After having performed the first book of The Welltempered Clavier many times pianist Marcel Worms recorded this masterwork of J.S. Bach on two discs. In this series of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all possible keys Bach showed not only his perfect mastery of polyphonic writing but also his capacity to evoke a colorful spectrum of human emotions. After almost two hours it seems as if you went through a complete human lifecycle, full of exciting developments and spiritual transformations. Marcel Worms (1951) studied at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam with Hans Dercksen. He also had lessons with the Russian pianist Youri Egorov and with Alicia de Larrocha. After graduating in 1987, he specialized in the study of chamber music with Hans Broekman and 20th century piano music with Alexandre Hrisanide. Marcel Worms remains active as a chamber music player and soloist.

The pieces, recorded here, form merely the tip of a fascinating iceberg. When medievist/archivist Andr� Nieuwlaat initially shared his discoveries (much more Dowland lute music) with lutenist Mike Fentross two years ago, he realized immediately their importance. Every composer has his own musical signature. Trusting the experience that Mike Fentross has gained throughout his thirty-year career as a professional lute player, and as Professor of Lute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague for the last 15 years, he started to make a selection from all the pieces in the pertinent manuscripts. He let himself be guided by musical intuition, by the essence of the pieces, and by constantly asking himself the question: do I recognize Dowland's hand in this? The overall quality of the pieces to choose from was very impressive, and the answer to this question was: ' Yes, I recognize Dowland in these works, without a shadow of a doubt'. His work pays off with this fascinating release.

The Viola is surely not the most assertive instrument among the string family. It reaches neither the extreme height of the violin nor the rumbling depth and the strength of the cello and contrabass. It's role is more integrating than leading or polarizing; and in brilliance, maneuverability and sound projection the violin wins hands down. But if a composer wants to express his or her feelings with maximum intensity and depth, he chooses the viola remarkably often. The loss of a loved one, a repressive political system, persecution and war were more than once the motivation for the composing of music with the viola as the most important voice for expressing the underlying emotions. The dark, somewhat veiled sound of the instrument makes it particularly suited to such a role. On this album, the second of two, we have recorded Mendelssohn, Gal, Shostakovich and Hindemith. Compositions for viola and piano in which oppression, both personal and political, has played, directly or indirectly, an unmistakable role.

The viola is surely not the most assertive instrument among the string family. It reaches neither the extreme height of the violin nor the rumbling depth and the strength of the cello and contrabass. It's role is more integrating than leading or polarizing; and in brilliance, maneuverability and sound projection the violin wins hands down. But if a composer wants to express his feelings with maximum intensity and depth, he chooses the viola remarkably often. The loss of a loved one, a repressive political system, persecution and war were more than once the motivation for the composing of music with the viola as the most important voice for expressing the underlying emotions. The dark, somewhat veiled sound of the instrument makes it particularly suited to such a role. The Polish-Russian Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg fled during the Nazi invasion. Dick Kattenburg was picked up in 1944 during a razzia and he died, only 24 years old, in Auschwitz. Max Vredenburg, being a Jewish artist, fled from the Nazis in 1941 to Indonesia but was there interned in a camp. Shostakovich's Sonata for viola and piano was his last composition. Notwithstanding that the pressures of the Soviet regime on the composer did not lead to his banishment or even his liquidation, the last stages of Shostakovich's life were far from uncomplicated. In all of these works, we see the viola utilized as the outlet of their suffering.

Laula! is the third album by Mike Fentross and Maarten Ornstein; following their debut duo album, Oblivion Soave and having worked with Rima Khcheich on the second album Ombre de Mon Amant, they are once again collaborating with an extraordinary singer - the Estonian mezzo-soprano Kadri Tegelmann. She is not only a superb interpreter of the Baroque music, as featured here, but she also introduced Maarten and Mike to the deep and rich tradition of Baltic vocal music with its many folksongs, hymns and chants. Choosing the repertoire for this new album, they learned that many -if not most- Estonian folksongs are about events from the cycle of life, such as birth, marriage, lullabies, leaving and returning home, and death. These universal themes have been used in art for centuries all over the world, and they are the basis for the music on this album too. For each of the Estonian folksongs featured here they have found an equivalent from the Baroque era, and where possible paired the songs. Thus Girolamo Kapsperger’s beautiful lullaby Filglio Dormi is paired with Lauliku lapsepõli, an old Estonian song about childhood memories. Elsewhere Une Sulased is carefully woven into Tarquinio Merula’s monumental Canzonetta spirituale Sopra alla nanna. The lyrics of both songs are about the darker side of sleep, dreams, and nightmares. Mike and Maarten are particularly fond of the arrangement for Kurb Laulik, essentially a song about tears and crying so delicately sung by Kadri. In the background Mike and Maarten play Flow my tears by John Dowland, both as an accompaniment to Kadri and as a distant memory to Oblivion Soave, their first album on Zefir Records.

