The five musicians Markus Stockhausen, Tara Bouman, Stefano Scodanibbio, Fabrizio Ottaviucci and Mark Nauseef had known each other since the 1980s. A sense of friendship on both personal and artistic levels grew among these musicians, as did the wish to make a recording of their 'Intuitive Music': a music that is fleeting – since it is only intended for the moment – but nevertheless deserves documentation. This is what motivated the present recordings. In February 2008, the five musicians met at Elmau Castle in the Bavarian Alps. For four days, they played together intuitively, without music or prior discussion. Walter Quintus recorded all these encounters and mixed them very skillfully. Stefano Scodanibbio died on 8 January 2012, much too young, after a long illness. This music is dedicated to him.

Tracklist:
1. Ungone
2. Of Silver Tongue
3. The Fluid Thread
4. Right Bright Night
5. She Cleared the Air
6. Invisible Again

Paul Hindemith's compositions for a cappella choir are distinguished by a richness of expression and mood manifested in various compositional techniques and artistic forms. Again and again in his writings and textbooks, Hindemith emphasized the important role of the singing voice as a natural instrument for the composer-in-the-making to test his compositional sketches as well as for the layperson and music lover for spontaneous singing and music making. The CD presents choral compositions on texts by Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, medieval and self-composed texts. Both dramatic and humorous, light tones in these choral works show the breadth of Hindemith's skillfulness. The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award and the "Echo Klassik 2001" (best choral-work recording)!

B�la Bart�k plays a major role in many works by Peter E�tv�s. The love of Bart�k's music first appears in the piano piece "Kosmos". The title refers to Bart�k's famous piano cycle "Mikrokosmos". However, the work also bears the title "Kosmos" because Yuri Gagarin's famous space flight was about to take place when it was written in March 1961. E�tv�s was then 17 years old, and Gagarin excited the young composer's imagination. On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Bart�k's birth in 2006, E�tv�s wrote a piano concerto in which he further developed Bart�k's ideas and thought processes. The concerto is entitled "CAP-KO", an acronym for "Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard, and Orchestra". The piano resources are extended by use of a computer, which adds further sounds to those being played - a revolutionary technology that E�tv�s wants to be understood as a symbol of Bart�k's pioneering spirit. The concerto centres on the famous Bart�k cascades of octaves and sixths. E�tv�s has twice re-arranged "CAP-KO" for other instrumentations, e.g. as "Sonata per sei" for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard. Among the musicians E�tv�s has always admired is Frank Zappa. When Zappa died in 1993 at the young age of 42, E�tv�s responded with grief and anger. He said, "In connection with Zappa's premature and meaningless death, one really cannot praise God, but must protest." He composed a piece that gives expression to this protest. Since the 150 psalms in the Bible do not deal with protest, the piece became Psalm 151: "This is the one that is not in the Bible."

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.

In the early 1960s, Wergo launched a series that would become legendary in the history of contemporary music recordings. Studio Reihe Neuer Musik featured some of the most significant and cutting-edge compositions of the modern era. These highlights of 20th-century music history have lost nothing of their topicality or liveliness. Many of the recordings in the series have never been released on CD and some have been unavailable in any form for many years. This release, featuring Arnold Schoenberg's sprechstimme monodrama Erwartung, is possibly the most famous Studio Reihe title. Soprano Helga Pilarczyk is accompanied by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen in a riveting performance of one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century.

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.

Cori�n Aharoni�n's work is characterized by bold gestures and explosive debates. The intensity of this composer's active engagement with his historical and contemporary environment gives rise to powerful and energetic sounds rooted in the culture of Latin American political resistance. Aharoni�n's entire aesthetic philosophy can be discovered in the smallest space, like a nutshell. His music is characterized by short sequences within a small range, rigorous use of material, lively sound gestures, explosively dramatic densifications, a non-discursive character, stringent rhythmic organization, block-like static constructions, repetition combined with stringent motivic transformation, suspense-filled silence as an aesthetic resource, and richly suggestive activity. Cori�n Aharoni�n (1940-2017) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the son of Armenian immigrants who had survived the genocide of 1915. In addition to composing, he was involved in a broad range of artistic and institutional activities promoting resistance to fascist dictatorships.

