11.ax

Ax Genrich is a German guitarist who went all experimental after getting involved in the primordial Krautrock scene, briefly with Agitation Free after which he then joined the legendary Guru Guru and stayed with them 1970-1974.
This is basically reissue of his first album (1975 - "Highdelberg") mixed with two unreleased Guru Guru tracks: live "Electric Junk" from 1971 and "Oxymoron" recorded for Beat Club TV show and two tracks from his new solo albums: "Blow Up" from 1994 album "Psychedelic Guitar" and "Come Back" from his 1995 album "Wave Cut". Bonus tracks are cool and "Highdelberg" is a good albums with Mani the usual Guru Guru friends helping out (Kraan, Harmonia etc). It has a very rustic relaxed feel to it, with some psychedelic-folk like tunes mixed with acid out-there, and ambient tracks.

Ax Genrich is a master guitarist from Berlin, Germany. He played with The Lords, Agitation Free, Guru Guru, RIF and many others and belongs without any doubt to one of the key persons of Krautrock music within the last 40 years. 1973 he became the best guitarist of Germany. "Highdelberg" is Genrich's first solo venture originally from 1975. Along for the ride are Mani Neumeller from Guru Guru, Jen Fride (Kraan), Peter Wollbrandt (Kraan), Helmut Hattler (Kraan), Deiter Morbius and Achim Roedelius (Harmonia, Cluster).

Antonin Dvorák's Piano Quartet No. 2 is one of the greatest chamber works of the 19th century (as are many of Dvorák's chamber compositions). Written in 1889 at the request of his publisher Simrock, it is a big, bold work filled with the Czech master's trademark melodic fecundity, harmonic richness, and rhythmic vitality. The first movement is a soaring, outdoor allegro with an assertively optimistic main theme accented by Czech contours and Dvorák's love of mixing major and minor modes. The Lento movement's wistful main theme is played with a perfect mixture of passion and poise by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The music alternates between passages of drama and delicacy in this, one of Dvorák's finest slow movements in any medium. The Scherzo's stately waltz is contrasted by a lively, up-tempo Czech country dance. The finale is a high-stepping, high-spirited allegro with a strong rhythmic pulse that relaxes for the beautifully lyrical second subject.

Though the name "Schoenberg" makes some people cringe, the Schoenberg piano concerto is a wonderful and highly expressive work. Though composed in the 12-tone style, it contains the same degree of lyricism and rhythmic drive that other, non-12-tone pieces have. Ax gives this concerto what it deserves- a highly sensitive performance that shows the concerto is a true piece of music rather than the product of a mechanical compositional process.

The prize here is the Rachmaninoff cello sonata, a warm, hyper-Romantic musical tapestry that gives both the pianist and cellist a major workout. Ma is a superb chamber-music player, as is Ax. Both offer the kind of artistic give-and-take that a great performance of this music requires, while neither weighs the music down with excessive indulgence. The Prokofiev, a very different sort of musical beast, is a much lighter work, but it's done no less well. This is one of Ma's best chamber-music discs.

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924) inhabits a "sound world" uniquely his own: moody, harmonically complex, sometimes neurotically so, melodically elusive. Less readily accessible than either of his French contemporaries, Debussy and Ravel, Faure's chamber music, nonetheless, is infinitely rewarding and certainly should be more widely recorded and available.
This remarkably rich offering of Faure's only two piano quartets (in C Minor, Op. 15 and G Minor, Op. 45) will, no doubt, go a long way in re-energizing interest in this coupling of the composer's most "popular" ensemble works.

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma's new album "Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5" erases the border between orchestral and chamber music, presenting two of Beethoven's iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of Beethoven's orchestral works. Beethoven for Three transports listeners to the turn of the nineteenth century, when audiences would have been more familiar with the composer’s music in arrangements for piano trio, string quartet, or piano four hands than for full orchestra. Here, Ax, Kavakos, and Ma seek out the most essential elements of Beethoven's musical language, pairing his second symphony, arranged for trio by Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries, with his fifth — among the most recognizable pieces in western classical music — in a newly-commissioned arrangement by Colin Matthews.

"Hope Amid Tears," the new album by Yo-Yo Ma together with his friend and pianist Emanuel Ax, presents Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano in the order in which they were composed, tracing an important arc in Beethoven’s development and approach as a composer. Joining them are Beethoven’s three sets of variations for cello and piano.

World-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime collaborator, pianist Emanuel Ax, are joined by violinist Leonidas Kavakos in their first recording together of all three of the piano trios of Johannes Brahms. Ma and Ax have built together a distinguished catalogue of Brahms recordings, but this is their first recording of the Piano Trios and their first collaboration with Kavakos.