Elliott Carter is the one of America's most distinguished creative artist in any field. - Aaron Copland nominating Elliott Carter for the "Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Eminence in Music" (1971). Two important pieces of the American composer - who won the Pulitzer Prize twice - are now available on CD (re-release of WERGO LP WER 60124): "In Sleep, In Thunder" and "Triple Duo". "In Sleep, In Thunder" is a setting of six poems by the late Robert Lowell and composed "in memory of the poet and friend". Black comic parodies and ice-cold irony determine the atmosphere of the six songs. For Carter the way out of the black world of the Lowell cycle was "Triple Duo", a work whose comic mood appears in it's very opening where the players are caught in the act of warming up before beginning.

Three rather meditative pieces from the repertoire of "Ars Acustica", but nevertheless: Fluxus! The New York-born artists whose radio plays are collected on this CD, Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, and George Brecht, have appeared together in performances, and they are also connected by their relationship to John Cage's aesthetic, by work with chance operations, and by Zen. Explaining Fluxus is like wanting to hold a river in your hand.

"Given such unspeakable things, art seems compelled to choose between cynically indolent glass-bead games, ridiculously vulnerable self-inspection, and, should it harbour politcal ambitions, the danger of turning into monstrous kitsch."(Spahlinger) It is his insistance on the self-reflecting - and hence political - character of art that sustains Spahlinger's music: it makes us sense the underlying orders of art, the hierarchies of language, while showing us their limitations. The ordering activities of the mind are seen as a political act.

Hans-J�rgen von Bose belongs to that generation of German composers who brought about a volte-face in the early 1970s. They bridled at the constantly increasing complexity of music and instead wrote their works "from the belly." But he was also inspired by the music of Alban Berg, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Gy�rgy Ligeti and Brian Ferneyhough. Von Bose's ideal, however, always remained the same: to recreate modernity from the spirit of romanticism.

The compositional roots of Ruth Zechlin - composer, harpsichordist, organist and teacher in the former East German Republic - were nourished by the musical atmosphere of Leipzig, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and, surreptitously, by Hindemith, Bartok and Stravinsky. She has ever declined to follow the dictates of a particular school or to adhere to the doctrine of a specifique technique, no matter which one.

This CD is dedicated to early works by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov: "Avant-garde is an attempt to break out of an enclosed space into a more open one. In the attempt to break out of this space, the fireworks of avant-garde artists are like the outbursts of the Romantics. In my first works, I made it my goal to achieve a lyrical atmosphere." As early as 1967, Silvestrov - who calls himself a "lyricist and poet in music" - formulated with these words his compositional Credo, which has remained unchanged throughout the years. The symphony for chamber orchestra "Spectrums" was originally created as music for the film "Kiev Frescoes" by the famous director Sergei Paradschanow - a project that could never be realized, however.

Heinz Winbeck is an unusual case. Up until a few years ago he was known to only to initiates as an eccentric Bavarian who could not be placed in the cubby-hole of any particular style. Since 1984 however, since the premiere in Donaueschingen of his “First Symphony” which in the following year attracted additional attention in a new version, suddenly there has been keen attention in and curiosity. The “Second Symphony” for Saarbrucken and the “Third Symphony” for Munich followed soon thereafter. The music world suddenly had to realize that it had overlooked a significant, important, and totally unorthodox composer (he had written fine music prior to his symphonies, as the “Second String Quartet” demonstrates). It is in fact difficult to categorize Winbeck’sscores with some kind of “school”, because they exhibit no dogma, no stylistic direction. He permits himself to be a subjective composer (something which in a time which preaches objectivity he has said, “I sometimes fear myself to be”). Highly impetuous but equally sensitive, he permits himself, as a completely contemporary man, to come under the spell of the music of the past – “the nearness to the works of the past does not just happen to me; I consciously arrange it”. “All I can say is that I literally only put down on paper that which, were I not to do so, would cause me to explode.” This exposed inner world or – as Franz Hummel has said – the territory of this music should be avoided by those unable to enter without prejudice.

On the occasion of his 85th birthday on February 9, 1994 WERGO has published Harald Genzmer's two Trautonium concertos on CD. Both of them - historical recordings from 1950 and 1958 - had already been published in 1986 on vinyl-records. Now, the newly developed Digital Sonic Solution No Noise System has considerably improved the sound quality. Oskar Sala is well-known for his sound background of Alfred Hitchcock's film "The Birds".

