Totensonntag

Boris Papandopulo: his name sounds Greek, and yet he has to be regarded as the most important Croatian composer of the twentieth century. Our third release featuring this uncommonly versatile composer presents his Concertos for Piccolo and Harpsichord. As in many of his concertos for solo instruments and orchestra, here too Papandopulo draws on neoclassical, that is, Baroque, sources in his Harpsichord Concerto. The three characteristic movements follow the model fast-slow-fast in their sequence. In the introductory cantata the composer incorporates dodecaphonic features into the musical structure in a most highly individual and original manner in order then to blend them with compositional-technical elements of the Baroque. He employed the piccolo in many ways his works.

In the male-dominated world of the time, in which women who performed and composed required special assertive skills, Johanna Senfter consciously refrained from a career in the wider world and limited her creative field to her birthplace of Oppenheim am Rhein near Mainz, not least because of her unstable health as a result of a severe bout of diphtheria in her childhood. This pragmatic self-limitation has given way to an interesting, decades-long debate, not least because her compositional legacy at the Cologne Musikhochschule is available to all interested researchers and musicians and has led to new editions or first recordings of her compositions.

Wer noch nach Beweisen dafür sucht, dass sich bei komponierenden Genies Quantität und Qualität nicht ausschließen müssen, der wird hier vielfach fündig.