Hong Rafea - From Our World to Yours - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

With his birthplace of Budapest, Benedek Horváth (*1989) feels very close to his 'fellow countryman', the great virtuoso and cosmopolitan Franz Liszt. Important stages of his career are inseparably linked with this name and the interpretation of the visionary's piano works has kept him busy since his early years of study. Horváth completed his soloist diploma at the Basel Music Academy and received important artistic impulses from András Schiff, Dimitri Bashkirov and Menahem Pressler. He was a finalist at renowned competitions such as the Concours Clara Haskil in Vevey. In 2018 he was awarded the 'Junior Prima', one of the most important cultural prizes in Hungary.

The Dutch composer Robin de Raaff has four symphonies to his name. Will de Raaff follow in the footsteps of tradition, or will he give the name, the form, a new meaning, a new direction? His symphonies have little to do with the classical concept. Of course, his love for composing was partly derived from the symphonies of composers such as Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and even Bernstein, but de Raaf is too much of a constructivist to write a symphony in the classical sense of the word. de Raaff became more and more convinced there was something to be gained in the concertante form, the orchestra and the soloist, the individual and the crowd. He shies away from prescribed forms and developments, a recapitulated theme followed by various movements with different characters. The symphony, the orchestral apparatus sounding together, telling it's story for a period of at least twenty minutes, is what he took as his starting point. Working from there, this led to a reinterpretation of the symphonic form. de Raaff's Second and Fourth Symphonies are the result of a reinterpretation of works for a soloist or soloist group with accompaniment. They are a revision of the material, reminiscent of the way in which Pierre Boulez let Incises for piano grow into Sur incises for ensemble and how Luciano Berio recomposed a number of his Sequenzas into Chemins.

It's been 13 years since Alkaline Trio released their first full-length album, GODDAMNIT. In that time, they've toured the world, sold over a million records, and expanded their sound radically beyond their original straight-ahead punk style. Now comes an amazing retrospective of those 13 years, DAMNESIA, as ALK3 takes to the studio to record acoustic versions of 13 fan favorites and 2 new songs.