Various Artists - Arstiderne - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

The Greek soprano Fanie Antonelou and German pianist Kerstin Mörk here join forces in an exciting project, entitled 'Affinities'. In a carefully constructed sequence of 23 songs, they explore the kinship between Greek and German art songs - a varied one, filtered through friendships, family connections and teacher-pupil relationships. All the composers represented on the album studied and/or worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the three great German-speaking musical centres - Vienna, Munich and Berlin - and include figures both well known (Schoenberg, Weill, Skalkottas and Mitropoulos) and less familiar (Emilios Riadis, Dimitrios Lialios, Ludwig Thuille). With twelve composers and even more poets involved, the subject matter of the individual songs is diverse indeed - from a café scene in Berlin (Der Abschiedsbrief by Kurt Weill in cabaret mode) to a hymn to Aphrodite, set by Dimitri Mitropoulos in a highly expressionistic free atonal idiom inspired by Schoenberg.

The fourth and final recording of Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett's InchMare BalticumInch project with and about music from the Baltic region, the first of which has already received the coveted ICMA, is perhaps the most beautiful. One-part melodies sung by four women in their own rhythm and yet in complete unison transport us to the bygone world of the Middle Ages. Solo songs bring us even closer to that time. For instance, when - this is just one example - Lorenza Donadini as Mary laments the death of Jesus, we hear the grief of a living mother over the death of her own child. What a pity that this excursion into the past lasts only 79 minutes!

Rudolf von Beckerath built his very first organ for the St. Elisabeth Church in Hamburg. The InchOpus 1Inch of the later world-famous organ builder has recently been restored to it's former glory. Despite the extensive expansion of the instrument, it can still be played unchanged in it's original state due to a technical refinement. Jens Ludwig presents the work with a personal selection and decided highlights of the baroque. Beckerath's original specification of 1951 could not be fully realized at that time for reasons of cost. 11 stops on two manuals had to suffice. Seven more stops were added a few years later, and this is the extent to which the instrument existed until it's restoration in 2019. The clever double console houses Beckerath's original console on one side and it's modern counterpart with four manuals opposite, which control both the IncholdInch organ and it's extension. This is an ideal symbiosis between conservation of the monument and innovative function. Whether Eurovision Fanfare, Toccata in D minor, Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Handel's InchLargoInch or Bach-Gounod's InchAve MariaInch you can almost sing along with this program. It is all the more beautiful to listen to the wonderful register colors, such as the trumpets in the main and swell sections in the pieces by Jeremiah Clarke, or the crumhorn in InchJesus bleibet meine FreudeInch. The instrument is also excellently suited for chamber music or continuo playing. Here we hear Telemann's rarely performed viola concerto or CPE Bach's Hamburg Sonata in G major for flute and continuo. Most of the pieces have a direct connection to Hamburg. In the case of Telemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, this is obvious from their biographies. Bach and Handel also have their Hanseatic points of contact. And the pieces from France and England are easily justified by Hamburg's well-known internationalism.