Herbert Gaskill

Herbert von Karajan (German: [ˈhɛɐbɛɐt fɔn ˈkaraˌjan]; born Heribert Ritter von Karajan; 5 April 1908 – 16 July 1989) was an Austrian conductor. He was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for 35 years. Generally regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, he was a dominant figure in European classical music from the mid-1950s until his death. /quote]

John Cage: Early Piano Music comes from Herbert Henck, an experienced hand with the work of Cage, having previously recorded Music for Piano, Music of Changes, and Sonatas and Interludes in addition to a mighty swath of first-tier twentieth-century literature for piano for various labels, most notably Wergo and ECM New Series. These are early works for standard, not prepared, piano, and some of these pieces will be as familiar to dyed-in-the-wool Cageans as "Happy Birthday." This puts the pressure on Henck to excel, and he does so spectacularly well here. The disc includes the two sets entitled Two Pieces for Piano, the piano version of The Seasons, Metamorphosis, In a Landscape, Ophelia, and the fragmentary Quest. The pieces date from 1935 to 1948, the same range covered by pianist Jeanne Kirstein in her pioneering 1967 survey of Cage's piano music for CBS Masterworks.

Victor Herbert, Irish by birth, moved to Germany when he was eight and came to America when both he and his wife landed gigs with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York. Operetta was plainly his strength, and his works in that medium remain his best known. But he soaked up enough of the German tradition (in 1883 he played in a tribute concert to Liszt, with Brahms of all people conducting) to want to write serious music, and he notched several major disasters in that field. That in turn has led to neglect of smaller works like the ones on this album, which contains several gems.

German soprano Dorothea Herbert submerged herself into the quietness we’ve all encountered during the COVID lockdowns. Society became to a full stop, an of course tragic time but also one that offered introspection. Die stille Stadt gives musical expression to that and became an album with a radiating program consisting of music by the unfortunately still underrated Alma Mahler, two breathtaking song cycles by Erich Korngold (including the famous aria ‘Glück, das mir verblieb’ from Die tote Stadt), completed by a selection of very powerful and illustrative songs by Franz Schreker.

Although his first four solo albums were commercial disappointments, 1984's 4630 Bochum turned Herbert Grönemeyer into the biggest musician in Germany. Featuring a blue-collar, stadium rock sound and highly literate lyrics – including double entendres, puns, and other creative word play – 4630 Bochum became the best-selling German album of all time, a record it held until Grönemeyer's Mensch beat it two decades later.

Il Trovatore was always one of Herbert von Karajan‘s favourite operas. He conducted it at the very beginning of his career and his first studio recording in 1956 was made in Milan with Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, but „his“ Trovatore really made its mark in the legendary performances given at the Salzburg Festival in 1962, which formed the basis for this successful revival in Vienna. He once declared in an interview that what he loved about this opera was its archetypal human passions, its compression of highly dramatic situations into the smallest conceivable space and Verdi‘s genius for translating such situations into music.

Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973), too, uses his own distinctive scheme of tonal organisation, different from Roslavets, and different from the Vienna School as well. His sonatas are technically very complex and difficult, and symphonically oriented, exploiting the full resources of the modern instrument. Herbert Henck puts this difficult material across in a beautiful, spirited performance and finds a lot of lyricism behind an often forbidding surface. The recording and production are up to the highest possible standards, as with all of ECM's releases, which are unsurpassed.