Very Interesting 2021

“Chopin is a composer who has been with me since I started playing the piano as a child. In Japan, where I grew up, it is impossible to avoid Chopin’s music! He is one of the most popular composers for everybody, and all pianists start playing and getting to know his music from a very young age.

With "Røta", her debut Album on Berlin Classics, presented Ragnhild Hemsing on the violin and Hardanger fiddle their Norwegian roots, explores identity and the connection to your musical education.

“Chopin is a composer who has been with me since I started playing the piano as a child. In Japan, where I grew up, it is impossible to avoid Chopin’s music! He is one of the most popular composers for everybody, and all pianists start playing and getting to know his music from a very young age. Therefore, he becomes an essential part of your life very naturally. I have wanted to record the complete Preludes for a long time. It is always very interesting to approach works like this that are conceived as a whole – like the 24 Bach Preludes and Fugues or the Debussy Preludes. Each prelude is individual, and each is in a different tonality so the colour and characters are completely different, and as the structure of each individual prelude is relatively open there is a lot of freedom for interpretation.” – Aimi Kobayashi

Salon music has a reputation for being rather shallow than particularly substantial. It should be entertaining, not disturbing, and inconspicuous. Classic muzak, background music with a certain claim, but easy to digest and pleasantly pleasing. This CD with works by Walter Wachsmuth, recorded by the violinist Julia Parusch and her companion, the pianist Cornelia Weiss, shows that this does not have to exclude a certain claim.

After more than 20 years of career, 2 million albums sold and 200 million streams on platforms, the Swedish singer with the unique vocal signature releases an album with English covers of great songs pop of yesterday and today: Grand Songs.

One can only do justice to Joseph Haas' oeuvre by judging it by what he himself said about the purpose of music: "Music is to delight, not offend; it is to shake up, not shatter; it is to refine, not trivialize."

It is a dialogue across the ages when, towards the end of his life, the seeker of meaning Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), baptised as a Protestant, chooses biblical words recorded between 300 BC and 50 AD to set to music. The fact that there is no mention of Christ, suits the skeptically minded Brahms. Questions were ultimately more important to him than traditional and ecclesiastical answers.

With this demanding program, Daniil Trifonov invites you to an exciting foray through concerts and solo works for piano.