Karl Off

This 50 CD Box Set includes Archiv Produktions finest analogue recordings made between 1959 and 1981, representing a Golden Age of a pioneering label that defined the way early music should be performed and recorded. Featured artists include Karl Richter, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Pierre Fournier, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and other icons of the Archiv label.

This comprehensive Bear Family audiotheque is dedicated to the mid-Sixties German Beat music boom. A total of 30 installments with 20 to 30 titles per CD, all remastered for the best possible sound quality. The author, Hans-Jürgen Klitsch, has written the hugely informative booklets for our CDs. Please note that all liner notes are in German language. Another Bear Family exclusive!

Single comes with a free bonus DVD on the flipside which includes the full Ringfest documentary while the regular edition contains just the 'special edit' version as 'multimedia content'. Also, the single comes in a regular jewelcase (not the slimcase as most singles do) and includes a different booklet with full lyrics.

Albert Mangelsdorff - Albert Mangelsdorff And His Friends (2017) {MPS 0211961MSW rec 1967-69}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 162 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 84 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 211 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1967-69, 2017 MPS Records / Edel | 0211961MSW
Jazz / Post Bop / Progressive Jazz / Trombone

This album of duos stands out as one of a kind; recorded during a phase in which he began to consistently incorporate a freer musical language into his playing, and set within a constellation of diverse duo formations, there emerges an exciting portrait of the central figure in German jazz: Albert Mangelsdorff. With tongue in cheek – or better said – in mouthpiece, Mangelsdorff accompanies Don Cherry on a journey that culminates in a zany duel staged almost without instruments. With his close friend Elvin Jones, Mangelsdorff unfurls so many melodic and metric parameters that one could believe they are listening to a full combo that dissolves conventional time patterns into kaleidoscopic polyrhythms, whereas the colorful tonal confrontation between Karl Berger’s agile, inspired vibes and the questioning, challenging trombone stands out as a lesson in Avant-garde brainstorming.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding. The roles of Caesar and Sextus, moreover, are taken by men, and there is not a countertenor in sight.

A genius signed to Decca in 1946 who defined Deccas piano sound in the 1950s and 1960s with ravishing cantabile and depth of sonority borne of matchless technique. Complete Decca Recordings on 35CDs, including new-to-CD early recordings remastered from 78s, plus some of Deccas first-ever LPs.
Presentation includes 35CD Lift-off- lid box; notes by Cyrus Meher-Homji in English, German and French; rare photos and selected original covers in booklet. A child prodigy of startling promise, Julius Katchen matured into a pianist of broad interests and unique artistry. His death at age 42 denied a discerning public the presence of one of Deccas star instrumentalists during the 1950s and 1960s.

It has been said about HK Gruber that "throws off labels as fast as pundits can affix them. Neo-romantic, neo-tonal, neo-expressionistic, neo-Viennese: he isn’t any of these things, so much as a sentient composer who keeps responding to whatever musical stimulus, be it highbrow or lowbrow, 12-tone or 7-tone, bitter or sweet, that comes his way."