Emilio Jannings

Lovers of the Spanish Baroque may be surprised to see the subtitle "17th-century violin music in Spain" here, inasmuch as non-keyboard instrumental chamber music following Italian models has never surfaced before. Indeed, the booklet transmits statements by writers of the time bemoaning the lack of such violin music. What's happening here is that Spanish historical-instrument group La Real Cámara and its director-violinist Emilio Moreno have hypothesized that Spanish organ music might have been arranged for other instruments in the same way Italian music certainly was; Girolamo Frescobaldi specifically attested to this.

Although Kairos’s rate of production has decreased in the past few years, the Viennese label still regularly releases discs of music by contemporary Austrian composers. This CD of two recent orchestral works by Friedrich Cerha, celebrating the composer’s 90th birthday, is a welcome addition to Kairos’s four previous albums of his music. While Cerha’s recent chamber music adheres to classical forms, his orchestral music from the same period eschews them, revisiting instead the principles laid out in his sound-mass works from the late 1950s such as Spiegel.