Rias Kammerchor Wolfgang Rihm Astralis & Other Choral Works

Brahms composed choral music prolifically throughout his life. As the heir to Bach and the German Protestant tradition, he based most of his motets on texts from Luther’s translation of the Bible – yet succeeded in infusing them with Romanticism at its most soulful.

This disc gathers all of Brahms' sacred choral music for unaccompanied mixed voices, except for the Sieben Marienlieder of 1859. Taken together with the accompanied sacred choral pieces, including the monumental German Requiem, this amounts to a significant body of work for a composer of his era who was not religious. Brahms was a skilled choral composer and it's a shame that his smaller a cappella works aren't performed more frequently. Except for Zwei Motetten from 1864, all these works come from the last two decades of his life.

The recording of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, conducted by René Jacobs, was one of the discographic highlights of the year at its 1997 release. Critics around the world praised the "sophisticated interpretation", the "splendid cast", the "expressiveness of the evangelist" as well as the "compelling acting performance of the singers".

Bach revised his Johannes-Passion regularly: he returned to it over a period of twenty-six years, from 1724 to his death. It is the version hallowed by tradition, established by the Kantor a year before his death, that is presented on these CDs. But the 1725 version, equally outstanding musically, has also been recorded complete and can be downloaded as a bonus in high-resolution sound. Comparison of the two versions reveals the underlying meaning of this matchless Passion.

Wolfgang Rihm - Ins Offene…, sphere (1995)
Classical | EAC: FLAC+Cue+Log | 1 Cd, Covers | 193 Mb
Label: col legno - Date: 1995

He does not always regard a finished work the last word on a subject—for example the orchestral work Ins Offene… (1990) was completely rewritten in 1992, and then used as the basis for his piano concerto Sphere (1994), before the piano part of Sphere was recast for the solo piano work Nachstudie (also 1994)…