Wolfgang Rihm's compositions for string quartet are as extensive as they are varied. So far, there are thirteen quartets, as well as ten other compositions for or with a string quartet. A selection of these works can be found on this recording featuring the Minguet Quartet and pianist Markus Bellheim. Rihm's String Quartet No.11 is a piece of work of extreme contrasts - restrained and explosive, simple and virtuosic, fragile and forced to the point of screaming, tightly homophonic and polyphonically splintered to the edge of total dissolution. Interscriptum is an elaboration of Rihm's twelfth string quartet. To the quartet ensemble, treated as one instrument, a piano part is added, which initiates a dialogue and creates entirely new relationships within the piece. Grave is dedicated to the Alban Berg Quartet, and was written in response to the group's request for a requiem.

The double bass is the focus of this collection of music by Sofia Gubaidulina presented here in powerful interpretations by Daniele Roccato. Written over a span of over forty years, these compositions have become staples of the double bass literature. In Pantomime, one immediately senses a certain theatricality, which is evoked by melodic contours, dramatic pauses and dynamic progressions. Originally written for cello, the Preludes were later arranged for double bass. For in Croce, Gubaidulina pairs the bass with a bayan, (a Russian accordion). The work was inspired by the composer's experiments in improvisation using either ancient or folk instruments. Roccato is accompanied by pianist Fabrizio Ottaviucci and bayan player Massimiliano Pitocco.

WERGO presents first recordings of chamber music works by the Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin. The eponymous series of works, 'Shifting Gravity', from 2008 connects the string quartets 'Anea Christal' with the compositions 'Sheva' and 'Sahaf'. The second part of the CD consists of the 'Winter Songs III' (2003). This WERGO production shows a different side of the artist who was born in Haifa in 1957 and who, up to now, has been appreciated mainly for her stage works, in particular for the much noticed music theatre play 'Pnima ... Ins Innere' or her adaptation of Mozart's 'Zaïde / Adama'. The instrumental works were all created after the music-theatre plays, associating notions like paralysis, adherence, proliferation. The field of tension resulting therefrom corresponds with Czernowin's own descriptions: 'Anea is the imaginary name of a 'music crystal' created from a latticework of corresponding musical gestures according to the model of an ionic crystal'. 'Winter Songs' are described by her as follows: 'The whole cycle reflects the aspect of winter which is about being pulled into the inner cave... At the same time, underneath, in the ground, the roots of life slowly grow stiff and blindly start to search for a path between the stones'.

It may come as a surprise but one of the leading creators of Keyboard music in the twentieth century is a composer by the name of John Cage. Cage's reputation is so deeply associated with the avantgarde, with chance music, graphic notation, performance art, technology and Zen Buddhism that is early, conventionally-notated music for percussion ensemble and keyboards is sometimes neglected. Or was until recently. In the last few years - with the advent of performances and recordings like this one - there has been a renewed appreciation of Cage's achievements in the earlier part of his creative life. Of course, Cage's keyboard music is not just keyboard music. Cage's once infamous "prepared piano" - born out of need as well as desire - is a keyboard instrument unto itself, as different from the romantic piano as that instrument is from the baroque harpsichord. But even in his "unprepared" piano music, Cage shows his individuality and distance from European tradition. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.

The young Stravinsky became acquainted with large parts of the Western music repertoire through piano arrangements. That might have been one reason for his later compositional practice to arrange major works for piano duet or for two pianos as well. With the new album "Petrushka", the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo has achieved it's intention to present a complete collection of Igor Stravinsky's published piano arrangements. The present recording contains two ballets which show Stravinsky's compositional development within the genre: the almost film-like burlesque "Petrushka" (1910/11) as well as the abstract late work "Agon" (1953/57) which puts the ancient Greek concept of competition into a contradictory musical setting. In addition, it contains two arrangements of concert pieces: "Concertino" for string quartet (1920) lives on the alternation between homogeneous instrumental passages and soloistic crossed accents. The orchestral "Scherzo a la Russe" (1944) as 'jazz commercial' testifies to Stravinsky's adaptation to his life in America as well as to his love of the Russian types of form at the turn of the century. In their recording, Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams present the special charms of Igor Stravinsky's music in 'black and white': The piano arrangements reflect the sheer brilliance of his oeuvre in a concentrated form.

