Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels

The composer Friedrich Gernsheim, who was highly respected during his lifetime, is largely unknown today. Yet, especially in his choral compositions, he broke away from traditional ideas of form at an early stage and was thus ahead of many of his contemporaries. With this recording, Tristan Meister and Vox Quadrata have set themselves the goal of bringing the forgotten choral works of the Jewish composer back into the public consciousness.

Andreas Hammerschmidt is undoubtedly the most unjustly neglected composer of seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany. Very few recordings have been devoted to him, even though his music was widely published during his lifetime. The fifteen or so published collections offer a great variety of works, which, like those of his famous contemporary Heinrich Schütz, illustrate the fusion between the Lutheran polyphonic tradition and the various stylistic influences of the Italian Baroque. For this musical portrait of Hammerschmidt, Vox Luminis has drawn on several of these collections in order to offer as rounded a picture as possible of the variety of the composer’s styles.

Born in Danzig in 1626, Balthasar Erben was a cosmopolitan. When he applied for the position of Kapellmeister of the main church of St. Marien in his hometown at the age of 27, the council granted him a generous scholarship so that he could "look around the world and perfect himself as a composer". For five years, Erben traveled throughout Europe, visiting all the centres of musical culture of the time, including Rome. His compositional style, which was developed during this time, is correspondingly distinctive: a combination of different influences, cleverly interwoven. The Abendmusiken Basel offer an impressive collection of instrumental and sacred works by the composer who is unfortunately little known today.

Austrian clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer has joined forces with Chinese pianist Yuja Wang to record an album of works by composers of the Romantic era. Blue Hour features some of the jewels of the repertoire, including Brahms’s Intermezzo in A major, Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words – arranged for clarinet and piano by Ottensamer – and Weber’s virtuosic Grand Duo concertant. The album reveals Ottensamer to be not just a sensitive and responsive chamber partner, but also a brilliant soloist, as he gives a dazzling performance of Weber’s First Clarinet Concerto, recorded with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Mariss Jansons.

Andreas Scholl returns to his repertoire of choice,introducing us to the splendid works of Frantisek Tůma - a little-known Bohemian composer whowas a prominent musical figure in the 18th century.