Karl Amadeus Hartmanns work is very difficult to attribute to any particular compositional school. Although he was not a revolutionist in terms of notation or performance forces, he was able to creatively subordinate all the achievements of modern musical language to innovative formal approaches. Hartmann wrote with extraordinary verve, creating artistic phrases with a broad ambitus, at the same time he could masterfully juggle short motifs, subjecting them to elaborate variational and contrapuntal transformations. In terms of harmonics, Hartmanns music is tonal, though strongly chromatic, which deprives the listener of a secure sense of anchoring in a specific key.
Hello buddies! Here you are an OOP cd with several orchestral works by the gifted British pianist and composer John McCabe. Enjoy!!
The Zehetmair Quartett, one of the most exciting and accomplished string quartets of our time, plays a programme of characteristically broad reach. This double album begins with Beethoven’s highly-concentrated opus 135, and concludes with Heinz Holliger’s explosions of fantasy in his 2nd String Quartet, a composition written for, and premiered by, the Zehetmair group. Bruckner’s rarely-heard C-minor quartet is, as Thomas Zehetmair notes, both touching and warm-hearted.