Syliva Gunter

Gunter Herbig's meditative e-guitar albums have become cult objects far beyond the classical music scene. After 'ex oriente' with arrangements of piano music by Gurdjieff/de Hartmann (BIS Records) and the Villa-Lobos album 'Tristorosa' (Aldilà Records), he has now taken on the iconic music of Arvo Pärt on his Gretsch White Falcon. He has transcribed vocal and instrumental pieces of various sizes and settings in tablature for the guitar, as has been the custom since the 14th century in order to reproduce polyphonic works on the solo instrument. Not only does the music gain an incomparable breadth and atmospheric liveliness through the resonance of the electric guitar as well as through the possibilities of subsequent shaping of the sound; at the same time, Arvo Pärt's music resounds here completely pure and simple, reduced to the essential, magical in it's eremitic power, as close to silence as we already know from Herbig's Gurdjieff album, and as perhaps only Gunter Herbig is able to manifest in this way combining inner warmth and outer beauty.

What a Brahms cycle! Günter Wand’s fairly brisk tempos, astute sense of linear clarity, and palpable dynamic intensity often hold a modern-day sonic mirror to Toscanini’s way with the composer. Listen to how the First symphony’s driving introduction ever so gradually eases into the incisively shaped main theme, or notice the fourth-movement introduction’s seamless yet almost improvisatory transitions. The Third’s difficult-to-balance first movement is all of a piece, with the sustained wind passages, brass outbursts, and often buried lower strings contoured in revelatory perspective.

What a Brahms cycle! Günter Wand’s fairly brisk tempos, astute sense of linear clarity, and palpable dynamic intensity often hold a modern-day sonic mirror to Toscanini’s way with the composer. Listen to how the First symphony’s driving introduction ever so gradually eases into the incisively shaped main theme, or notice the fourth-movement introduction’s seamless yet almost improvisatory transitions. The Third’s difficult-to-balance first movement is all of a piece, with the sustained wind passages, brass outbursts, and often buried lower strings contoured in revelatory perspective.

For the first time, from the vaults of electronic music guru, Klaus Schulze, comes The Schulze-Schickert Session, a rare and previously unreleased private session featuring echo-guitar pioneer Günter Schickert. Recorded on 26 September 1975 in Klaus Schulze's home studio in Hambuehren, Germany, Schulze can be heard playing an EMS Synthi A, as well as keyboards, and a Syntanorma, while Schickert plays a 12-string Framus with metal strings and also sings on a few tracks. Although Schickert's name is little-known outside of a very select circle of krautrock fans, he was a key member of the Berlin free jazz scene of the 1960s and a pioneer of the echo-guitar.

Although at first we might wonder at the rationale for pairing these two pieces–a double bass concerto and a sinfonia concertante by a (not very well liked) colleague of Mozart and Haydn–on closer inspection we realize that the connection derives from the fact that both pieces were premiered by the same double bass virtuoso. Leopold Kozeluch’s Sinfonia Concertante is scored for the unique combination of mandolin, trumpet, double bass, and piano.

A German bandleader, pianist, arranger and composer.
Growing up with three brothers in Bad Kissingen, Günter Maier was the eldest son of a postman early in touch with music and studied piano. He was classically trained at the Bavarian State Conservatory in Würzburg and studied piano and composition. His studies he financed as jazz musicians performing in American clubs as a member of the Hep Cats combo . Even after successful graduation he initially joined on as a jazz musician with the Helmut Brandt Combo on. In 1961, it undertook RIAS for his RIAS Dance Orchestra in Berlin as a pianist and deputy conductor…

Suddenly, and not before time, the Sixth Symphony of Bruckner is riding high. And deservedly so since it is the tersest of his mature symphonies and the most openly exultant. Unlike the superficially more alluring Fourth, it needs a real musician to direct it, no mere master of orchestral ceremonies. What's more, it needs a Brucknerian with a passion for musical logic, a musical realist rather than a musical romantic. As such it is a work better suited to a Rosbaud, a Klemperer, or a Wand rather than someone like Jochum or Furtwangler however inspirational they may be at certain critical moments in the score.