Outhere Music

Figures of Harmony: Songs of Codex Chantilly c. 1390 - Ferrara Ensemble, Crawford Young (2015) {4CD Outhere-Arcana A382}
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© 2015 Outhere Music / Arcana | A382
Classical / Medieval / Early Music / Vocal Music / Chamber Music / Instrumental

Presented in a stylish 4-CD box set, here is a comprehensive recording of one of the most enigmatic manuscripts in the history of European music, preserved in the museum at the Château de Chantilly, France. ‘Anything that can be sung, can be written in music notation,’ claimed an anonymous treatise on notation in the late fourteenth century. The harmonies thus ‘captured’ on parchment represent an apex in Western music, associated with the wealthiest courts in Christendom, called ‘decadent’ by some.

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott: Luther and the Music of the Reformation - Vox Luminis (2017) {2CD Ricercar Official Digital Download RIC 376}
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© 2017 Ricercar / Outhere Music | RIC 376
Classical / Baroque

A two-CD set devoted to the Lutheran liturgical repertory from Martin Luther himself to Heinrich Schütz. The first disc comprises compositions specific to the Lutheran liturgy: Deutsche Messe, Deutsches Magnificat, Deutsche Passion (the first German polyphonic Passion, by Joachim von Burck) and even a reconstruction of a Deutsches Requiem drawn from polyphonic works that set the same texts as those Brahms was later to use for his Deutsches Requiem.

Various Artists - A Guide to Musical Instruments, Vol. II: 1800-1950 (2013) {8CD Box Set Ricercar RIC104}
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© 2013 Ricercar / Outhere Music | RIC104
Classical / Viennese School / Romantic / Early 20th Century Music

This second volume of the Guide to Musical Instruments explores the history of musical instruments in the period from 1800 to 1950. Its purpose is both to discuss improvements and transformations of instruments dating from before 1800 and to investigate all the novelties thought up by instrument makers during this era. All these developments took place in a context in which the process of instrument making moved from artisans’ workshops to commercial firms which became veritable factories, typical of the ‘age of industrialisation’. The majority of the musical examples are recordings of individual instruments that allow us to hear timbres often lost under the weight of the orchestral mass.This second volume of the Guide follows the same principles as the first.

Marco Ceccato and Anna Fontana are well-known performers on the international baroque circuit and familiar faces thanks to their recordings for Outhere labels Alpha, Arcana and Zig-Zag Territoires (including Marco's 2015 Diapason d'or Award winning recording of Boccherini with Accademia Ottoboni). Now they have come together to tackle the two revolutionary works for piano and cello composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1796 and dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia. Their interpretative approach deepens our understanding of the final years of that century when a young Beethoven, a child of the 18th century, was grappling with one of his most extraordinary stylistic innovations. These two expert performers have set out to reconstruct historically reliable versions of the works, linking Beethoven’s revolutionary harmonic solutions with the 18th-century stylistic features that were still in vogue, from phrasings to Beethoven’s meticulously notated articulations.

For twenty years Marco Serino was Ennio Morricone’s violinist, the soloist on his film soundtracks and on world tours where they were reworked for the concert hall. In January 2020, after what proved to be his last public concert, at the Italian Senate in Rome, Morricone finished the transcription of this magnificent and unpublished collection, which recasts the themes of his most famous scores in suites transcribed for violin and orchestra. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Marco Serino and dedicated to him as a fruit of the artistic partnership between the two men. The collection alternates between pieces already performed in concert and others that are heard in this version for the first time. A year and a half after the composer’s death, this extraordinary document, a testimony to friendship and professional esteem, now becomes a recording project with the collaboration of Andrea Morricone, the composer’s son, who conducts the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento.

For their fourth recording on Alpha Classics, Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra - who bring together the best Estonian talent and leading musicians from around the world each year in Pärnu - celebrate composers from Estonia and Poland, two nations closely connected by their history. Eduard Tubin (1905-1982) is a composer whose ten symphonies tower at the top of Estonian orchestral music.

The Lockenhaus International Chamber Music Festival is regarded as one of Austria’s most prestigious festivals: it was created by the violinist Gidon Kremer to offer a new vision of chamber music and the opportunity to create musical exchanges in an intimate setting. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt succeeded Gidon Kremer in 2012 and now continues the spirit of the festival. For this first recording in partnership with Lockenhaus, he is joined by experienced partners, including the Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang, the Hungarian violinist Barnabás Kelemen, the German pianist Alexander Lonquich – whose Schubert double album was recently released on Alpha (Alpha 433) – and the British violist Lawrence Power. Together they have selected two works, the Piano Quintet of Béla Bartók, a demanding composition, rarely performed even though it is considered an intensely personal work, and the String Trio of Sándor Veress, a former student of Bartók.

The Moravian-born multi-instrumentalist and composer Gottfried Finger is often found in the footnotes in modern music histories, yet during his lifetime few other composers could boast of the number of firsts and career milestones. In a varied and active career spanning more than half a century, he crossed paths with some of the leading composers of his day (Biber, Purcell, Telemann, Silvius Leopold Weiss and perhaps François Couperin, to name just a few). Finger could switch with great ease between faithful versions of the dominant French and Italian styles, but thanks to his experiences across such wide geographies, variety of musical styles, languages and cultures, his primary style is a truly pan-European phenomenon. Although Italian music was his main inspiration, it is difficult to assign Finger consistently to any kind of national style or regional school. This CD presents premieres of 12 pieces from the second half of his career show-casing some of the breathtaking scope and scale of his output and his particular strength in deft handling of ear-tickling instrumental sonorities and virtuosity.

Max Bruch was eighty years old when, in 1918, he decided to return to the chamber music genre he had frequented in his early years. Stimulated by the violin virtuoso Willy Hess, he composed two string quintets and an octet, monuments to beauty and harmony, at the end of a tumultuous personal life and in the midst of a western world on the brink of collapse. After an album devoted to Beethoven’s chamber music, the Chamber Players of the WDR Sinfonieorchester now tackle one of the last chapters of German Romantic music, with pieces that constitute Bruch’s swansong.

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann ( Concerto Polonois ) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.