The music in this programme, featuring two vocal top soloists, Claron McFadden and Nora Fischer, reigns from the turn of the 16th to the 17th century, the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque era, a musically interesting and exciting time! Claudio Monteverdi is without any doubt the biggest Stella Lucente (shining star) of this album. He has always been considered the great master of this period and the title of the album could have been Monteverdi and his time. The highest goal is to touch the listener’s soul. This leads, among other things, to an enormous amount of publications with compositions for solo voice, two sopranos and basso continuo and, subsequently, the birth of the opera. Many musicians work in the courts of the great city-states (such as Ferrara, Florence, Mantua, Venice) and the papal residence in Rome. The Duke of Ferrara employs three sopranos under the name Concerto delle Donne. They are the pride of the court and perform in special concerts attended only by high-ranking courtiers and important guests. Composers are inspired by them, Luzzaschi in particular, who worked as the musical director at the same court. Not only were they highly skilled singers, they were also adept at playing various instruments, some of which you can hear on this album; the harp, viola da gamba and guitar.

The Goldberg Variations consist of an Aria followed by thirty variations and the reprise of the Aria at the end. Bach wrote the work for a harpsichord with two manuals, a given with which a pianist-who has only the one keyboard at his disposal-is painfully confronted when two voices cross each other: his hands have to fight each other for the available space. Bach composed the variations around 1741, and chose an earlier Aria from the Klavierb�chlein f�r Anna Magdalena Bach for his theme. The Goldberg Variations were published in 1742. Bach couldn't have guessed that his Goldberg Variations would come to be considered one of the pillars of Western classical music. Yet with hindsight it's easy to understand the composition's undisputed place in the classical music tradition and repertoire. No composer before Bach had ever written so many variations on a single theme, and never so freely and richly filled with fantasy. Structure and feeling, form and content, reason and emotion are all beautifully in balance. Even with the enormous diversity in the variations, the relationship to the theme is always audible. The range and scale of the required keyboard techniques is enormous. A number of these techniques are akin to those of contemporaries, but others point far into the future. The Goldberg Variations form in this way a comprehensive keyboard tutorial, referring for example to the techniques of Domenico Scarlatti, a contemporary, but also leading the way to, among others, Chopin (Var. 26) and Liszt (Var. 29). Metamorphosis, one of Glass's best-known compositions for solo piano, is based on his music from a theatrical setting of Kafka's famous story "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") (1915), in which the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself changed into a giant beetle. There is no lack of high-flown interpretations of Glass's work. Metamorphosis is often analyzed, sometimes even on non-musical grounds. One relatively sober analysis explains the work as the life-cycle of an organism: from the seed state (I) to the stage of germination (II), and, after the growth period (III) and the time of flowering (IV), on toward final, unavoidable death (V). One of the reasons for the popularity of the music of Glass and his fellow minimalists is it's strongly tonal character, which greatly increases it's accessibility. Metamorphosis is written in E minor, a key closely related to G major, the key with which E minor shares two of the three notes of it's primary triad-and which is also the key of the Goldberg Variations. During his study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1963-1965), Glass worked intensively with counterpoint and especially with the music of Bach. His love and admiration for Bach's work has always stayed with him: in 2008 he wrote, at 71, his Songs and Poems for cello solo, a work which, with it's Baroque character, could almost pass for a long-lost Bach Suite. This same combination of Baroque and contemporary idioms is shown in an even more recent work, Glass's Partita for solo violin (2011), which, with it's Prelude, Chaconne, and two dances clearly alludes to the violin partitas of Bach. The premiere of this Partita by the violinist Tim Fain took place on May 14, 2011, in the same hall where the CD that you now hold in your hands was recorded: the Zeeuwse Concertzaal in Middelburg, the capital of the Dutch province of Zeeland. The minimalism of Glass and his colleagues was hailed as a totally new musical idiom. But striving to reach a desired result with maximum expression while using a minimum of material is as old as art itself. Bach's work also shows the striving for this ideal. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that we could even consider his famous Prelude in C major, the opening of the Well-Tempered Clavier, to be "minimal music avant la lettre."

Fock: Songs & Sketches

This recording is a road trip through the last 50 years of minimalist and ambient piano music. From the early sound tapestries of minimalists Philip Glass and John Adams, via David Lang and Arvo Part who combine repetition with melody and harmonic colors, to the atmospheric and quiet worlds of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Max Richter and Nils Frahm, what captivates the listener on these recordings is a sense of ambience, an evocation of space. Feico Deutekom breathes life and shape into these works, many of which have a delicately melancholy tone. He is able to convey both the rhythmic complexity and the panoramic quality of this music, where silence and the spaces lingering between the notes are often as important as the notes themselves. This release includes the world premiere recording of Philip Glass's Mishima Sonata, an arrangement that Feico Deutekom made with permission of the composer of three movements from the movie soundtrack of Mishima, originally composed for strings.

