Berg / Musikkollegium Winterthur / Cunz / Tauran - 3 Fragments from Wozzeck Op. 7 / 3 Orchestral - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Alban Berg's Wozzeck, which premiered at Lindenoper/ Berlin in 1925, is regarded as one of the key music compositions of the 20th century and an essential work in any connoisseur's collection. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck, which was left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's play on May 5, 1914, and knew at once that he wanted to base an opera on it. From the fragments of unordered scenes left by Büchner, Berg selected fifteen to form a compact structure of three acts with five scenes each. He adapted the libretto himself. On this , the Frankfurt Opera, under the baton of Sebastian Weigle, delivers a razor-sharp and exciting interpretation. With Audun Iversen and Claudia Mahnke in the main roles the recording shows an ideal cast.

Volume VII of the Robert Craft Schoenberg Collection begins with the early Six Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, in which the obvious harmonic and melodic influence of Wagner is counterbalanced by a more personal instrumentation.

György Kurtág (born 1926) composed his Kafka-Fragmente in the mid-1980s; it's forty settings of Franz Kafka text fragments remain one of his most often-performed works, commonly presented in staged versions. Many of the movements are extremely brief; in the present recording 11 of the movements are less than 0 30 long. This often highly virtuosic and demanding score is interpreted by soprano Caroline Meltzer and violinist Nurit Stark, artists with a strong commitment to contemporary music who've collaborated with composers such as Aribert Reimann, Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin.