Loserthomas Bernhard

After the double album of the Violin and Harpsichord Sonatas with Kristian Bezuidenhout, a bestseller in 2018, here is the next installment in a Bach recording adventure that began nine years ago with a set of the Sonatas and Partitas now regarded as a benchmark. Isabelle Faust, Bernhard Forck and his partners at the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin have patiently explored a multitude of other works by Bach: harpsichord concertos, trio sonatas for organ, instrumental movements from sacred cantatas etc. All are revealed here as direct or indirect relatives of the three monumental Concertos BWV 1041-43.

Bernhard Scully maintains an active international career as a horn soloist and pedagogue. He is currently the Professor of Horn at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign.

This album explores clarinet music by Swiss composers from the mid-19th century to the present, showcasing six different instruments from the clarinet family. Five of the eight pieces are world premiere recordings.

The Pianist Bernhard Parz (born 1979 in Vienna) studied Piano at the University of Music in Vienna and the Conservatory of Music Vienna. In his career he has earned several prizes (i.e. 1st prize at "International Johannes Brahms Competition") and played concerts throughout Asia, South America and Europe.

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin returns to Pentatone together with soprano Christina Landshamer, presenting La Passione, a collection of dazzling concert arias on love, longing and loss by Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, paired with the latter’s “La Passione” Symphony. Ranging from pastoral simplicity to exuberant outrage, the programme offers some of the finest vocal writing around 1800, including some of Beethoven’s rare and little-known excursions to Italian bravura opera, as well as one of the most dramatic and expressive symphonies of the eighteenth-century.

Cleverly paired with two symphonies by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – written in 1755/56 and 1775/76 respectively – Beethoven’s first two contributions to the symphonic genre reveal the bubbling creativity of a thirty-year-old composer determined to go even further in the renewal of the genre than another, very recent reference, Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’. So much is clear from the very first chord of his Symphony No. 1! Relive this decisive moment in the company of the musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik, under the guidance of their Konzertmeister Bernhard Forck.

A popular German singer and radio and TV host, Bernhard Brink was born on May 17, 1952, and by the early '70s he was well on his way to a law degree in Berlin when he decided to concentrate on music instead. He eventually signed to Hansa Records and released a dozen or so charting singles between 1974 and 1981, many of which were thinly disguised adaptations of English pop tunes.

Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) left behind an enormous oeuvre of over 600 works for and with lute, which not only impresses with its virtuosity but also with its musical quality and characterises him both as a composer of the first rank and documents his exceptional status as a lutenist.

The least famous of Beethoven’s symphonies? Yet these two works are genuine tours de force: the composer takes the listener on a journey whose destination never seems to be known in advance, one brimming over with structural innovations subtly brought out in this interpretation by the musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.