The music of the "waza" trumpet groups is considered the most important instrumental music of the Berta, who have been living in the border region of Sudan and Ethiopia since the 19th century. A full ensemble consists of ten to twelve monotone instruments between 50 and 180 centimeters long and the wood blocks, called "bali". The performances usually take place after sunset and are a major event for the inhabitants of a village. Before the pieces begin, a woman sings a song, which is then performed instrumentally. The recordings from 1982/3 are published for the first time on this CD.

This CD, which is a co-production with the Berlin Ethnological Museum, is a sample of the larger Mantle Hood collection of 164 reel-to-reel tapes representing more than 80 hours of music and improvisations of principal Javanese gamelan musicians in Yogya, Solo and Bandung in the 1950s. The recordings capture improvisation rooted in a truly Javanese traditional rote system of learning during a pivotal era before the widespread influence of western-modelled conservatory pedagogy. All pieces of this CD - recorded in 1957 and 1958 - are first releases.

In 1990 John Cage met sho player Mayumi Miyata, who requested he write a piece for the ancient Japanese mouth organ. Cage was deeply impressed by the sound of this instrument and in 1991 he wrote Two3 for sho and five water-filled conch shells - one of the so-called "Number Pieces" Cage worked on during the last years of his life. Although the sound of the piece's structure remains a mystery to rational thinking, it is directly accessible to sensory awareness - especially in the interpretation here played by accordion player Stefan Hussong and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei. Two3 for sho (a Japanese free reed musical instrument) and five water-filled conch shells (1991)

Am nhac t�i t� Nam b� (music of the talented) is an artistically ambitious variety of amateur music from southern Vietnam that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the founding of circles of especially talented musicians. It's repertoire, which represents an essential part of the cultural identity of the south, belongs to musical traditions of Vietnam that are increasingly at risk of being forgotten. Every piece is created anew at each performance. The musicians must give an individual form to a preexisting abstraction with few fixed points. In this context it is interesting to note that the conception of composition and creativity differs from that of classical European models. The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award!

Wolfgang Rihm is a real phenomenon: his overwhelming creative energy was already present during his childhood. He began composing when he was only 11 years old, long before his studies at the Hochschule fur Musik in Karlsruhe where he successfully passed the state examination in composition and music theory. The current album featuring string quartets and quintets presents works from the early and late stages of his compositional oeuvre. Rihm composed the String Quartet in G minor as a 14-year-old schoolboy. The youthful work displays a close proximity to early Beethoven who at that time stood very m uch under the influence of Haydn. Stylistically, this quartet also shows many similarities to the String Quartet 1968 written a few years later. The ''Epilog'' for string quintet which forges a link with the late works of Schubert was composed 45 years later. Despite its affinity with Schubert's Romanticism, the composition is clearly contemporary in style, not least due to its advanced playing techniques. ''Geste zu Vedova'' is a homage to the Venezuelan artist Emilio Vedova (1919-2006). This music is a percussive and block-like reaction to the kinesis and energy of the artist's creative approach to his works which made such a profound impression on Rihm.

The "vina" is one of the most important musical instruments used in Carnatic music, which today is still a living musical art and an essential cultural aspect of South India. Rajeswari Padmanabhan and Karaikudi Sambasivayer Subramanian are playing the "vina" in the 9th generation and the remarkable percussionist Tanjore Upendran accompanies them on the "mridangam". The recordings for "Sambho Mahadeva" (Great god Sambhu) were made in June 1975 in the studios of Sender Freies Berlin and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and include 7 first recordings of a total of 17 pieces. The extensive booklet contains - besides descriptions of the compositions and their respective musical styles - numerous examples of notations and many photographs.

