Wolfgang Hoffmann

This year the Bremen Cathedral Choir is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and with its director of many years, Wolfgang Helbich, it also has certainly enjoyed a »musical marriage« of a rare kind. And then there is the splendid Bremen tradition that has been observed for some eighty years now: the Christmas song concert in St. Peter’s Cathedral so very dear to the hearts of the Bremen public. Since cpo, as a label with its home in Northern Germany, has long maintained close ties to the Hansa city (cf. Radio Bremen, Weser-Renaissance Bremen, and not least Helbich himself), it seemed to us to be high time to document this event full of the Christmas spirit for the pleasure of a wider listening audience. Everything that lends the Christmas season its musical magic is represented in traditional arrangements, from Adeste Fideles to Vom Himmel hoch.

E.T.A. Hoffmann was a ‘man for all seasons’. In addition to composing music, he was an illustrator, writer, and attorney who attained a position on the Court of Appeals in Berlin. His primary legacy is in the area of German literature. He wrote many novels and stories concerned with supernatural elements and their impact on humans. Hoffmann’s most famous writings are the stories on which the French composer Jacques Offenbach based his opera "Tales of Hoffmann".
When I read a Hoffmann story, I think of the supernatural operas of Carl Maria von Weber, not Hoffmann’s most well known opera "Undine". The fact is that Hoffmann’s reputation as a composer is slight, and recordings of his works are infrequent. Even during his own lifetime, he had great trouble getting his music published.

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (Königsberg, January 24, 1776 – Berlin, June 25, 1822), who changed his third name to Amadeus in honour to Mozart, is one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism, and a pioneer of the fantasy genre, with a taste for the macabre. He was also a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist.
As a musician, he composed about 80 works, including several operas, among them Aurora (1811-12), after Franz von Holbein, and Undine (1814), after Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's tale, one symphony, sacred and chamber music, as well as instrumental pieces.

Joseph Eybler was a Viennese composer of the late 18th and 19th centuries. He was a pupil of Johan Georg Albrechtsberger (as were Hummel and Beethoven), and was a respected friend of Mozart and Haydn. He is believed to have had a close involvement with the composing and posthumous completion of Mozart's "Requiem". His Christmas Oratorio "The Shepherds at the Crib in Bethlehem" was his his first major choral work at the age of 29. Its musical style is a synergistic blend of "late baroque" elements (no doubt imbibed from his traditionalist mentor Albrechtsberger) together with the then modern style developed by Haydn and Mozart. Listeners can be grateful to the conductor of this performance, Wolfgang Helbich (Director of Music at Saint Peter's Cathedral in Bremen), whose resaerches have rescued this entrancing work from undesereved obscurity.

The 200th anniversary of Haydn's death arrived in 2009, and this mammoth box boasts one CD for every year that's passed! Well, not quite, but only a composer as prolific as this Viennese-classical master could even come close: 150 CDs of symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music, oratorios and more beautiful music that have challenged performers and inspired composers for centuries. You'll hear the symphonies performed by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra; the piano and violin concertos played by L'Arte dell'Arco; the trumpet, horn and cello concertos played by the Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields; the string quartets performed by the Buchberger Quartet; the lieder performed by Elly Ameling and Joerg Demus, and much, much more!