H. Herzogenberg Von - Secular Choral Music 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Small treasures, as promised by the song Pennies from Heaven in the eponymous 1936 film with Bing Crosby, are assembled on the latest from the Mandelring Quartet favorites, individual movements and encores which the Mandelring Quartet regularly play in concert, but also works which don't fit into - or at the end of - standard concert programmes and are therefore presented on this album. Whether classical or non-classical, original works or felicitous arrangements for string quartet all pieces are much loved by the ensemble. After spending weeks searching through their music archives, accumulated over more than thirty years, and sifting out the highlights from a huge body of works, the Mandelring Quartet now present a colorful mixture of miniatures from diverse genres across the centuries. They include rarely played compositions of the classical repertoire, such as a movement from the very first string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; pieces which the Mandelring Quartet like to play as encores, such as the Allegretto, which Dmitri Shostakovich distilled from his ballet The Golden Age; tango classics such as Cafetín de Buenos Aires, stylishly arranged by Werner Thomas-Mifune; earworm candidates such as the Andante cantabile from Piotr Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in D major; trouvailles such as the adaptation of the St. Louis Blues, which the violinist Sebastian Schmidt discovered whilst on tour in the US when he visited a music shop in Los Angeles in order to buy a music stand because his suitcase had been lost. This compilation combines InchPennies from HeavenInch from highly diverse musical spheres into a musical treasure trove - and at the same time presents the Mandelring Quartet at their most personal.

Baumgartner / Lucerne Festival Strings - Brandenburg Ctos 1 [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/19/2007

The Trio Lirico has programmed three composers who lived and worked on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain until 1989 for Franziska Pietsch and Sophia Reuter this is music which - paraphrasing Goethe - they Inchsearch with their soulsInch. InchAs children, we both lived in East Berlin and were close friends alreadyInch, Franziska Pietsch explains about her violist colleague. InchWe therefore share personal history, a similar style of playing and a similar non-verbal way of communicating about this music. We just feel it.Inch This personal form of perception, into which the Bremen cellist Johannes Krebs blends empathetically, is not irrelevant for this music which becomes accessible not just via the text but also to a high degree via the cultural and political environment in which it was written. Of course Krzysztof Penderecki (b.1933), following the political liberalization of Polish music from 1956, had the opportunity to tie in with avant-garde developments in the West and to create his very own and unique modernism. On the other hand, his generational colleague Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) and the older Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) had, until the end of the Soviet Union, to assert their music in the face of massive harassment from the authorities which, in Weinberg's case, went as far as being arrested for anti-Semitic reasons. Born in Warsaw, Weinberg, who fled to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, kept in close contact with his friend and mentor Dmitri Shostakovich. Nonetheless, Weinberg's music is entirely unique, and his string trio of 1950 strikes a balance between popular tunes and references to Yiddish music. Alfred Schnittke, who found it hard gaining acceptance on account of his (Volga) German and Jewish heritage, composed his trio in 1985 for the birthday of his illustrious colleague Alban Berg - and, shortly after completing the work, suf