Der Spiegel 16.04.2016

With "Nemesis - The Best Of & Reworked", Blutengel are not only releasing their first official Greatest-Hits-Album, but also a rather special kind of history lesson, presenting classic songs, hits and favorites from the past in the sound of today…

The browser noticing this disc might be forgiven for thinking that the current trend toward recording obscure works of the classical period had gone too far. Not only does it present a work by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, otherwise known almost exclusively as the man who completed Mozart's Requiem under sleazy circumstances after the composer's death – it also offers that work in an arrangement for winds by an even more obscure composer, Johann Nepomuk Wendt. But give it a spin (or a click): it's not without interest for those with a deep interest in Mozart, especially in the opera The Magic Flute. Süssmayr's opera Der Spiegel von Arkadien (The Mirror of Arcadia) was his biggest success during his own lifetime.

In this extensive 50-disc set, Brilliant Classics presents 500 years of organ music. The pieces presented here offer a survey of diversity, value, and historical importance. The first portion of the set is devoted to pieces from the early period. Groundbreaking organ composers such as Cavazzoni and De Macque, who developed the capriccio and canzon forms and composed complex counterparts to the periods vocal music, are featured here. The Baroque and Classical eras are represented in this set by the likes of powerhouse composers Mozart, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Handel, Telemann, and Haydn.

"Einer der besten Countertenöre unserer Tage" (Fono Forum) ist zweifellos Valer Sabadus. "Was der Countertenor Valer Sabadus bis in schwindelnde Höhen an Natürlichkeit und Koloratur leistet, ist einfach überwältigend", urteilte der Spiegel über seine letzten Aufnahmen. Auf seinem neuen Album präsentiert der Countertenor mit dem Kammerorchester Basel unter der Leitung von Julia Schröder zeitlose Arien aus Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach, aber auch selten zu hörende Arien aus Opernraritäten von Georg Philipp Telemann.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.