Karoline Schuch

On his latest album "Brahms, Schumann, Gade", the clarinet virtuoso and three-time ECHO Klassik winner Sebastian Manz dedicates himself to three absolute opera magna of the clarinet repertoire. The focus on the chamber music core repertoire makes this album project stand out clearly from the artist's previous discography. Without distractions or programmatic embellishments, Sebastian Manz completely serves the artistic content of these timeless masterpieces in this album. Sebastian Manz is accompanied on the piano by Herbert Schuch. Together they inspire with recordings in which one can hear that time and space have been left for spontaneous musical qualities. The thoughts and emotions of the performers thus come to the fore unfiltered. In addition, large-scale takes preserve the musical flow and their naturalness.

Pianist Herbert Schuch marks the 100th anniversary of Erwin Schulhoff’s Piano Concerto, which was composed in 1923 and has not yet attained the recognition it deserves. It’s a work that shows the influence of the jazz styles that had crossed the Atlantic and were then taking Europe by storm. Schuch pairs it here with Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and also includes Schulhoff’s cadenza for the opening movement of the Beethoven work. Discover a world of musical contrasts on this album on which the pianist is joined by the WDR Sinfonieorchester and conductor Tung-Chieh Chuang.

Schuch: “Indeed, it’s quite exciting to look at what was going on exactly 100 years ago – perhaps because 1923 doesn’t seem all that distant to us. Certain events and circumstances seem to mirror one another a century apart. From a musical point of view, Erwin Schulhoff’s piano concerto is a truly interesting work that has not attained the recognition it deserves…“