Matthias Pauqué

The tragic fate of composer Oskar Böhme long went unresearched. His music suffered a similar fate. On his new album “Oskar Böhme – Trumpet Concerto & Pieces” the trumpeter Matthias Höfs is joined by The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in a performance of his most ambitious works that aims to win a hearing both for his striking and sensitive music and for the story of his life. The album will be released by Berlin Classics on September 30.

Franz Krommer (1759-1831) was a prolific and very good composer, whose music is now being resuscitated with great and deserved success. It was difficult to be a composer in Vienna at the same time as Beethoven and Schubert, and most of their contemporaries have not survived the pressure. But Krommer managed to retain his personality and originality, becoming the last official director of chamber music and court composer to the Habsburg court under the conservative Emperor Francis I. The first of the two symphonies was published in 1803. Among its many interesting features is a haunting litde trio in the form of a waltz. The second work is much later, with four horns and three trombones, and is in C minor, but ending in the major. In both works, Krommer's knowledge of, and predilection for, the wind instruments is notable. The two works were well worth recording, especially with such felicitous performances and bright, pleasing recorded sound.

It's the late Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, that get the big print on the cover of this release by the awe-inspiring baritone Matthias Goerne, but actually the music on the album falls into a neat early-middle-late classification scheme. The group of middle-period settings of poetry by Heinrich Heine doesn't even get graphics on the cover, but these are fascinating. Brahms wrote a lot of songs, but you couldn't do better than the selection and performances here for a cornerstone collection item. Beyond the sheer beauty of Goerne's voice is an ability to shift gears to match how Brahms' style evolved. If you want to hear his real slashing, operatic high notes, check out the Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, settings of poems by the minor poets Georg Friedrich Daumer and Karl August Graf von Platen. These rather overwrought texts add up to a kind of slimmed-down Winterreise, and they catch the spirit of the still-young Brahms with his strong passions, elegantly controlled. The Heine settings, which come from several different sets of lieder, are not that often heard and are in some ways the most compelling of the group here.

If there’s one thing that makes Christmas what it is, it’s festive music and uplifting melodies: 'Festive Trumpets for Christmas' is the new Christmas album from Matthias Höfs, to be released by Berlin Classics on November 5. On this new album, the trumpeter joins his brass ensemble and organist Christian Schmitt in a wide-ranging programme. The instruments of the musicians ring out in triumphal tones, brilliantly nuanced, capturing the joy and splendour of the Christmas festival. There are works by Albinoni, Handel, Vivaldi, Morales and Scheidt, along with arrangements by Peter Lawrence, Nikolaus Herman and Matthias Höfs himself.

''Attention, attention! Unknown flying objects from another planet and creatures identified so far only as Globolinks have landed on Planet Earth. All citizens are asked to remain calm. Be on your guard. Stay tuned for further broadcasts. THE GLOBOLINKS ARE HERE!'' A scene from a science fiction movie? It certainly could have been; the admonition is so familiar but, no, this is the opening spoken narrative that follows some evocative night skies, space-sweeping and reminiscent-of- schooldays orchestral music in Menotti's space-age opera for children of all ages, “Help, Help, The Globolinks”. Composed in 1968 and first performed in Hamburg, Menotti's music for “Globolinks” is appealing and accessible and often very amusing.

At a time when Schoenberg and Stravinsky were thought of as opposite poles, Roberto Gerhard was combining the density of the one with the dynamism of the other in a wholly personal synthesis. You can hear this in the Piano Concerto's mood swings from the dark and brooding to, in the finale, a Spanish take-off that Chabrier would have thought off the wall. Gerhard's 1960s music is in-your-face modernism that holds you in its grasp, embracing sound with an enthusiasm that remains inspirational today. Listen to the tape part of the Third Symphony–a cut-and-paste job that trounces most of the computer-music generation in its imagination and feeling for what's possible. Epithalamion features material originally intended for, of all things, Lindsay Anderson's film This Sporting Life. Not that its impact is any less than coherent; the percussion writing alone has a fantasy that will keep you entranced. Well prepared performances, superbly recorded. This is still music of the future.