Huber

In a follow-up to her acclaimed album of Mahler songs, Christiane Karg takes us on a Christmas tour, in the select company of fellow music-makers. Revisiting holiday memories through the eyes of a child, but with the benefit of her superb artistry as a lieder specialist, the German soprano shines a light on some enchanting rarities of German and French repertoire, along with examples of Spanish, Basque, and Scandinavian traditions… A treasure trove of hidden gems!

These are world première recordings in Sterling's Romantic Swiss music series. Hans Huber was amongst the leading musical personalities in the German-speaking part of Switzerland in the years around the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in 1852 in a small community in the north-west Swiss canton of Solothurn. He studied under Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and subsequently taught music in Alsace from where he made his first contacts with musical life in Basel where he moved in 1877.

Over the course of his long and eventful career, Dussek composed 38 violin sonatas – or rather sonatas for the keyboard, accompanied by the violin – and the partnership of Julia Huber and Miriam Altmann is acquiring impressive credentials and critical praise as they gradually uncover them for the first time.

Franz Liszt's Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), composed in 1878, dates from the end of his career, when the formerly flamboyant composer joined a monastic order and spent part of his time living a spartan life in a small apartment near Rome. The work combines extreme spareness with the chromatic experimentation characteristic of the composer's late years, with simple melodies subjected Bachian part-writing that veers into expressive chromatic depths. The work shows off the powers of a small choir and has been recorded many times, but this German release, featuring the West German Radio Chorus of Cologne under Rupert Huber, is a standout for several reasons.