Holger Gugg

MDG is delighted to announce the second volume of their critically acclaimed Eisler Lieder recordings. In 1948 Hanns Eisler returned to Europe from exile in the United States, where he had found refuge from the National Socialist regime. On his return he found hardly any traces of the Germany he had left in 1937 and expressed his feelings of grief and loss in many choice songs ? some of which Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher have selected for the enthralling and exemplary program on this second volume of their Eisler edition.

The program of Vol. 3 of the successful and critically acclaimed Hanns Eisler project by Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher features songs from this composer's American exile. The Hollywood Songbook is a major work, even if measured solely by its length and total of thirty-two pieces. Moreover, the concentration and intensification of the content attained by Eisler while he was residing on the Pacific Coast make this rather loosely organised collection of occasional pieces what is certainly the most important song cycle of the twentieth century.

Hanns Eisler composed more than five hundred songs, and his very first extant compositions include songs with piano accompaniment. On the fourth and last volume of their selections from Eisler’s songs, Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher focus on his early works and bring to light an absolutely astonishing discovery: the young Hanns was an autodidact who had an incredible feel for the song part, and his artistic aspirations are also evident in the piano part.

Between the Great Depression and the Third Reich the committed communist endeavoured to exercise influence with his music as his medium. On the first volume of MDG's edition of Hanns Eisler’s songs, Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher present pieces from the years between 1929 and 1937 for which Bertolt Brecht supplied almost all the texts. A long-overdue rehabilitation of a composer who for many years was known above all as the German Democratic Republic’s artistic spokesman!

German pianist Holger Groschopp has emerged as something of a specialist in the voluminous body of transcriptions by Ferruccio Busoni. The most famous of these are treatments of Bach's music, but he also wrote arrangements and reworkings of Mozart, Liszt, and many other composers. This is a new recording of Bach transcriptions, made in 2011. Busoni's transcriptions are often heard singly on recital albums, but there's a lot to be said for hearing them in large groups, even for hearing the two CDs' worth here. It gets into the range of treatments Busoni applied, from massive Mahlerian attempts to encompass the world of the organ on piano, to studies in chromatic harmony, to quiet reverential treatments.

The magic and majesty of Holger Czukay’s late career works for Claremont 56 is being celebrated on a new compilation.

Jah Wobble had already explored 'Islamic funk' with his Invaders of the Heart band but here got down with some weird amalgam of Eurobeat hooked to Afro-funk of the Talking Heads kind. Snake Charmer is a mini LP and result from a collaboration between Jah Wobble, best known as Public Image Limited bass-player, U2 guitarist The Edge and German experimental krautrocker and Can member Holger Czukay produced by a forefather of the house music, the New York Studio 54 DJ François Kevorkian. Others who dropped in during the recording of the 'Snake Charmer' mini-album were Can's Jaki Liebezeit, jazz-funk singer Marcella Allen and guitarist Animal.