Although Gyorgy Ligeti composed only three works for the organ, these pieces mark significant stages in the course of his compositional development. More importantly, they revolutionized the world of organ music and provided the initial spark for an entire wave of new music for the organ. Volumina completely dispenses with the parameters normally used to structure time in a musical work, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony. The only active structural parameter in this music is tone color. Harmonies unfolds as an unbroken chain of ten-note chords; only one note is changed from one chord to the next. Coulee is a chain of extremely fast notes that describe a slow harmonic progression. Also included are organist Dominik Sustek's organ transcription of Ligeti's eleven-movement piano cycle Musica ricercata as well as Sprachsignale - one of Sustek's own original compositions that was inspired by Ligeti's Articulation.

Available as a recording for the first time ever: the first of Mikis Theodorakis' 3 great ''lyrical tragedies'' (i.e. operas). The composer based his arrangement of the plot on Sophokles' version of the famous ancient tragedy – thus the 'theodorakian' Electra is the protagonist. She is the daughter of King Agamemmnon. After 10 years of battle for Troy the King has just returned to his palace in Mykene – only to be treacherously killed by his faithless wife Klytaimnestra and her lover Aigisthos. The murderous couple marries soon after the crime; however, their plans haven't considered Electra, who is craving revenge for her father ... ''Electra'' was composed between 1991 und 1994; its world premiere was held on May 2nd 1995 at the municipial theater of the former 'european capital of culture', Luxemburg. The 3-CD-recording was actualized under direction of Mikis Theodorakis himself with the St.Petersburg State Academic Orchestra & Choir.

Mikis Theodorakis is a composer whose life and work are more closely connected with the vicissitudes of twentieth-century European political history than any other musician alive today. In calling his new album East Of The Aegean, Theodorakis harks back to his own origins – he was born on the island of Chios in the eastern Aegean Sea. In Jens Naumilkat and Henning Schmiedt, Theodorakis has found two musicians who are ideally suited for a sensitive interpretation of this work.

With his operas "Electra", "Antigone" and "Medea" about three ancient Greek female figures – which he himself defined as ''lyrical tragedies'' – Theodorakis fulfilled an artistic promise made on August 6th, 1988 following the premiere of his "Zorba" ballet at the Verona Arena, namely to compose three pieces dedicated to the great Italian opera composers Verdi, Puccini and Bellini. ''For the last five years, I have lived with the texts of Euripides and Sophocles and worked on them. Five years which have become the best of my life, because the whole day long – mostly opposite the Acropolis, giving me the feeling that my house was on the foundations of the house of Sophocles, for we know he lived here where I live, in Athens – I could delve deep into the universal harmony I seek,'' he wrote after finishing his ambitious project.

The composer wrote the libretto for his opera "Antigone" himself. In it, he not only refers to Sophocles’ "Antigone", but also to other classical material such as "Oedipus At Colonus" by the same tragedian, Aeschylus’ "Seven Against Thebes" and "The Phonician Women" by Eurpipides. Short summary: In a pantomimic prologue, Oedipus’ son Eteocles seizes the throne and the royal insignia while his brother Polynices is out of the country. In the first scene, Oedipus leaves the city with his daughter Antigone, though not without criticizing the Thebans’ policy of self-betraying submission. In the second scene, Eteocles appears, in preparation for battle against his brother who has besieged Thebes. Jocasta, mother of both, desperately attempts to pacify the brothers and allay her worst fears. Her efforts fail, the brothers kill each other, and Jocasta commits suicide. In the next scene, Creon accedes to the throne whilst Antigone mourns deeply. Creon orders a state funeral for Eteocles. Polynices, however, is to be left unburied, exposed to animals and decomposition. Whosoever ignores this order risks the death penalty. When Antigone breaks the law and attempts to bury her brother, she is arrested and condemned according to Creon’s inhumane orders. Haemon, who is Creon’s son and engaged to Antigone, tries in vain to change his father’s mind. In the final scene, the couple sing to love "invincible in battle", united in death.

