The Reign of Alexander The Great

Under the reign of Frederick the Great, Berlin developed into one of the most important centres of the European music scene. He brought the most important composers and musicians to his court and his court orchestra had to play both representative operas and concerts as well as in the king's private sphere.Although the king himself played the flute and strongly protected his instrument, the oboe was also of great importance and the orchestra featured four outstanding oboists.Frederick, however, was stuck in a conservative, traditional style and the once "young, wild" Kapellmusiker became increasingly weary of this musical monoculture. Thus a new music scene gradually developed in Berlin in the bourgeois milieu with house concerts and weekly academies.The "queen of the baroque oboe", as Xenia Loffler was respectfully called by BR Klassik Radio, presents on her new album a fine selection of oboe sonatas from the Berlin repertoire with works by the two Bach sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, as well as Christoph Schaffrath, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch and Carl Ludwig Matthes.

Taking as a key turning point the self-fashioning of the first Roman emperor Augustus, author Jennifer Finn revisits the idea of "universal history" in Polybius, Justin, and Diodorus, combined with the Stoic philosophy of determinism present in authors like Plutarch and Arrian. Finn endeavors to determine the ways in which Roman authors manipulated narratives about Alexander's campaigns—and even other significant events in Mediterranean history—to artificially construct a past to which the Romans could attach themselves as a natural teleological culmination.