Die Calcaneusfraktur

Electric guitars, swinging rhythms, studded jeans and petticoats - rock'n'roll has not only completely changed the entire music world, it was also then and still is today a musical style and attitude to life in equal measure. With "Die Hit-Giganten - Best Of Rock'n'Roll", the well-known Sat-1 sampler therefore now dedicates itself to the legends of this genre, which found its origin in the America of the 1950s. They swing, they rock and "The Hit Giants - Best Of Rock'n'Roll" has them all: the stars and legends of Rock'n'Roll. This collection belongs in every well-assorted CD cabinet!

Hear back to the future: 25 years of Winter & Winter'. In 1736 Janitsch revolutionized the music world with his weekly Friday academies (Freitagsakademien); This was the beginning of the upheaval from the courtly to the bourgeois concert scene. Die Freitagsakademie is now presenting its favorite works from Bach to Beethoven.

Born in the vicinity of Cologne, only two years after and some sixty km distant from Beethoven, Johann Wilhelm Wilms was once a musical force to be reckoned with. In Amsterdam, where he lived from the age of 19, his music was actually performed more frequently than Beethoven’s at one period, and his orchestral works were played in such musical centres as Leipzig. Besides chamber music and solo sonatas, Wilms composed several symphonies and concertos, among them piano concertos for his own use.

Of all Schubert's songs, the part songs for male voices are probably the hardest for contemporary audiences to take seriously. The sweetness of the harmonies recalls the saccharine harmonies of barbershop quartets, the emotions of the lyrics recall the sentimentality of greeting cards, and the sheer ubiquity of drinking songs recalls the inebriated bowling banquets of the Beneficent Order of Elks. But while Schubert's part songs for male voices are in many ways the precursors of all these smarmy things, they are themselves quite lovely.

Although some of the other volumes in the Singphoniker's collection of Schubert's complete part-songs for male voices have greater masterpieces – Vol. 1's Nachthelle (D. 892) and Vol. 5's Gesang der Geister über den Wasser (D. 714) – Vol. 3 has the highest number of good songs and the lowest number of composition exercises, which may make it the most easily appealing volume. Starting with the glorious Wein und Liebe (D. 901) and ending with the exquisite Grab und Mond (D. 893), there are hardly any songs in this collection that are not first-rate Schubert.

This disc, Vol. 4 four of Singphoniker's five-volume collection of the complete part-songs for male voices, may be the weakest in the series. All the others have one or more indisputable masterpieces on them. Even Vol. 1, with its half-dozen drinking songs, and Vol. 2, with its half-dozen composition exercises, still have a few masterpieces. But while Vol. 4 has no composition exercises and few drinking songs, it has the lowest number of masterpieces and the highest number of nearly unknown Schubert songs. But there are still Schubert songs and so great a composer of songs was Schubert that even his least-known songs are often still wonderful.