"The Metamorphoses of Dionysus", Mikis Theodorakis’s first opera, from 1985 — it was followed in 1990 by "Medea", in 1993 by "Elektra", in 1996 by "Antigone", and in 2001 by "Lysistrata" — is based on a free variation and an individual reading of Greek history. It is at once a parable of the excesses and suggestive effects of power, but also of the relationship between art and politics. It centers around the suicide of the civil servant and poet Kostas Karyotakis, whose poems Theodorakis set for the opera. The libretto, by Theodorakis himself, incorporates various texts by Karyotakis and two fragments from the poem "The Good People" by Kostas Varnalis (1884–1974). The opera begins and ends with the suicide of the poet Kostas Karyotakis, whose poems are presented as arias in the opera, running through the entire work. They are framed with texts by Theodorakis, producing a collage of verses of poetry and his own texts, of melodic and grotesque passages, that becomes the opera’s essential structuring feature: the contrast between the arias, the set “tragic” poems by Karyotakis, and the musical farces, the music to Theodorakis’s “sarcastic” texts.

When considering the reception and public perception of the music of Mikis Theodorakis, a strange contrast becomes evident: Those interested in music know many of the Greek composer’s songs, sometimes without even knowing that a certain melody was written by him, since a considerable number of his songs have been disseminated in many different variations and arrangements. Singers from many countries have often made Theodorakis’s songs their own using new texts, some of which bear no relationship to the content of the original but contributed to their fame nonetheless. The situation looks quite different, however, with Theodorakis’s symphonic works. Even those who are active in the world of music often do not know a single symphonic work by Theodorakis; some are not even aware that he has produced a considerable symphonic oeuvre. The two rhapsodies on the present CD are easy to understand, making them good examples of the musical facture that derives from Theodorakis’s basic aesthetic stance. The rhapsodies have many things in common, including that they emerged from earlier works with the same melodic material. This procedure is characteristic of Theodorakis as well as the continuation of a procedure that can be found throughout the history of music. Recall the common multiple uses of their own musical material in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach or Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, which the composer himself reworked into an alternative or second version for piano and orchestra as Op. 61a. The Rhapsody for Violoncello and Orchestra AST was written during the last six weeks of 1996 and was premiered in Munich in October 1998. The melodies are already found in the song cycle Ta lirikotera of 1994/95, which was released as a CD in 1996 under the title Poetica, and Ta prosopa tu iliu (The faces of the sun) of 1986. The nine movements bear the names of the nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, whom Hesiod called the tutelary goddesses of the arts and assigned them to particular spheres of the arts. Their more widely known Latin names and attributes are, in the order of the movements of the rhapsody: 1 Clio (history) 2 Erato (love poetry) 3 Thalia (comedy) 4 Calliope (epic poetry, philosophy and science) 5 Euterpe (flute playing and singing) 6 Urania (astronomy and didactic writing) 7 Terpsichore (dance and light entertainment) 8 Melpomene (tragedy and elegy) 9 Polyhymnia (sacred poetry, pantomime, and serious song) The Rhapsody for Guitar and Orchestra AST also has a precursor. In Athens in March 1967 Theodorakis wrote seven songs on texts from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romencero gitano, published in 1928. These eighteen gypsy romances helped Garcia Lorca achieve his fame in Spain. His decidedly anti-Franco, leftist stance, in which Theodorakis no doubt saw parallels to his own positions, and his homosexuality caused him to be so hated by the reactionary forces that he was shot by the Falangists on August 18 or 19, 1938, just a few days before the civil war began. Theodorakis’s seven songs after Lorca were premiered in Rome in 1970 by Maria Farantouri under the direction of the composer. A version for alto and guitar was recorded by Maria Farantouri and John Williams in 1971 and only recently by the baritone Peter Goedhart and the guitarist Wim Spruijt with Garcia Lorca’s original Spanish text. Theodorakis’s second version with six songs is entitled Concert for Guitar (Lorcaand was commissioned by the Komische Oper of East Berlin. The premiere, with Maria Farantouri (alto), Kostas Kotsiolis (guitar), and members of the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Orchester der Komischen Oper under Rolf Reuter was in September 1983. Finally, the composer arranged the work for guitar and symphony orchestra in the mid-1990s and premiered this version in Munich in October 1998. Theodorakis wanted to offer the guitarist an instrumental work well suited to the instrument and with the guitar dominating from start to finish. The melodic material is primarily assigned to the orchestra.