Haydn Symphony 192

Hunting cannot be thought about in isolation from the sounds accompanying it - the barking of dogs, the shrieks of frightened quarry, the shots, and the sound of horns and trumpets. Signal instruments and the atmosphere of chase gave rise to the special genre of "hunting music". The quintessential hunting-related instrument is the French horn, which became widely used in Bohemia after 1760, owing to Count Franz Anton von Sporck.

Gianluca Cascioli’s career as pianist was launched with his victory at the 1994 Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition before a jury that included Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Maurizio Pollini, and Charles Rosen.

With this recording of his organ arrangement of the great Fugue in B-flat major, op. 133 Martin Sturm, presented a fascinating and exciting contribution to the Beethoven centenary in 2020.

International lawyer by day and piano virtuoso by night, Paul Wee made his recording début in 2019 with some of the most technically demanding piano music there is: Alkan’s Symphony and Concerto for solo piano. He now returns with music which presents a different, but not lesser challenge: how make the keyboard sing. The piano is by nature a percussive instrument – the sound is created by little hammers falling on strings. To create a true legato – or the illusion of it – has been the aim of generations of pianists, but few have taken the matter as far as Sigismond Thalberg.

Herbert von Karajan was the most renowned conductor to emerge from Europe in the post-World War II era – and through fortuitous timing throughout his career, and in spite of controversy that dogged his early years, he was the most recorded conductor of the 20th century, and is likely to remain one of the most visible (and biggest-selling) conductors well into the 21st century. Born in Salzburg and descended from a family of Greek origin with deep roots in Austria – including scholars and physicians in Vienna and Salzburg – he was a music prodigy, playing the piano at three and playing his first recital a year later.

Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan": he was a German composer, trained in Italy, who spent most of his life in England.

The box comprises all (live) recordings made by Martha Argerich at the Lugano Festival, from 2002 to the last edition in 2016, and released by EMI Classics and Warner Classics. An impressive collection of 22CDs without equivalent. ü It includes a variety of genres: some solo piano music, lots of music for piano duo and among them many arrangements, chamber works and concertos. ü The composers span the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, with Schumann, Mozart, Ravel, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Brahms and Shostakovich being the most frequently performed. Among the artists appearing with Argerich on these recordings are: Stephen Kovacevich, Renaud Capuçon, Gautier Capuçon, Lilya Zilberstein, Mischa Maisky, Lyda Chen, Alexander Mogilevsky, Gabriela Montero, Yefim Bronfman, Maxim Vengerov, Gidon Kremer, Maria Joao Pires, Mauricio Vallina, Mikhail Pletnev, Alexander Vedernikov…

In 2006 Mozarts 250th birthday was celebrated. For this occasion Cascade Medien compiled an outstanding CD collection, presenting his most famous works from Concerts, Quartets, Divertimenti through to Symphonies, Arias, Opera Scenes, Famous Overtures, Sonatas and many more.