the melos, gesture and treatment of long-established forms. Everywhere there is evidence of a living relationship to traditional European and especially Austrian piano music, more particularly piano music by Haydn and Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky and of course the composers of the Second Viennese School.

ECHO Klassik 2002 within the category "World Premiere Recording of the Year"! Hartmann's five one-act operas, which had their first premiere (for which we have to thank Hans Werner Henze) 58 (!) years after their composition, are interesting not only as documents of the musical life of the late twenties in Munich, but also as information about the early work of an artist who is known in the history of twentieth-century music not as a composer for the theater but rather as a composer of symphonies. These one-act operas are documents of their time especially in their use of texts that criticize and satirize their society, that capture distinct situations from life in a spotlight, and that typify the characters so that the ensemble of the acts does seem like a wax museum - that is, the pieces depict people who do not develop (hence, wax figures) in a way that establishes distance, tends toward the comic, and is a little didactic. - This CD is a great rarity.

Paul Hindemith was motivated to work with Gottfried Benn after he had read his article "Can Writers Change the World?". In it Benn states, in opposition to the political program of salvation of his days: History has no overarching sense, no upward movement, no dawning of humanity, a motif of the Orient, a myth of the Mediterranean Sea; it survives the Niagara Falls, only to drown in the bathtub; necessity calls and randomness answers. Benn then gave form to these views in his poem "Das Unaufh�rliche", which is supposed to express the self-transformation of the creative act. Hindemith was confronted with the paradoxical problem that he could in no way express the principle of the perpetual, to which as an art form music, too, is subject, by means of an emphatically autonomous music. Instead, he sought to embody the principle of the perpetual in his basic compositional decisions. Hindemith succeeds by always giving something fictive to the "organic" closed forms of the "natural" musical flow. The principle of the perpetual is assigned to three themes, which almost all of the work's other themes are derived from in the most subtle, unobtrusive art of transformation. And when the final chorus returns to these three themes in their original form, it makes thematically manifest what was always latently present: the principle of the perpetual.

Although Jamilia Jazylbekova has very strong ties to her native Kazakhstan, her creative urge cannot be boiled down to the local musical culture. "What's new and exciting about her music", says Kasper de Roo, who conducted the music on this CD at Deutschlandfunk with the Ensemble Modern, "is it's distinctive and inimitable language". With varying forces and a broad range of expression, this "inimitable language" shines forth in the five works on this CD. In "Voci" ("Voices"), where Jazylbekova herself sings the vocal part, touchingly song-like traits are transmuted into the naked gesture of a scream. In "Aspan" ("Heaven"), strange brass figurations congeal into eruptions of sound only to rapidly dissolve like dream images, despite their urgency. Seemingly raw and fragmentary sounds correspond with structural elements, while proportions of intensity and density within the composition, as in "Le refus de l'enfermement IV", become the focus of attention. Jazylbekova views each instrument as a separate "being" to be brought to life by the performer. In "Nuit de mars" and "Aikyon", rather than pursuing the ideal of "pure beauty of sound", she incorporates "pollutants"': "It's like the water of a mountain stream in whose bed we can see plants, rocks and soil: the admixtures in the water correspond to the proportion of noise in the sound."

The Franconian composer Walter Zimmermann deliberately drew on Maeterlinck's theatrical revolution, the anti-dramatic radicality, when in 1984 he composed his static drama "Die Blinden" after Maeterlinck's "Les Aveugles". It is the "Dialogue of the Two Roses" from Edmond Jab�'s "Le Livre des Questions" that forms the basis of Zimmermann's "Singbarer Rest." (Singable Residuum)

"Carmina Burana" - Carl Orff's famous work for vocal soloists, large mixed choir and large orchestra based on a collection of medieval texts - in the piano version?! The piano was for Carl Orff a percussion instrument, consisting of strings, hammers and keys. Here he went far beyond Bartok's "Allegro barbaro", beyond Prokofiev and Stravinsky's "Les Noces". The hammered sound makes the rhythm clear, as it does in the case of timpani, glockenspiel, and xylophone. The piano version of "Carmina Burana" is not a piano score; what the vocal soloists and the choir sing is integrated into the sound just as the orchestra part. Orff's metre and form are followed exactly. One perceives how carefully proportioned the individual melodies are, how much freely applied form theory plays a part, how the impulse is subject to strict control. The careful listener to the piano version may not only manage to identify one or the other instrument, but will also have Carl Orff's fantasy image of the Middle Ages vividly in front of his eyes: vital, colourful, wordly, spread out between gracefulness and drastic coarseness.

