Chamber Music & Recitals

As early as the 1820s, the Dessau court Kapellmeister Friedrich Schneider conceived the plan to compose a coherent series of four full-length oratorios dealing with the life of Jesus. Although Schneider did not realize his original plan of a tetralogy,...

As early as 1882, audiences acclaimed the premiere of the first symphony by Alexander Glazunov, who was just 16 years old. The Niederrheinische Sinfoniker, under the baton of their principal conductor Mihkel K?tson, now present an extremely attractive...

As Clare Hammond writes in the liner notes to her thought-provoking selection of piano ?tudes, the genre, at it's best, 'combines the visceral excitement of technical display with expressive, coloristic and compositional ingenuity'. Opening with three...

As artists we are chroniclers of the emotions of a particular time, and if we are lucky our chronicles radiate a little, illuminating the path. Moritz Eggert's new disc shows how diverse are the paths he endeavors to illumine. With works both traditional...

As Anna Paradiso writes in her liner notes to this disc 'the history of music is full of fine composers who, for one reason or another, have been largely forgotten.' In the case of Pietro Domenico Paradisi, it is only thanks to his Sonate di gravicembalo...

As Alfred Schnittke and Arvo P?rt both adopted the Orthodox faith in the 1970s, Orthodox choral traditions became increasingly prominent in their work, but both composers also looked to the music of the Western church. Schnittke's Three Sacred Hymns set...

As a performer and conductor, Christian Lindberg has a rare ability to electrify an audience, and as reviewers attest, the same applies to his compositions. Released on disc in 2018, his viola concerto Steppenwolf was described as 'one of those rare...

As a composer Sergei Prokofiev was so versatile that audiences never quite knew what to expect. As a strategy, this could misfire but with his first symphony he got things just right. He once described what he had wanted to achieve: 'If Haydn had lived...

Arthur Lourie (1892-1966) is one of the most important representatives of the Russian avant-garde, even though he unfortunately never received the appropriate attention due to emigration, among other things. While his early piano pieces were still linked...

Ars Antiqua Austria and Gunar Letzbor present outstanding sacred concerts by Rupert Ignaz Mayr for voice, a virtuoso solo violin and basso continuo. Mayr, working largely in Munich from 1683 until his death, is considered a reformer of southern Germany's...

Around 1800 Vienna was, alongside Paris, one of the European centers for guitar performance. The instrument was well suited for the idiom of Viennese classicism and ideal for domestic music-making and it was promoted by figures such as the virtuoso Mauro...

Arnold Schoenberg's second string quartet - included on a previous release by the Gringolts Quartet - is often used as a reference point when the emergence of atonality is discussed. That work, where Schoenberg in the fourth movement suddenly does away...