The recording was awarded the German Record Critics' Award of the Year 1983, the "Deutscher Schallplattenpreis" (German Record Award), the Record Cover Award (IMZ) and the "Diapason d'Or".

John Cage's Etudes Australes, performed here by pianist Sabine Liebner, launched a series of virtuoso studies born out of the composer's renewed interest in traditional instrumentation and notation. This complex work consists of a total of 32 etudes divided into four books, which John Cage based on maps of the southern night sky. From these maps, locations of planets were selected via chance and translated into pitches, transforming indeterminacy into a new aesthetic category. For Cage's Etudes Australes, the moment of performance is its only moment of reality. Only what is in the present can be heard: in this case, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sound.

This specially-priced set offers a portrait of the young German composer Johannes Boris Borowski. It focuses on a genre that is rarely found in contemporary music: the concerto. Although the instrumental style of playing may suggest a classical orientation, Borowski breaks with the concerto tradition in new and unexpected ways. One concerto and one ensemble piece are contained on each of the discs in this set which features top interpreters of the international contemporary music scene.

By releasing the DVD “Birdcage: 73'20.958" for a Composer”, WERGO presents another highlight among the releases marking the composer's 100th birthday:

The legendary film collage, created in 1972 on commission of WDR and SWR on the occasion of the 60th birthday of John Cage and premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, paints an extraordinary picture of Cage the Artist, of his musical and extra-musical thinking, his character and his remarkable oeuvre. The cinematographic composition, which is released here in the unabridged original version for the first time, was realized by the composer and writer Hans G Helms.

Helms assembled various film materials into a special kind of mosaic: Historical flashbacks, biographical milestones and music recordings are complemented by original commentaries of the composer's contemporaries, companions and friends, such as Carolyn Brown, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Teeny Duchamp, Don Gillespie, Doris Hays, Frederic Rzewski, Grete Sultan, Margaret Tan, David Tudor, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and Paul Zukofsky. The twittering of birds – symbol of the aesthetically unintentional and basic material of Cage's tape composition “Birdcage” – runs like a thread through the film, forming its musical basis.

Produced by IFAGE on behalf of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Köln, and Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden, 1972.

-- Wergo

The decision as to where the borders of music lie can only be determined by the work of composers, who are always trying to make understandable that which is incomprehensible, to turn chaos into order, to encompass that which has no borders: an impulse of the human spirit since the beginning. (Bernd Alois Zimmermann, 1956) The present CD brings three pieces of occasional music (the miniature ballet "Un petit rien", the Music for a Puppet Theater, "Das Gelb und das Gr�n" [The Yellow and the Green], and the film music "Metamorphose" [Metamorphosis]) together with the composition which laid the groundwork for the "linguistic compositions" of Zimmermann's Late Period: the highly serialized cantata "Omnia tempus habent". coproduction with Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Swiss Radio DRS 2.

These four compositions from the 1950s deliberately link the heterogeneous, the non-simultaneous. The result of this combination, presented by Lucas Fels and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Peter Hirsch, is an entirely inspired bridging of tradition and awakening, light and serious music, form and ecstasy. "M�rchensuite": Live Recording of the World Premi�re in January 2001 "Alagoana. Caprichos Brasileiros": First Recording This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award and, in 2003, the prize "Coup de C�ur Musique Contemporaine" of the Acad�mie Charles Cros.

The passion with which both of them approached the sound of language was the basis for the long and fruitful collaboration between Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano Berio. Sanguineti considers "Canticum novissimi testamenti" and "A-Ronne" to be the most successful musical settings of his texts. In his obituary for his friend, Sanguineti wrote in 2003: "For me he embodies purely and simply how music can be planned and thought today." "A-Ronne" begins with the biblical assertion that the word stood at the beginning of all things and concludes with the line "in my end is my music." Sanguineti could hardly have presented the composer with a better text on the subject of the transformation of the word into music. In "Canticum novissimi testamenti" Berio traces the subtle nuances and shifting moods of the poem with elegantly homogeneous sound from eight singers and eight winds.

What happens after death? This question has occupied the thoughts of mankind since its existence. They believe in gods and paradise, in hell or in the afterlife. Even some of the most famous moments in music history are due to the imagination of the realms that are beyond this world. In the works by Francesco Filidei, music and death are always interconnected: Man has found three instruments to explore life: philosophy, religion, and art. To me, music is the most effective because it works with time, and we perceive life through time. The composer Michael Beil devoted himself to cross-media questions very early, and his composition Black Jack plays with the relationship between sound and picture, playback and action, while giving special emphasis to the play with silence and repetitions. The piece culminates in a powerful march in which virtuality and reality are antagonistic. For his unfinished song-cycle In der Matratzengruft, Mauricio Kagel compiled a text from Heinrich Heine's last poems. In the fifteen parts of the composition, Kagel reassembles the soloistic chamber ensemble again and again and blends his own colours for each of the musical sections: "It is a musical parable of Heine's fragmented existence", writes Kagel, "where fragments of fragments succeed one another intermittently, sometimes even simultaneously, and where the knot between the real reason for suffering and the eternal question of "Why" cannot be untied."

