Unified Europe Catalog Volume 8 2023

The three works on this album were all composed between 1943 and 1953. Despite the extreme experiences and difficulties she faced during this undoubtedly most tragic time in Poland’s history, Grażyna Bacewicz managed to compose outstanding works which constitute splendid testimony to the vibrant creative potency for which she was renowned. Until 1939 her career as a virtuoso violinist and an emerging composer evolved naturally.

This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

Friedrich Lux (1820–95) was one of those musicians who formed the fabric of musical life in nineteenth-century Germany: though he worked away from the major cities, as conductor, teacher, organist, organiser and composer, he was an indispensable element of the communities in which he worked. His large body of organ music, as good as unknown before now, brings together elements of the musical language of Bach, Mendelssohn and Schumann, in works that range from the intimate to the grandiose.This second volume brings some of his many transcriptions to the fore.

This fourth instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two earlier works – from when Bruk was merely in his late seventies. His Symphonies Nos. 15 and 16 – both predicated on Bruk’s concern for the environment – inhabit the sound-world that has become familiar from his more recent symphonies: almost a stream of consciousness expressed through wildly inventive orchestral writing in a kaleidoscope of colour and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance.

The enormously prolific Marie Joseph Erb (1858–1944) has somehow escaped the attention of posterity, although the quality of his music is on a par with contemporary organist-composers whose works are far better known. Erb’s long life – he heard Berlioz conduct in 1863 and was still composing in 1944 – was focused on Strasbourg, where he was active as pianist, organist and professor, though he had studied in Paris, with Faure, Gigout, Saint-Saëns and Widor, and later with Liszt in Weimar. This first album devoted to his organ music in almost 30 years sandwiches four lyrical chamber works between two towering sonatas.

2023 release. Entertainment icon Olivia Newton-John's legendary career immortalized in 11 classic duets with her dear friends. Vol. 2 includes new, never-before-released duets "I'm Counting On You" with Johnny O'Keefe, and "I Will Be Right Here" with David Campbell. Other duets include Burt Bacharach penned "Wishin' And Hopin'" with Dionne Warwick, "Falling" with Marty Raybon, Dave Aude produced bonus Track "You Have To Believe (We Are Magic)" with Olivia's daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, and more.

The organ works of Axel Ruoff, born in Stuttgart in 1957, constitute one of the most important contributions to the literature for the instrument by any composer since Messiaen, with Ruoff often using its unparalleled resources to write music of extraordinary power and dramatic flair. This third volume in Jan Lehtola’s complete recording features the organ in the unusual role of duo partner in chamber music – but it is chamber music conceived on a symphonic scale. Here these five muscular duo works are separated by a series of weighty chorale preludes.