After the release of Pierre Henry's "La Ville. Die Stadt" and John Cage's "Roaratorio. An Irish Circus on 'Finnegans Wake' " within the CD series "Ars Acustica", WERGO continues this CD series with Bill Fontana's "Ohrbr�cke / Soundbridge K�ln - San Francisco". This first satellite sound-bridge between Europe and North America - initiated by the WDR in Cologne in association with the American Public Radio - which became a highly successful media event, involved the participation of over 50 radio stations in Europe and America as well as the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco. The "orchestra" consisted of each 18 sound sources in the city of Cologne and in San Francisco. Of special importance were the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - with it's fog horns which can be heard over a long distance - and the Heinrich-B�ll-Platz with the cathedral and river boats in Cologne. Simultaneous events in the two cities, parallel but completely independent of one another, were brought together and mixed into a collage by Bill Fontana from a mixing board at the WDR, producing the live composition, "Satellite Sound Bridge Cologne - San Francisco". For an hour the listeners entered into the sound world of two widely separated cities through the medium of Fontana's sound composition. This WERGO CD documents the hour-long live broadcast.

Joaqu�n Turina is one of the principal composers of the twentieth-century Spanish nationalist school. With Isaac Alb�niz, Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla he forms part of the group which marked the emergence of modern Spanish music, situating it on it's high level. The Spanish pianist Bego�a Uriarte who had studied E.G. with Jos� Cubiles has won international recognition with a series of concerts (soloist and in duo) and recordings of Soler to Ravel and Ligeti. Conciseness and at the same time spiritual charm characterize her interpretations. Bego�a Uriarte: piano.

The music of Wilhelm Killmayer needs no declaration of facts, nor a declaration of love. Like almost no other music it "emanates from itself", is autonomic. For the premiere of "fin al punto" (which was written for the twentieth anniversary of the Munich Chamber Orchestra) in 1971 Wilhelm Killmayer wrote the following text: "The calm already contains the catastrophe. Out of the calm grows the movement that drives itself to the furthest extreme of its powers, where it collapses. It is the point at which one gives up, beyond which one can escape into the open."

Pioneers of the Ars Acustica: Every radio plays is to be understood in the most general sense, as an auditory experience in which all of the sound phenomena, whether sounds, words, or noises, are in principal equal: part of the available material.

In Adriana H�lszky's opera "Bremer Freiheit", Geesche leads her fellows with cheerful nonchalance to their doom. The murders follow in regular succession, with no more passion or sentimentality than "Ten Little Indians". What H�lszky wanted to create was anything but a neo-veristic shocker, a psychoanalytic character study or the melodrama of a victimized woman. Instead, she has given us an almost playful alienation, a sort of Grand Guignol operetta. Connoisseurs of Fassbinder's plays know that they are generally neither realistic nor "naturalistic" but instead find their raison d'�tre in stylization, albeit not on the sublime classical sense. Only on the surface do they seem to deal with real human beings of flesh and blood. In reality they deal with character masks, like the generalized figures of comedy. In "Bremer Freiheit", then, all the characters apart from Geesche are "marionettes of suppression". It is precisely because of these admittedly horrifying goings-on that H�lszky has succeeded in giving all her characters and stage actions a lite-rally "tactile" plasticity. Yet at the same time she has remained playful, pre-serving Fassbinder's rondo structure, for example, and introducing a number of buffo elements. (from the liner notes by Gerhard R. Koch)

To pigeonhole Schenker in the category of “progressive expressionism”, however, is to display an ignorance or misunderstanding of the range and variety of his oeuvre to date. There is nothing in the altercations between East and West to denigrate the work of Friedrich Schenker. His music is pervaded by a strong moral fiber, at times even a driving spirit of rebellion, that sheds light on precisely how much the conflicts he has confronted – past and present, personal and artistic – continue to smoulder.

The Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister holds an important position in the musical history of our century as a significant composer of operas. Sutermeister's numerous religious works are among the most important of those independent and highly individual works written in our century which present a broad humanism against a religious background. Sutermeister found his way in the "Missa da Requiem" to a formal structure of his own. The orchestration is appropriate to the text. Retraint and outburst are juxtaposed according to the requirements of the mood. The "Te Deum 1975" represents an extension of the "Missa da Requiem". It is a music based on an extended concept of tonality, which unfolds mood, atmosphere, and an appropriate representation of the meaning of the text.