Freitagsakademie

The early music ensemble “Die Freitagsakademie” is still committed to its namesake, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, and makes music for his immensely rich oeuvre.

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.

The premiere of Mozarts Quintet for piano and winds must have been a shock and at the same time a delight for the audience of the 18th century. The immense richness of colors and sounds were entirely unusual. Mozart had been searching for new challenges and was rewarded. After the premier on April 1st, 1784 Mozart has written to his father: ""I myself consider it to be the best thing I have written in my life."" Mozart celebrated one of the greatest triumphs of his career. For the first time the near-orchestral rich sonorities, the masterful harmony and the continuing and vigorous dialogue of the oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon in relation to the piano was heard. Only thirteen years later Beethoven used the same unusual combination of instruments. His quintet for piano and winds was also premiered in Vienna on April 6, 1797. Both artists chose to compose for an entire unique and by that date unknown instrumentation and each had his own musical approach.

The early music ensemble “Die Freitagsakademie” is still committed to its namesake, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, and makes music for his immensely rich oeuvre. The chamber music gems presented here (two of them as first recordings) bear impressive witness to Janitsch’s equally elegant and imaginative compositional art. They combine the melodic sweetness of the “galant” style popular around the middle of the 18th century with contrapuntal finesse and expressive harmony.

Die Freitagsakademie presents works of the often underestimated composer of the baroque period in memory of Café Zimmermann in Leipzig, where Telemann’s Collegium Museum has written music history.

The Bern Friday Academy around oboist Katharina Suske has taken on several recent reconstructions of Bach concertos with verve and esprit, three of which have been recorded here for the first time alone."An album of hitherto unknown music by Johann Sebastian Bach would be a sensation! What may seem rather unlikely at first glance, the ensemble Die Freitagsakademie under the direction of Katharina Suske has nevertheless succeeded. Some of Bach's works that are considered lost today have been reconstructed in recent years and are now available on the album "Bach Concertos: Lost and Found", partly as first recordings.

The Bern Friday Academy around oboist Katharina Suske has taken on several recent reconstructions of Bach concertos with verve and esprit, three of which have been recorded here for the first time alone."An album of hitherto unknown music by Johann Sebastian Bach would be a sensation! What may seem rather unlikely at first glance, the ensemble Die Freitagsakademie under the direction of Katharina Suske has nevertheless succeeded. Some of Bach's works that are considered lost today have been reconstructed in recent years and are now available on the album "Bach Concertos: Lost and Found", partly as first recordings.

German soprano Dorothee Mields has emerged as a leading figure in the performance of both Baroque and contemporary music, praised by Forbes as "unflappable at any tempo." Mields was born in Gelsenkirchen, in the industrial Ruhr valley, in 1971. Her training was German: at the University of Bremen with Harry van der Kamp and later independently in Stuttgart, where her teacher was Julia Hamari, and she has continued to study with Richetta Manager during her active career. Mields took a position teaching at the Franz Liszt Academy in Weimar in 2001. In the early 2000s her performing and recording career began to develop rapidly. Mields' recordings have been devoted mostly to Baroque music. She made her debut on CPO with a 2002 release of chamber cantatas by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, followed two years later by a second volume of those and by a recording of the rare Gellert Oden of C.P.E. Bach. After a four-year hiatus, she began recording for the German labels Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Accent, and Carus, as well as continuing with CPO.