Julia Brückner Ferien Auf Burg Donnerfels 1 Der Geheimgang

Founded in 2010 by cellist Niklas Schmidt, ""Fontenay Classics International"" stands for fine chamber music, superior sound and exquisite design. FCI presents both young ensembles as well as recordings of Mr. Schmidt himself. Mostly first-time recordings, this disc offers much material for further musicological research and discussion. Text clouds surround the individual interpretations, as is the performers practice during staged recitals; the music can thus be enjoyed and analyzed in the company of introductory accounts of these great artists and their circles of friends.

Riccardo Muti chose to celebrate his 75th birthday with a programme at the 2016 Salzburg Festival featuring two masterworks from the Austro-German tradition that had both been premiered by the Wiener Philharmoniker under the direction of their respective composers: Bruckner’s Symphony No.2 and R. Strauss’ Orchestral Suite Der Bürger als Edelmann. Alongside celebrated pianist Gerhard Oppitz is violinist Rainer Küchl, on the eve of his retirement from the Wiener Philharmoniker following a remarkable 45 years of service.

These three masses are early works but Bruckner had already gestated into Bruckner by the time of their composition. His symphonies regularly quote motifs from these works; they resonated in his mind down the years (and in fact, the F Minor Mass was written as a palliative gesture when the poor bugger was madder than usual).

“During these entire dozen years which I spent in Weimar, there was one great idea valways on my mind – the reformation of music through its deeper bond with the art of poetry”, Franz Liszt wrote in a letter from 1860 to his piano student and close friend Agnes Street-Klindworth (1825-1906). But Liszt ́s entire artistic life shifted even more in the field of tension between art and religion, between freedom of expression and the strictness of dogmatic limitations. This artistic credo not least becomes clear in his large-scale piano cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses S.273. This varied piano cycle, dating back to the year 1835, relates to a poetry collection by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) and combines great concert pieces (f.e. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude or Funérailles) with simple and shorter compositions partly including Gregorian melodies.