Karl Koch Test

This is delightful and ingenious set of 2 Cds. For people familiar with R. Strauss "Der Burger als Edelmann" Orchestersuite (op. 60), the set provides the complete music to the comedy of Moliere (reworked by H. Hofmannsthal) as it was staged originally in Berlin in 1919. Sir Peter Ustinov performs the role of Jack of all Trades: he wrote the text, narrated the story, and played all the important roles. It is the BEST we may expect (barring the original Berlin production). For people who are not familiar with the Orchestersuite - this set represents one of the best examples of the neo-classical Strauss. Most of the play's music is part of the suite, but the play's context and Ustinov's magic give a new light to this wonderful work.

Bach’s lost St Mark Passion was first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday 1731 and a second time in 1744 in a revised version. Though Bach's music is lost, the libretto by Picander is still extant, and from this, the work can to some degree be reconstructed. Unlike Bach's earlier existing passions (St John Passion and St Matthew Passion), the Markus-Passion is probably a parody – it recycles previous works. Which of his own works Bach may have taken for his St Mark Passion led to numerous speculations. Differently from further reconstructions the Frankfurt musicologist Prof. Karl Böhmer used the revised Picander text from 1744 which schedules one Aria and a chorale more than the 1731 version. Other parts have been revised and complemented.

Johann Friedrich Fasch was a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, and that has seriously hampered the interest in his music. It was the German musicologist Hugo Riemann, who at the beginning of the 20th century made an attempt to restore his reputation.

MOZART 111 combines the best of the Austrian master's music with the best of Deutsche Grammophon's Mozart recordings, bringing together a total of 111 works, while retaining, as far as possible, the original album releases with their cover art. There's enough of everything here to stock a shop, as they say, in performances that have stood the test of time and performances that make you sit up and listen to Mozart afresh the perfect way to discover, rediscover and savor the incomparable genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It’s good to have Richard Strauss’ fascinating, somewhat atypical concerted works for piano left hand available on a single disc, especially in well played and strongly projected readings like these. At times the slow-motion harmonic scansion and rhapsodic piano writing throughout the Paregon to the Symphonia Domestica evoke Scriabin’s misty muse. By contrast the Panathenäenzug, subtitled Symphonic Etudes in the form of a passacaglia, uses a time-honored baroque form to generate opulently scored, post-Wagnerian froth.

Franz Koglmann - Ich (1986) {Hat Hut Records hat ART CD6033 rel 1989}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 281 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 182 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 34 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1986, 1989 Hat Hut Records | hat ART CD 6033
Jazz / Modern Creative / Avant-Garde Jazz / Flugelhorn

Here in the early days of Austrian composer and flügelhorn player Franz Koglmann's Pipetet – it was only five years old in 1989 – listeners hear the first efforts of the mature composer begin to come to fruition. His trademark meld of styles did not so much involve combinations but juxtapositions – the clear lines of division still existed on Ich. Unlike the later offerings of Cantos I-IV or The Art of Memory, Koglmann's earlier work had to stress its European-ness for the sake of identity more than anything else. (One wonders why, when in the first measures can be heard the restraint of a Vienna conductor holding this band of ten together, and the measured ear of the rhythm section looking for cues.)

The French division of the massive EMI corporation has released a compendium called Les Introuvables de Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (EMI 68509, six CDs), and it contains so much outstanding material that one feels churlish complaining about what it lacks. But here we go. These six discs contain more than 125 lieder, ballads, cantatas and songs – primarily in German, but also in French, Italian, Latin and English – recorded mostly in the 1950s and '60s when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice was one of the wonders of the musical universe.

it’s not often that you get to hear the music of Anton Eberl (1765-1807), a Viennese composer who was both a pupil and a friend of Mozart (and of course a contemporary and supposed rival of Beethoven as well). These are technically quite competent works whose temperament straddles both classical and romantic styles, but there probably won’t be a rush to an Eberl revival anytime soon.