REIMANN Melusine • Peter Hirsch, cond; Marlene Mild ( Melusine ); Teresa Erbe ( Pythia ); Gabriele May ( Madame Lapérouse ); Richard Kindley ( Max Oleander ); Song-Hu Liu ( Count Von Lusignan ); Nuremberg P • WERGO WER 6719 2 (2 CDs: 96:47 Text and Translation) Live: Nuremberg 5/12/2007


Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) has pursued a dual career as composer and pianist; he was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s accompanist for 20th-century repertoire. Reimann has written perhaps 50 major works in many forms, most of them including the voice. He is best known for his ambitious operas based on major literary works: The Trojan Women (Euripedes), A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata (Strindberg), The Castle (Kafka), The House of Bernarda Alba (Lorca), Medea (after Franz Grillparzer), and—talk about ambitious—Shakespeare’s Lear , the latter written for Fischer-Dieskau, who suggested the subject and sang the 1978 premiere, recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon.


The 1971 Melusine , based on a play by Yvon Goll, is the “Pastoral” Symphony of Reimann’s dramas, a breath of fresh air amid all that heavy breathing. It is the classic story of a mermaid who loves a mortal, for which they both must pay with their lives— Rusalka moved to the big city, or at least to a park at the edge of town. Max’s former lover, Madame Lapérouse, has arranged his marriage to Melusine, who remains virginal despite his complaints. She in turn consorts with her magical friends in the woods; the fairy Pythia (her Ježibaba) gives her the fishtail, which “closes her loins but makes her irresistible to men,” some of whom die for her. Finally, she falls for the Count, and you know the rest.


As befits a fairy tale, the elegant music is lighter and easier than the dense, mostly serial expressionism of Lear and The Castle , and the spare, harsh melodrama of Bernarda Alba . But the most fascinating—astonishing—thing about Melusine is the title character’s vocal line, which makes the Queen of the Night sound like a basso profundo. It has easily the highest tessitura I have ever encountered, probably around a’’, with excursions up through the next octave. Even more amazing is the apparent ease with which Marlene Mild handles the range and the coloratura; there is no screeching or squeaking here, and—after the astonishment wears off—her singing comes to seem natural for this mythical, magical creature. Baritone Song-Hu Liu is also marvelous as the Count; they share a long, gorgeous duet in the final act, which is surrounded by two impressive orchestral interludes. The whole cast is eminently satisfactory, as is the orchestra. The opera is a bit slow to get started—scene 1 is a tedious debate between Max and Madame which brings us up to snuff on who’s who and what’s what—but it takes wing with Melusine’s entrance. The live recording is clear and clean, with no audience intrusions. German and English texts appear on facing pages. Unless you can’t abide any music beyond Strauss, this is definitely an opera worth getting to know.


FANFARE: James H. North

Early in 1920, the young brash composer George Antheil decided to leave his home country, the USA, and conquer the concert halls of Europe as a pianist, travelling first to London and then to Germany where he set up headquarters from July 1922 to June 1923, well-prepared to dazzle Europe with his daring compositions and bold pianism. Most of his experimental piano music was composed in Berlin in just this one year. Many of these works can be heard together for the first time on this recording thanks to new discoveries and scholarly research – exquisitely performed by Guy Livingston who is one of the foremost performers promoters of Antheil's music today.

Born in Tennessee, with degrees from Yale, NEC, and the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands, pianist Guy Livingston wowed critics and audiences with his successful 'Don't Panic' CD. He is based in Paris and Amsterdam and travels widely as a pianist and director. Livingston has already recorded two CDs of the music of George Antheil, organised the Paris Antheil Centennial Concert, and was Artistic Director for the 2003 George Antheil Festival in Trenton in honour of the 1920's futurist. In addition Livingston has been the focus of two television documentaries on Antheil, as well as appearing in the film 'Bad Boy Made Good'.

French composer Mark Andre's ...auf... consists of three independent orchestral pieces. Taken together, they can be heard as a cycle or as a triptych. Though they are related, each work begins again the search for new resonances and means for transitions between sounds. Andre studied composition with Claude Ballif and Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire de Paris. He continued his studies in Stuttgart with André Richard at the SWR Experimentalstudio and with Helmut Lachenmann.

