Udo Zimmermann - White Rose - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Udo Zimmerman spent three careful years working on this opera which tells the true story of brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, who led a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. Condemned to die for their actions, we join the siblings in real time as they await their execution from their prison cells. Zimmerman, through stark storytelling and pared down orchestration, leads us with sobriety through their story, at once appalling and life affirming, through which a glimmer of hope and faith in humanity shines from beginning to bitter end. Udo Zimmerman conducts the Musica Viva Ensemble Dresden, who offer superb support to the young soloists.

Of all the instruments that have marked the course of musical history, the piano has certainly gone through one of the most remarkable evolutions. It began as an intermediary, transitory stage between two instrumental traditions. Following it's invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori at the beginning of the 18 the century, the piano gradually replaced the plucked strings of the harpsichord with a hammered, striking action; this innovation enabled a far wider range of dynamic nuance, increasingly winning over musicians and composers in the 18th and above all in the 19th century. After Cristofori, the German keyboard maker Gottfried Silbermann further developed the instrument, and it's sound eventually became more like that of the modern piano as we know it. In the quest for interpretations that get as close as possible to those of past eras, some of today's pianists have adopted the early pianoforte, offering the listener the opportunity to discover the sounds the composer would have heard and conceived. Firmly convinced of the rightness of this approach, Alpha has collected 10 albums of these recordings, in an attractively produced set, presenting works by a number of different composers, including Haydn, Chopin, Beethoven and Schumann, performed by some of the tag's iconic pianists, such as Freddy Eichelberger, Jos van Immerseel, Alexei Lubimov, and Eric Le Sage.

This product is an authorized manufactured on demand CD-R