Booklister August

At around autumn 1809, the management of Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Theatre commissions Beethoven to compose the incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont, which premiered in Mainz in 1789. The plot of this tragedy is very much in keeping with the patriotic trend: it is set in Brussels, which is threatened by Spanish troops, and focuses on resistance against oppression and foreign rule. The hero, Egmont, places too much trust in the common sense and discretion of those in power – and this is his tragic mistake. In good faith, he allows himself to be lured into a deadly trap by the sinister Duke Alba, to whom he even explains his ideals of freedom and just rule. His lover Klärchen fails to persuade the cowardly citizens of Brussels to take violent action to free him, and, in her desperation, she commits suicide. What remains is the vision of a future freedom and victory – one that appears to Egmont in the form of Klärchen as he awaits execution in his dungeon.

Among all the recordings of Handel's Water Music, this is for me the most uplifting. Yes, it is on modern instruments. Yes, it was recorded in 1962, but if you can get hold of this on CD you'll find the sound as wonderful or better then any modern recording. August Wenzinger and his orchestra seem to me to have the measure of Handel's music completely. Tempos are just right and you can almost feel the fun these people are having with it.

Jazz on life and death! In There Is No Future, Swedish jazz singer Sara Aldén makes her album debut with self-written music and arranged jazz standards with a focus on grand crescendos and vulnerable intimacy. She creates jazz as if her life depended on it where the question of the end of everything is allowed to exist, the small endings and the big ones. Sara Aldén and her trio present a musical sinkhole in the ongoing history of jazz, where doom-filled and intimate compositions alternate with dizzying arpeggios and dystopian and lyrical sound worlds.

The Music for the Royal Fireworks (HWV 351) is a suite in D major for wind instruments composed by George Frideric Handel in 1749 under contract of George II of Great Britain for the fireworks in London's Green Park on 27 April 1749. The music celebrates the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in 1748. The work was very popular when first performed and following Handel's death. Mozart called the work a "spectacle of English pride and joy".

Central Pennsylvania’s finest, August Burns Red, are back to blow your mind with Guardians, their epic ninth full-length. The album drops on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 via Fearless Records.

August Winding was the son of a musical clergyman whose great interest was in collecting folk-songs. He was his son's first music teacher. Later, he studied in Hamburg, Vienna and Paris where he became acquainted with Chopin and Kalkbrenner. The composer Carl Reinecke, who was court composer in Copenhagen in 1846-48, also taught Winding. He was very close to Niels W. Gade and also studied with him. He established himself as a formidable pianist especially in the works of Mozart and Beethoven. He taught at the Conservatory in Copenhagen and through his marriage to Clara, the daughter of J.P.E. Hartmann, he became a member of this musical family. In fact, the other composer on this CD, Emil Hartmann was his brother-in-law.