Sara Ovinge - Patientia - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The decision to record works by my great-grandfather was actually made some time ago. Back in 2006 I founded the Hohenstaufen chamber music festival, which takes place annually in September and of which I am the artistic director. We play chamber music from absolutely all eras at this festival, in a wide variety of scorings. This is how we came to engage with the chamber music of Robert Kahn and produce the first CD with hänssler CLASSIC in 2013. I was aware of Kahns´s composiotns at the end of the 1990s. Kahn was a senator of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Professor at the Musikhochschule in Berlin for chamber music and piano.

Amy and Sara Hamann Heralded as 'having the eloquence and ability to maintain their audience under their powers' by L'Impartial, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Amy and Sara Hamann in just a few years have won international recognition, captivating audiences and critics alike wherever they appear. Amy and Sara are the first American Piano Duo to win the Absolute First Prize in the Fryderyk Chopin Concorso Pianistico Internazionale, held in Rome, Italy. They are also the youngest First Prize winners in the history of the National Federation of Music Clubs Ellis Competition for Duo-Pianists. In addition to winning the first prize, Amy and Sara were awarded the Lucile Parrish Ward Award for the best performance of American music. As winners of the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies' Concerto Competition, Amy and Sara made their professional debut at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Their broad range of repertoire and versatility in playing period and modern instruments has led them to be featured artists at the Chautauqua Institution, the Quebec International Duo-Piano Festival as well as the Reding-Piette Two-Piano Festival in Switzerland. Frequently, Amy and Sara's performances have been broadcast on national and international television and radio, including NPR's Performance Today. This recording was made live in concert in June 2004. The recital was sponsored by The Schubert Club and Children's Yamaha Music School (where the sisters began their music study with Lana Flatau). Currently Amy and Sara Hamann are busily engaged in teaching and concertizing. Upcoming projects include a classical music video as well as recital, concerto, and festival appearances throughout the United States and Europe.

A selection of Lieder, however broad, focuses perforce on the German language, as dictated by the theoretical, historical, and technical definition of the word InchLied,Inch of the genre InchLieder.InchWhat is more, this particular selection of Lieder, though broad, gravitates around a strong poetic inspiration which, entrusted here to Sara Mingardo, is oriented towards the evocation of moonlit nights, of mysterious nocturnal scents, of that contemplative solitude that quivers between the two extremes of eros and nostalgia. The Lieder of Brahms and Mahler promise cosmic dimensions in the sphere of the sublime. In these, too, the listener also moves, but in ascent or descent (s)he Inchmoves his (her) stepsInch not here and there, but into the depths which, when inverted, lead to the heights of heaven, in a sphere almost independent of time and space.At this point our reconnaissance brings us to the music presented for our enjoyment on this CD. Here again, one senses the air and the motion of the passeggiata, of an easy, informal stroll. This apparently unlikely association is prompted by the metaphorical image of music in the open air as a leisure pursuit, as entertainment. And here is the nub this image, which implies the idea of InchmovementInch in space and time (the brief space of a public garden, the brief space of a spring afternoon, or that between summer and autumn), takes on much broader ramifications as soon as we establish a logical connection between the democratic social and cultural function of the InchPromsInch and the mature self-analysis of the kind of lofty, profound music, intimately bound up with a poetic text of similar spiritual level, that was such a feature of Austro-German culture between 1860 and 1914, between the national (or even InchnationalisticInch) undertones of the said culture and the First World War.The historical parallel is not ne