Frühling

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is the most famous of the sons of J.S. Bach. His magisterial oeuvre contains, notably, a large number of concertos for various instruments and keyboard pieces. But the composer also excelled at vocal music, thus continuing in the family tradition by composing, among other genres, sacred and secular cantatas and songs. His works respect the rules of Baroque style while also hinting at the dawn of the Classical style subsequently represented by Haydn and Mozart. Café Zimmermann has been including the music of C. P. E. Bach in its programmes for years, notably in a recording (ALPHA 107) that marked a turning point in the discography.

The human factor determines the path. The Clarinet Trio op. 114 by Johannes Brahms more or less represents the DNA of the Quantum Clarinet Trio, and the piece was one of the driving forces behind the founding of this young chamber ensemble, whose members first met at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in 2014. At that time, Italian clarinettist Elena Veronesi had been searching for fellow musicians to collaborate in a late work trio, and she found them in the German cellist Johannes Przygodda and Korean pianist Bokyung Kim.

One of the leading mezzos of our day in a Schubert recital which offers seventy minutes of pure pleasure. The twenty-one songs recorded here are among Schubert’s finest, from ‘Erlkönig’ (written in the composer’s annus mirabilis of 1815) to ‘Leise flehen’ (which dates from his final summer).

The Karajan Official Remastered Edition comprises 13 box sets containing official remasterings of the finest recordings the Austrian conductor made for EMI between 1946 and 1984, which are now a jewel of the Warner Classics catalog. This 5-CD box includes Haydn's Die Jahreszeiten, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Brahms's German Requiem performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, with renowned vocal soloists such as Walter Berry and José van Dam.

Un double CD Diapason d'or à retrouver dès aujourd'hui en kiosque avec le numéro de février de Diapason.

Colin Davis has recorded a great deal of Haydn's music over his long career, and his late recordings have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim. This live performance was recorded at the Barbican in London in June 2010, when Davis was just short of his 83rd birthday, and for British audiences it has carried overtones of a golden age. In the late 1960s Davis recorded the oratorio Die Jahreszeiten, in its English version as The Seasons, for the Philips label with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and that version remained a fixture of music stores through the late LP era.