"wolfgang Paul"

The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. ‘Lichtzwang,’ the earliest of his concertos, draws on chorale-like sequences and piercing outbursts alike in its memorializing of the writer Paul Celan. ‘Dritte Musik’ begins almost imperceptibly before growing in intensity and eventually slipping beyond audibility. Defter and more subtle than the preceding pieces, ‘Gedicht des Malers’ (Poem of the Painter) was inspired by an imagined painting of the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye. As Rihm has written: “The soloist virtually embodies the painter’s brush as it moves over the canvas in sometimes faster and sometimes more deliberate ways.”

Wolfgang Rihm has had a long and varied career, which Hanssler's Rihm Edition aims to document by exploring the archives of German radio orchestras. This disc here focuses on the period when he first came to prominence in the European contemporary music scene. In the 1970s, Rihm was writing in an effusive expressionistic style, often going with the white-hot inspiration of any given moment instead of an elaborate preconceived form. The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg perform three works in this vein…..

Christopher Culver @ Amazon.com

Louis XVI was the last king of France (1774-92) in the line of Bourbon monarchs preceding the French Revolution of 1789. Louis and his queen consort, Marie-Antoinette, were guillotined in 1793 on charges of counter-revolution.
Following the abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, the Bourbons returned to power in France and restored the system of monarchy under Louis XVIII. During this process, they also introduced a number of highly symbolic cultural acts as a public representation of the Bourbon dynasty. In 1815, the new king Louis XVIII had the mortal remains of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette removed from the Cimetière de la Madeleine in a solemn ceremony, taken to Saint Denis and placed in separate graves in the crypt.

Wilhelm Kempff's cycle of the Beethoven Piano Concertos with Ferdinand Leitner and the Berlin Philharmonic is one of the great achievements of the golden age of stereo. Kempff had already recorded a magnificent mono cycle in the mid-1950s with the same orchestra under Paul Van Kempen (recently reissued on the box set "Wilhelm Kempff: The Complete 1950s Concerto Recordings" in DG's Original Masters series – see my review), but these new performances maintained his highest playing standards while offering the added dimension of stereo sound.