Various - Works for Organ - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

To make the dream come true and record the music for the album, Kaczka and Nadrzycki had to conquer thousands of kilometres and overcome numerous obstacles. The mental barrier turned out to be the hardest if they wanted to focus strictly on the music, they had to forget about cancelled flights and restrictions, not to mention all the disturbing news regarding the global spread of SARS-Co-V 2 or the insecure artistic and professional prospects for the future in face of the lockdown and closed concert halls. But they succeeded. They managed to devote themselves to the music entirely, the result being an exquisite album that for listeners will prove to be a welcome respite from the pandemic and a space to breathe freely.

Music of Chad presents music and dance from several regions of this landlocked Central African nation. Featured sounds include interwoven ostinato melodies created by the balafon (wooden xylophone) and the coucouma, a violin-like instrument performed by Bilala shamans from central Chad. Also heard is the n'gambaya guitar, a five-stringed instrument from the Logone district with a wooden body that is covered in a thin animal hide. Liner notes include descriptions of the region, the instruments, dances, and ceremonies, as well as instrument photographs.

Here are two works composed by Schubert at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (Swansong) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He died on 19 November at the age of thirty-one, and Die Taubenpost (Pigeon post), which closes the collection, is said to be his very last composition. The fourteen songs, by turns light-hearted, somber and melancholy, are settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl. In the summer of the same year he composed his String Quintet in C major, scored for two cellos, which was not premiered until 1850, at the Vienna Musikverein. The power and orchestral dimensions of the work make it a pinnacle of nineteenth-century chamber music. We could not have dreamt of a finer line-up of musicians to record these two Schubert monuments. Fanny Mendelssohn's Schwanenlied (also to words by Heinrich Heine) completes the programme, along with Felix Mendelssohn's Song Without Words no.1 for solo piano, composed a year after Schubert's death and Schubert's own setting of an unrelated Schwanengesang (D 744, on a poem by Johann Senn).