Gulfh Gulfh of Berlin

Ella Fitzgerald’s Verve songbook albums of the mid-’50s to mid-’60s stand as cultural landmarks, but there’s scant documentation of her performing these composer-specific projects live in concert. This unissued Irving Berlin item, from the personal collection of Verve founder Norman Granz, is a head-turning exception. With a full orchestra arranged and conducted by Paul Weston (who worked on the 1958 studio album as well), the First Lady of Song offers 15 gems from one of the world’s greatest composers, Israel Beilin (1888-1989).

Long overdue reissue of Berlin-based experimental new wave/post-punk outfit Sprung Aus Den Wolken's vital self-titled debut, remastering it from the original tapes and bundling it with extra material from the same period. RIYL Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten, Suicide or Tuxedomoon.

The composer Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) is representative of many musicians and composers, most of them with Jewish roots, who lost their lives in the Nazis' extermination camps. To mark this 75th liberation anniversary, the pianist Annika Treutler has devoted her new release to proscribed music. To musicians and composers like Viktor Ullmann, Bohuslav Martinu, Pavel Haas and many more: none of whom ever had the opportunity to fully develop their creativity because they were barred from pursuing their artistic careers in freedom.

Ludovico Einaudi is a minimalist Italian composer, often associated with film, who has enlivened his style with electronic effects drawn from the worlds of techno and ambient music. He sometimes goes by his last name alone. The combination has proven commercially potent in Europe, and given the attraction of Steve Reich and the other minimalists among aficionados of electronic music on the pop side, it's surprising more musicians haven't explored the combination. Live in Berlin mostly draws on Einaudi's album Divenire, which is scored for piano and orchestra.

This wonderfully re-issued Orchestral Music of Giacomo Puccini - (1858-1924) offers a unique orchestral side of this genius of opera. These orchestral compositions may be divided into two areas: orchestral and operatic. Selections I & II are from Puccini's student days at the Milano Conservatory. Selections III-XI date from his early days as an operatic composer including the truly delightful Minuets - I-III and the lush and haunting Crisantemi of 1892, written for a funeral.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080
Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 394 MB | Full Artwork; 125 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Harmonia Mundi # HMC 902064 | Country/Year: France 2011
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

"Bach's unfinished Art of Fugue, published for still-debated reasons in open score, has been performed and recorded in dozens of different instrumental versions. But this one, by the veteran Akademie für alte Musik, founded in the former East Berlin, is unique; few others have differentiated the fugues by instrumental forces deployed, and perhaps in none has the overall effect been quite so kaleidoscopic as this one. (…) The sound engineering, a product of Berlin's Teldex Studio, is a major strong point." ~allmusic