The pieces of music on this live album were recorded during the concert tour of the Finnish composer, Tomi Räisänen in North Germany in 2014 and 2015, organised by Neue Musik im Ostseeraum (Lübeck). The tour documented the composer’s long-time collaboration and connection with Northern Germany, or as one perhaps can say more descriptively, from a Finnish perspective, with the Southern Baltic Sea.
Continuinghis exploration of Handel operas, maestro René Jacobs now turns his attention to Agrippina the first great operatic success of the composer s Italian period. Composed in 1709, Agrippina is an opera seria in three acts on a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani. The opera tells the story of Agrippina, the mother of Nero, as she plots the downfall of the Roman Emperor Claudius and the installation of her son as emperor…
This year the Bremen Cathedral Choir is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and with its director of many years, Wolfgang Helbich, it also has certainly enjoyed a »musical marriage« of a rare kind. And then there is the splendid Bremen tradition that has been observed for some eighty years now: the Christmas song concert in St. Peter’s Cathedral so very dear to the hearts of the Bremen public. Since cpo, as a label with its home in Northern Germany, has long maintained close ties to the Hansa city (cf. Radio Bremen, Weser-Renaissance Bremen, and not least Helbich himself), it seemed to us to be high time to document this event full of the Christmas spirit for the pleasure of a wider listening audience. Everything that lends the Christmas season its musical magic is represented in traditional arrangements, from Adeste Fideles to Vom Himmel hoch.
Since January 2007 the Stockhausen-Verlag is releasing Text-CDs of a new series: lectures which Stockhausen has given since 1952. The edition is limited to 300 copies per release. He wrote and spoke these lectures in German. Most of them are supplemented with musical examples.