2025 Bis

Following his recordings dedicated to Beethoven’s piano concertos (BIS-2281) and Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Études (BIS-2681), the gold medal winner at the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2009, Haochen Zhang, now brings these two composers together on this new recording with two summits of 19th-century piano literature: Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and Liszt’s Sonata in B minor.

The fifteen string quartets composed by Shostakovich established him as one of the masters of this genre. These works show him at his most concentrated & most intimate. Although each is quite different in form and structure, every bar of them reveals some aspect of the composer’s character, from wild humour to black despair, with an all-pervasive nervous tension. Without texts, descriptive titles or any overt public agenda, they can be heard as revelations of the composer’s musicianship in its most essential form. For its first release on BIS Records, the Jerusalem Quartet presents three of Shostakovich’s quartets. Although the Second String Quartet was composed in 1944, its character is elusive and it makes no direct reference to the war. Yet this is a substantive work, dark, powerful and at times dissonant. The Seventh Quartet, consisting of three short mvts played without interruption, is an enigmatic and deeply personal work dedicated to the memory of the composer’s wife. For all its questioning and complex inner references, the Tenth Quartet is among the most immediately appealing of his later works. By this stage in his life, Shostakovich’s music tended to speak in a quieter voice and to a more intimate audience.

With this recording, volume 42 of the complete music for solo keyboard by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Miklós Spányi continues his exploration of transcriptions of concertos originally written for keyboard and orchestra, to which he adds some movements from early versions of sonatas (the standard versions of which appear on earlier volumes in this series). Four of the six concertos from the Wq 43 collection are featured here (the remaining two appear on the previous volume, BIS-2397). When Bach published this set of six concertos for keyboard and orchestra in 1772, he also prepared a version for solo keyboard intended for moderately advanced amateurs who could then play them at home, without orchestra, thus opening up a much larger market. A smart move by the shrewd businessman that Bach was. About his decision to record these works on a clavichord rather than a tangent piano as previously, Spányi says that it allows ‘nearly infinite possibilities for fine dynamic shadings’ and that ‘the required dynamic contrasts can be emphasized even better than on other keyboard instruments of the period’. Spányi adds that this release is a tribute to the clavichord, and especially to his own instrument, built by Joris Potvlieghe.

The three works on this recording bear witness to the changes that took place at the dawn of musical modernism. The reappraisal and reinterpretation of traditional musical genres and innovations led to new ways of organising and addressing the harmonic, melodic, timbral and rhythmic elements of music. Polish composer Karol Szymanowski developed a highly personal musical language that prioritises tone colour, an approach that is perfectly suited to the triptych Mythes, inspired by legends from ancient Greece. Here he developed a new mode of expression, a fusion of the violin and the piano into a single entity with the use of extended violin techniques.

Recorded in August 2022 at concerts given in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie by the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg under Kent Nagano, this version of Johannes Brahms’s celebrated choral masterpiece will come as a surprise to many. The German Requiem is heard not in its usual seven movement version, but rather as it was first performed in Bremen Cathedral on 10th April 1868 (Good Friday) under Brahms’s direction, without the fifth movement for soprano and choir that was completed later that year. On the other hand, there are numerous interludes, instrumental and vocal, secular and sacred, by Bach, Tartini, Schumann and Handel – including pieces that were then regarded as essential parts of a Good Friday concert. Such a programme might seem unusual today, but these musical additions shed new light on Brahms’s work, which in this version manifests itself as what Umberto Eco might have described as an ‘open work’. Presenting the work in the form heard at the Bremen premiere is more than just a reconstruction: it enriches our understanding of this unique music.

Could Alain Planès let the centenary of Satie’s death go by without paying tribute to this composer whom he admires above all others? On a 1928 Pleyel, he offers us a panoramic survey of this often droll, caustic music, which stubbornly resists classification. Marc Mauillon (in the songs) and François Pinel (in the pieces for piano four hands) accompany him in his exploration of the finest compositions of the ‘Maître d’Arcueil’. An exceptional CD, with a booklet ‘personally’ illustrated by both the composer and the performer themselves.

One of the foremost vocal chamber ensembles active today, New York Polyphony is renowned for its innovative programming ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary commissions.

Mit „Hair“ haben Phillip Boa And The Voodooclub im Januar 1989 eines der wohl wichtigsten deutschen Indie Rock-Alben der ausgehenden 80er/ beginnenden 90er Jahre veröffentlicht. Ein Paradebeispiel an stilistischer Experimentierfreude, versponnener Erzählkunst und kreativer Eigensinnigkeit, mit dem Boa seinen Status als vehementer Antipopstar untermauerte.Im April erscheint der Longplay-Meilenstein als remasterte und erweiterte Anniversary-Edition, die neben dem Original-Album weitere Tonträger mit brandneuen Songs, einen bisher noch unveröffentlichten Konzertmitschnitt sowie exklusive Raritäten, Bonustracks und Session-Outtakes enthält!