Unsettling and opposed to any and all concessions to fashion, these are apt descriptions of Christfried Schmidt's music. For decades this composer, now over sixty years old, was subjected to massive and undisguised repressive measures by the East German cultural authorities. Yet, at the fall of the Iron Curtain, he was struck by indifference, particularly from those who do not want to grapple with the unsettling acoustical fantasies of a person which cannot be diverted from his artistic direction. Nevertheless, Schmidt's music is not avant-garde in an obvious sense of the term. On the contrary, Schmidt writes his music within the bounds of what we might call an open expressivity. He cultivates a seething, often beseeching idiom that obviously links him with the grand traditions of expressionist music from the turn of the century: with Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg no less than with Varese and Xenakis. Schmidt gives his listeners music that can be aggressively emotional even when it is quiet, whose underlying impetus perhaps thrives on the idealistic and utterly "nonmodern" intention of engendering a state of catharsis - true to Beethoven's maxim that the purpose of music is to improve mankind.

"A whirling panopticon in which dreamlike images fly past, flaring up explosively in light and rapidly vanishing into the dark." What Detlev Muller-Siemens fascinated about Walter Hasenclever's play "People" - which the libretto of his opera is based on - was "its shorthand dialogues, often no more than a series of seperate words barely expressive of the plot." The scenes are closely interrelated, and deal with aspects of human existence - like birth, death, power, oppression, law, murder, fear, loneliness - which are contrasted with withdrawn, gentle and quiet moments, islands, so to speak. The character of the music evolves between these two poles: Two extremes - a metallic cutting shrillness pressing ahead in abrupt thrusts like a mechanical chain, and gentle lines circling and interlacing as if in weightless, foliage-like profusion - interact to produce an often highly fused form of polyphony between which the music autonomously transmutes, allowing the play, is complement and equal, as much scope as possible.

The theremin is the only instrument that can produce sounds without being touched. The hands of the performer dance in the air. Invented in the 1920s, the theremin did not really achieve a breakthrough in the following decades. On "Touch! Don't Touch!" Lydia Kavina and Barbara Buchholz pick up the thread of theremin history with new compositions. Eight German and Russian composers were commissioned to write pieces for two theremins and instrumental ensemble. They followed the maxim that there should be no limits to the sound; everything should be possible. The result is this marvellous CD.

Igor Strawinsky writes in his memoirs about the composition of "Petruschka": "While I was writing this music I clearly imagined a suddenly liberated puppet which brings the orchestra to the brink of despair with its diabolical leaps, answered by the orchestra in its turn with threatening fanfares. While going for walks by Lake Geneva after I had finished this bizarre piece, I searched for a title in my mind which would express in one word the essence of my music and accordingly the essence of the figure in my imagination. One day I sprang in the air for joy. Petrushka, the eternal and unhappy hero of all fairs in all countries - I had found my title." In "Jeu de cartes" Strawinsky has changed from a Russian story-teller to a worldly, well-read stylist. "Jeu de Cartes" is an interpretation in dance of a game of poker in three rounds, in which the Joker makes itself felt in a confusing and disturbing way.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann's opera, based upon Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel of the thirty years' war, has not been seen on stage or heard in concert in the UK. Yet it's one of the most important German operas of the 20th century; it was composed during the mid-30s, but couldn't be performed under the Nazis because of the unmistakable parallels it draws with the situation in Europe. (It was staged for the first time only in 1949.) Markus Stenz's fine performance - with an oustanding Juliane Banse as the naive shepherd boy, Simplicius, who finds himself surrounded by the horror, corruption and farce of war - was recorded in 2012 at one of Netherlands Radio's invaluable Saturday matinees, at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. Like the BR Klassik recording of the opera from 2009, with Camilla Nylund in the title role, it uses the original version of the score, which is more unsparingly pessimistic and much more indebted to the principles of Brechtian epic theatre than the substantial revision that Hartmann made in the 1950s. Stenz and his cast capture that raw intensity very truthfully.

New York City native Tobias Picker was described by the "Wall Street Journal" as "our finest composer for the lyric stage" and by BBC Music Magazine as "displaying a distinctively soulful style that is one of the glories of the current musical scene." The new WERGO recording with pianist Ursula Oppens traces an evolution in the composer's writing for piano from the virtuosic challenges of his "Four Etudes for Ursula" and the jazzy, urbane landscape of "Keys to the City" to the lyrical simplicity of "Old and Lost Rivers", "... when soft voices die...", or "The Blue Hula". Listeners will also have a rare opportunity to hear the composer performing in the two piano version of "Keys to the City". This CD with mostly first recordings will make an invaluable contribution to the discography of contemporary American music.

The CD presents partly unpublished choral works of Paul Hindemith who wrote in 1952: "It is not going too far to say that the art of a cappella ensemble singing and the music written for it can be thought of as the measure of the achievement of the musical culture of any particular period." The brief texts of the canons reveal his love of punning games and an underlying sense of humor.