Zanter / Dikener / Alves / Ankara University - Letters to a Young Poet - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

No time of day has presumably been set to music more often than the nighttime. On this album violinist Elena Denisova and pianist Alexei Kornienko are featuring nocturnal works of the 20th and 21st century. Canto crepuscolare by Gian Francesco Malipiero, dating from 1908, is still a playful impressionist composition, while the Nocturne for violin and piano by John Cage (1947) rather revels the silence. A calm and melancholic vision is painted by Helmut Rogls Ein Traum zur halben Nacht (A Dream at Midnight, 1986), whereas Notturno (2007) by Michael Colina and Incubus, Fantasy for violin, piano and electronics (2020/21) by Alfred Huber depict the eerie and scary traits of nighttime. Like the work by Huber, Durch die Nacht (Through the Night) for violin and pre-recorded electroacoustics by Dieter Kaufmann (2020/21) as well as all the darkness we can hear - all the silence we can see (2020/21) by Oscar Jockel are world premiere recordings.

Heine Quartett - Intimate Letters [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/01/2006

Leonie ('Lony') Fraenkel was a German-Jewish exile from Nazi Berlin who set up the Café de Paris on Beethovenstraat in Amsterdam in 1939. In late 1939 she sent a card to greet Peter, her first grandson, newly born in safety in England, and over the next three years she sent a series of letters to Peter and his mother, Lony's daughter. In 1943 she was deported first to the Westerbork transit camp, and then to Theresienstadt and, finally, in October 1944 to Auschwitz, where she was gassed two days after her arrival. Many years later, that grandson, Peter, now a grandfather himself, discovered Lony's letters, translated them and brought them to the attention of the composer Ronald Corp. Ronald Corp has set Lony's letters in a series of lyrical arioso recitatives for mezzo-soprano, string quartet, and piano, lasting just over an hour. The cycle was first heard at the Proms in St. Jude's in Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London, in 2017, and now Toccata Classics is releasing it's first recording.