Oehms

The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries above all as the writer of important ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkönig, Herr Oluf and Archibald Douglas are well-known examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler were popular hits, especially in a bygone heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs. But the same Carl Loewe also wrote six operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos as well as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all of which have fallen into oblivion.

The solo piano music of Béla Bartók is sometimes compared to that of Schoenberg, but Bartók's works are more emotionally accessible to listeners, particularly when they are played as Andreas Bach does on this album. While a great importance is placed on the percussiveness of Bartók's music, Bach instead focuses on the harmonies and the temperaments of these works. He does not ignore those more primitive aspects of the music, but rather than being sharply aggressive, Bach uses more of a forceful follow-through to control the sound.

Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), a priest, was maestro di cappella at San Marco for the last 25 years of his life, following Adrian Willaert and Cypriano de Rore. A year after arriving at San Marco, he published this book of 13 motets for six voices. These motets are being published this year (2013) in a modern edition by Cristle Collins Judd, the annotator of this disc, along with four motets for four voices published a year later (not recorded here).

Few atonal piano compositions are so amenable to generate new meaningful, extremely sombre soundscapes as ‘ Triadic Memories’, according to different modalities of execution some would call rendition. This one execution, excruciatingly slow, generates aural hallucinations in the guise of rational insights. Beware of the illusion of order, this Feldman classic piece proves that that is way more harmful, as in pathetically alienating, than the illusion of depth..

Die Sopranistin Miriam Alexandra hat für diese Produktion ein spannendes Lieder-Programm mit hohem Repertoire-Wert (darunter einige Ersteinspielungen) der Komponistin Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) zusammengestellt. Die meisten Gedichte auf dieser CD stammen von Eduard Mörike. Aufgenommen hat sie die Lieder vergangenen August im Studio Britz des Deutschlandradios in Berlin. Begleitet wurde sie dabei von keinem Geringeren als vom renommierten Liedbegleiter und Professor Eric Schneider.

The cellist Wen-Sinn Yang and the conductor Shao-Chia Lü live and work in Germany. Both were trained at important music o academies in Berlin and Vienna. During the 2016/17 season Wen-Sinn Yang was invited to perform several concerts as artist in residence with the Taipei National Symphony Orchestra. The performances of three concertos in June 2017 were so enthusiastically received that it was decided to release them as live recordings. The wonderful acoustics of the National Concert Hall in Taipei and the amicable dialogue between soloist and conductor have thus been preserved on this CD.