Luise 2023

Paul Rivinius is best known as a chamber music player and as a vocal accompanist. He has performed and recorded on both the piano and the French horn. Rivinius was born in Munich, Germany, in 1970. His first instrument was the piano, which he took up at age five. He attended the Musikhochschule Saarbrücken, studying piano with Nerine Barrett, Walter Blankenheim, and Alexander Sellier. After completing his studies there, he moved to the Musikhochschule Frankfurt and studied both piano (with Raymund Havenith) and horn (with Marie-Luise Neunecker).

For years the star cellist and Opus Klassik laureate Raphaela Gromes has taken up the cause of women composers. Three of her albums, acclaimed by critics and listeners alike, have featured music by unknown women composers, and she maintains a long-term working relationship with the "Frau und Musik" Archive in Frankfurt. So it is only natural that her new double album, FEMMES, should lend a voice to outstanding women from nine centuries of music history. No fewer than 23 woman composers found their way onto the double album, from Hildegard of Bingen to Clara Schumann all the way to Lera Auerbach and Billie Eilish, not to mention such famous operatic figures as Susanna from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro or Bizet's Carmen.

‘Has there ever been a composer of more consistent elegance?’ If Steven Isserlis’s rhetorical question invites the listener to think of plausible alternatives, on the evidence of this wonderful album—an imaginative selection of Boccherini’s cello concertos and cello-centric chamber music—they are most unlikely to succeed. This is truly ‘music of the angels’, with performances to match.