Sarah Saviet and Joseph Houston formed their duo in 2019 through a mutual devotion to an intimate, powerful, and transcendental sound language created by the violin and piano. In this album, the Saviet/Houston Duo trace a path through a shifting landscape of melodic contour, with duos by Michael Finnissy, Enno Poppe/Rebecca Saunders, Lawrence Dunn, Iannis Xenakis, and their own collaborative composition. Each work reflects in different ways the intricate contradictions and the powerful complexity of contemporary life.

Masako Ohta chooses a haiku by Matsuo Basho as the motto for her musical garden: For a while moonlit night over flowers. Ohta opens with "In a landscape" by John Cage and leads over to "Clair de lune" by Claude Debussy with the Intermezzo, N� 2, A major by Johannes Brahms. Pattern B "Yabe" from Patterns of Plants by Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda is just as much a part of her journey into the infinite nature of sounds as Fumio Yasuda's "Rain Forrest" and "Souvenir from Japan, Sakura for Piano" by Toshio Hosokawa. Masako Ohta combines classical music from Schubert, Mozart, Chopin and Zimmermann with contemporary Japanese sounds to create a poetic work of fine and sensitive timbres. With "My Music Garten", Masako Ohta releases her third piano solo album on Winter & Winter. For the recordings, Ohta retreated to a solitary forest house in the Bavarian Forest, far away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, to be inspired by silence and nature. This album is the result of her intensive study of poetry, sound and music from her native Japan and her adopted home in the West. Masako Ohta lives in Munich and performs all over the world, often in collaboration with actors, dancers, poets and visual artists.

Chromatics is a word derived from the Greek noun meaning color. During the Renaissance, new music was composed in the Western world, opening up a palette of (timbral) colors for the first time. Before the Renaissance, music (in Gregorian chant) existed only to convey the word, not to make an appearance itself; this changed completely after the 15th century. Music, like painting, exploded into new forms and colors, and the era of the modern age was ushered in. Strange harmonies, mysterious voices - tones of passion and desire, of terror and fear, of the confusion of the sublime or of divine apparition... This is the world of musical colors that opened up in the age of the Chromatic Renaissance, giving rise to a music that is daring, adventurous and timelessly modern.

Classical Music

Some composers identify early on with a particular genre. A quick glance at a list of works by the Dane Hans Abrahamsen seems to indicate a very different attitude. The profusion of titles suggests a mind that picks up a form, engages with it for the duration of the work itself, and then moves on to something fresh. There has been one significant exception however- the string quartet. Abrahamsen's four quartets span almost the whole of his composing career: Quartet No. 1 was composed in 1973, when Abrahamsen was in his early twenties; Quartet No. 4 appeared in 2012, as he entered his sixties. Not only so, but the quartets also draw a vital thread across the chasm at the heart of his life's work. This new release presents the aforementioned works as well as the two quartets that appeared between them, brilliantly performed by the Arditti String Quartet.

Wind instruments revolutionized music in the 17th century. At the court of Louis XIV, Jean de Hotteterre invented the oboe, the instrument that began an incomparable triumphal procession through the world of music. And other inventive instrument makers helped the horns to develop completely new possibilities. Clever Baroque composers such as Vivaldi, Zelenka, Handel, Fasch and Telemann enthusiastically embraced these tonal innovations. Unfortunately, these stunning works are rarely heard. The wonderful arias by Händel are available here in a first recording. Under the direction of the oboists Katharina Suske, Die Freitagsakademie is one of the most unusual baroque ensembles. It is unusual because new instrumentations and thus new sound colors are dared again and again. For "Baroque Wind" two oboes, a bassoon, two horns and a continuo group create an orchestral experience. Unusual because interpretations, dynamics and tempi are daring, which seem like a dance on a tightrope without a net. (The album "Wiener Klassik" has been awarded the Diapason d'Or de l'Année in France.) Unusual because there is no conductor, but the cooperation and listening of soloists who have one thing on their minds: There is no early music!

James Weeks writes: "EXAUDI, long-established among the UK's leading vocal consorts, presents fresh readings of 19 of Gesualdo's madrigals from Books V and VI, combining rigorous stylistic understanding and tonal beauty with an overriding focus on the music's extreme expressive vision. The late madrigals of Gesualdo exert a strange and enduring fascination on the modern musical imagination. Listening today to these extraordinary messages of anguish and ecstasy, we are drawn back to his flame like lovers who can't let go, into the warp of chromatic harmony, the emotional hyper-intensity and mysterious otherness of this most tantalising early Baroque figure."

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Mauricio Kagel directs a surreal story about the return of Beethoven. We are in the year 1970 and Beethoven returns to see his hometown and his house in the year of his 200th birthday. A wondrous 35mm B&W film tells of Beethoven's experiences in the 20th century.

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When Anton Diabelli, wishing to promote himself as a publisher, commissioned many of the best-known composers of his time to write a variation on a theme composed by himself in 1819 in order to publish a score with all of them, he couldn't possibly imagine that the greatest of them all, Ludwig van Beethoven, was going to write not one, but thirty-three variations, probably encouraged by his wish to keep his name apart from his minor colleagues or, who knows, by his eagerness to undertake an in-depth search of the possibilities of a theme that, initially, he scornfully mocked for it's 'Schusterfleck' ('cobbler's patch'). In the end, in his Diabelli Variations Beethoven turned the banal (that tiny waltzlet serving as the starting point) into transcendent. From hardly nothing he built a whole which overwhelms us with it's greatness. It's a work full of paradoxes, winks, double meanings, but it's also a contested work, not easily understandable, complex and experimental. Planned as a building with superimposed layers, seemingly heterogeneous and without an apparent connecting thread, it looks the perfect testing ground for a creative artist - like Uri Caine. In his hands you forget the quasi-monotonal character of the piece, and we remain drawn and surprised by it's continuous feinting.

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EINE NACHT IM ZOO

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The Munich-based French pianist Jean-Pierre Collot presents the piano works of Jean Barraqué, one of the most important composers of Serialism. This is a journey of discovery through Jean Barraqué's piano works, deeper and deeper through quasi-archaeological layers that bring us closer to the arcana of creation. The Sonate pour piano (1950/1952), masterpiece and experiment at the same time, here recorded for the first time in the definitive recast version, demands of us that we break all boundaries, as far as our conception of tempo, dynamics or agogic is concerned, that we create and explore new imaginary spaces. The deeper we go back in time, the more mysterious and gloomy the early pieces (1947-1949). All of these works are premiere recordings. The prelude to the third act of Tristan [Richard Wagner] — like a ghostly and fragile motto [of the young Barraqué] — throws on the whole program its pale, nebulous light. The Munich-based French pianist Jean-Pierre Collot presents the piano works of Jean Barraqué, one of the most important composers of Serialism.

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This film by Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy features music by John Zorn. In the years 1938041 nearly 20,000 European Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai, China, where most would spend almost a decade in exile.

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