From the Bottom of My Heart

Oblivion Soave

TANGOS FOR PIANO

In more than thirty concert halls from Amsterdam to Strasbourg: pianist Marcel Worms, violinist Ursula Schoch and author Jan Brokken have presented their lecture-concert Baltic Souls, inspired by Baltische zielen, lotgevallen in Estland, Letland en Litouwen (Baltic Souls, fifteen families in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.). In that book, Jan Brokken describes the history of the three Baltic countries by chronicling fifteen families who flourished within the last 150 years. Families including such remarkable talents as the Estonian composer Arvo P�rt, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, father and son Eisenstein from Riga, writer Romain Gary from Vilnius, Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, painter Mark Rothko from Daugavpils, the philosopher Hannah Arendt from K�nigsberg, the Lithuanian composer Jurgis Gai�auskas, but also far less well-known or forgotten families like that of the bookseller J�nis Roze in Riga or the barons Von Wrangel from Estonia. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are truly "music lands". They have long singing and choir traditions. In Riga, Vilnius and Tartu, enormous choir festivals are held. Everyone seems to sing in the Baltic countries, whether it be traditional, classical or popular music. But it is no coincidence that also many famous violinists and cellists like Jascha Heifetz, Gidon Kremer, Philippe Hirschhorn and Mischa Maisky come from Riga, Tallinn or Vilnius, as well as great conductors like Neeme J�rvi and Mariss Jansons. Considering the size of the lands and their modest populations, it is almost unbelievable how many internationally known composers Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have produced. The Baltic lands were for many centuries occupied or ruled by foreign powers. Music was for a long time the only permissible form of national expression for the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Only in their music could they be themselves.

Three organs from Zeeland were the point of departure for a voyage of discovery towards fitting repertoire for these instruments. Leen de Broekert presents these three entirely different organs with adventurous music that is not always an obvious choice. What they all have in common is the fact that they belong to the lesser known compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). The programme starts in Middelburg with a festive prelude by the composer Thomas Babou from Liege (1656-1739), in which trumpet and cornet put in a befitting appearance. In 1738 Johann Kaspar Ferdinand Fischer (?-1746), a German contemporary of Babou, composed a collection of suites for harpsichord named after the nine muses and entitled: Musicalischer Parnassus. The suite Euterpe represents the muse of flute music. The Fugue in D minor, BWV 539, better known among organ players as the "Fugue for Violin ", is an 18th century transcription of unknown origin of Bach's Fugue in G minor from the Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001, a solo for violin. The Fugue is combined with the Adagio that precedes the fugue in the aforesaid sonata. This Adagio (transcription Leen de Broekert) is a worthier companion in comparison to the rather insignificant Prelude to which the Fugue has been linked in several manuscripts. Leen de Broekert's arrangement of one of Mozart's sonatas for piano agrees with the 18th century musical usage in which the distinction between harpsichord, fortepiano and organ was not all that strict. The Baarland organ resonates in music by the composers Charles -Joseph van Helmont from the south of Holland (1715 -1790) and Dieudonn� Raick (1703-1764) and in a partita by one of Bach's contemporaries, Gottfried Heinrich St�lzel (1690-1749). At the age of eighteen Charles-Joseph van Helmont succeeds Josse Boutmy (1697-1779) as the organ-player of the Sint Goedele church in Brussels. In 1737 he becomes the bandmaster of the Kapelle church in Brussels but four years later he returns to Sint-Goedele and for a period of 36 years he offers musical training to choir singers, organises musical performances in church and composes sacred music for church services. Apart from being a priest, theologian and lawyer, Dieudonn� Raick was also a famous organ-player and in this capacity he was associated with the Antwerp cathedral, the Sint-Pieter in Leuven and the Sint-Baafs church in Gent. A number of inviting sonatas and suites for harpsichord by Raick have been preserved. Johann Sebastian Bach was well familiar with Gottfried Heinrich St�lzel's music and held him in high esteem as a composer. He included his Partita in g-minor in the little music-book which he himself had put together for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. The partita ends with a minuet of his own composing. Bach's and Teleman's chamber music is a perfect match for the organ at Gapinge, an organ that used to be private property. The looks of this organ are remarkable due to the impressive trophys of instruments adorning it's panels. They symbolize so to speak the art of the muse to which Leen de Broekert too has contributed in a meaningful manner.

Wiek (Rotor) is a is a dance/theater collaboration between director Boukje Schweigman and the Dutch composer Douwe Eisenga. The score is written for saxophone quartet, piano and sampled percussion. All saxes are played by Erik-Jan de With (Python Saxophone Quartet). The music is, even without the theatrical elements, a beautiful listening-experience. According to the press the DNA of Eisenga's work bears a likeness to Philip Glass and the Flemish composer Wim Mertens: 'A bridge between pop music and minimal music'. This quote is certainly true for Music for Wiek, with hypnotizing patterns, thundering drums, pounding saxes and lyrical piano's. Press Quotes: "A magnificent ode to the cyclic movement' "Fascinating, gradually whipping music" ? "Splendid, repeating music'