“It was only with Partch that a music began to take shape that could do equal justice to the physical desire for rhythmic pulse and a curiosity for new, unheard sounds; a music that enthralls us despite, or rather, precisely because of its unfamiliarity. A music for which we have no category, and which has no location, and yet in a strange way is grounded.” (Heiner Goebbels) The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is considered a pioneer of the Just Intonation movement and was far ahead of his time when he began to explore microtonality. In the course of his life, he not only created a highly complex tonal system, but also designed and built an extensive set of instruments of sculptural beauty and great stage presence for its realisation, the only and original set of which is preserved in the USA.

On the occasion of the opening of the Ruhrtriennale 2013 with "Delusion of the Fury", staged by Heiner Goebbels, Harry Partch's entire set of microtonal instruments was reconstructed for the Ensemble Musikfabrik and learned by the musicians. It was only through this enormous reconstruction that performances of Partch's music outside his home country became possible at all. The dance and music theatre "Delusion of the Fury", whose recording by the Ensemble Musikfabrik sets new standards, is considered a key work and musical quintessence in Harry Partch's oeuvre. The extensive booklet documents the extraordinary music theatre production with numerous pictures as well as texts by Heiner Goebbels and Edu Haubensak.

Wolfgang Rihm is one of the world’s most performed and prolific composers. In 1972, he not only graduated from high school but also completed Germany’s state examinations for composition and music theory. Rihm and the cellist Friedrich Gauwerky (who is one year older) met in 1968 when they were roommates for a week at a competition for young musicians in Erlangen. This was the beginning of a life-long friendship. Gauwerky has performed his friend’s music throughout his career, especially the “wild and unbridled” virtuoso solo work Grat. Like Rihm, Friedrich Gauwerky quickly became an internationally celebrated star: as a soloist for works by the New Complexity composers and also as a member of distinguished ensembles such as Ensemble Modern (as principal cellist) and the Elision Ensemble in Australia. Gauwerky has taught at a number of German music universities as well as at the Darmstadt Summer Courses.

Gauwerky says of his friend Rihm, “As a composer he almost always comes up with something unexpected, unpredictable, and new. This may be because he is so open and curious, unlike some composers who continue to churn out the same material because they once had success with it. I have tried to illustrate the broad spectrum of his compositional activity with the works on this album.” To celebrate Wolfgang Rihm’s 70th birthday on 13 March 2022, Gauwerky recorded a very personal tribute to his friend in the studios of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, including an early unpublished and never-recorded string trio influenced by Alban Berg’s lyrical twelve-tone writing.

Dieter Schnebel has been deeply involved with music education since the beginning of his career. With the celebration in 2015 of the 45th anniversary of the founding of the AG at the secondary school in Grünstadt, a commission for MOVIMENTO closed the circle of the long history of artistic cooperation between Dieter Schnebel and the AG Neue Musik. In MOVIMENTO for musicians in motion, movement – as the title indicates – is even more important than in the other parts of the Schulmusik cycle. The participants perform with and without instruments, and with and without the use of their voices. Sounds and movements are woven together and are mutually dependent on each other, in that the sounds – which by definition move in space – are transferred to bodily actions and vice versa. In this sense, Schnebel’s composition is a framework for experimentation: the students and their teacher are encouraged to experiment with the ensemble and solo pieces at hand and to develop performance versions of their own. MOVIMENTO, according to Schnebel, “is music having to do with learning, practicing, rehearsing, internalizing, experiencing, and altering – combined with inspiration.”

The Trio Accanto is a most unusual ensemble. 25 years ago, it was a brave step to consider forming an ensemble made up of saxophone, percussion, and piano because no repertoire worth mentioning existed. This release demonstrates that this now has changed. The interesting constellation of the group has had a liberating effect on the tonal fantasies of the composers, leading to a great wealth of mixtures, combinations, and amalgamations. This album contains recordings of works by Georges Aperghis, Rolf Riehm, Johannes Schöllhorn, and Stefan Prins. For them, the trio as "sounding body" is the focus of their compositions. Georges Aperghis' "Trio Funambule“ resembles a dance on a tightrope. The piece proceeds in perpetually balancing movements – sometimes staggering, sometimes hesitant. All three instruments can always be differentiated as independent partners. In Rolf Riehm’s “Basar Aleppo oder Die Straße nach Tyros”, the musicians also make an appearance as actual persons. With the subtitle “Klangszenen" [Scenes in Sound], Riehm refers to the theatrical character of this composition. Johannes Schöllhorn’s piece “Sinaïa 1916“ sounds as if from a great distance, a remote legendary past. The trio moves, completely together, in slow and steady steps, in perfect harmony. Stefan Prins provides the musicians with a number of technical extensions for "Mirror Box (flesh + Prosthesis)": pre-recorded material, electronic samples, preparations- his piece certainly has the most eccentric “sounding body” of all the pieces on this album.