Chamber Music & Recitals

While African masks are readily identified, their voices -although essential- are much less well-known: they speak and sing. The most modest masks, intended for entertainment, as well as the most powerful ones with strong supernatural power, use music...

Which 'Clavier' did Bach have in mind? Apart from a 'grand clavessin' by Michael Mietke, which he probably had at his disposal at the court in C?then, there is evidence that he knew instruments by Gottfried Silbermann. A harpsichord with a 16' stop by...

Whether you call it visceral or rockin', the music of Chicago-based composer Marc Mellits is never less than smokin' hot. In this album of ensemble works, New Music Detroit not only finds the groove, it shakes it. Smoke is the culmination of a long and...

Whether singing, conducting, dancing or acting, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is a source of fascination. Alpha Classics is proud to enter her world today and to present in 2017 her very first album as singer and conductor: with the...

Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an ?migr? in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans G (1890-1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in...

Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an ?migr? in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans G (1890-1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in...

Whereas The Art of the Fugue remains wrapped in respectful veneration and an aura of mystery, the contemporary Musical Offering has acquired relatively longstanding popularity. This is somewhat paradoxical, however, as the work is no less complex, and...

Where next after Mozart's Clarinet Quintet? Try these duos and trios by Georg Friedrich Fuchs (1752-1821) in newly recorded period-instrument performances. Born in the German city of Mainz in 1752, Fuchs was a pupil of Haydn's before becoming a wind-band...

Where Jutland meets Germany, you will find a border country that has served as a transition and meeting point for over a thousand years, but also as a point of contention. In the border country there has always been a living mix of Danes and Germans who...

When, on 26th August 2013 in the KKL Concert Hall, Claudio Abbado conducted a performance of Bruckner's Ninth with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, there was present in the room an inescapable sense of an ending. To this day, those present recall the...

When Zemlinsky died in 1942, there was no telling if or when posthumous recognition of his work would take place. Typical though his reception was for the 20th century - pockmarked by two world wars and Nazi rule, it remains remarkable just how...

When you read the name German Brass, you know just where you're at: here are musicians who can conjure up the most finely-honed degrees of timbre, volume and pitch that it is humanly possible to produce on brass instruments. It rings true: German Brass...