A selection of Richard Strauss’s most-loved lieder and songs, and Elisabeth’s arias from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the role in which Lise Davidsen will make her debut at Bayreuth Festival. Plus Ariadne’s aria from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos: her 2017 Glyndebourne debut in the title role was named “one of those ‘I was there’ moments” (The Times).
Also includes Strauss’s iconic Four Last Songs, originally premiered by Decca’s Kirsten Flagstad. Recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra, who performed the premiere of the Four Last Songs, and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Director of music to the Darmstadt court, Graupner's output almost equalled that of Telemann and certainly surpassed that of J.S. Bach: he composed a number of operas, many concertos and orchestral suites, chamber music, keyboard works and more than 1400 church cantatas. Almost the entire body of Graupner’s work has survived in autograph but hardly any of his compositions were published during his lifetime or afterwards. Fortunately they were not burnt after his death as he himself wished, but were the subject of a legal dispute between the landgrave and Graupner’s heirs. Thanks to this the complete archive was taken to a place outside the city and thus spared a second burning, as very little of the old city of Darmstadt would be spared during the Second World War.

Nach vier Single-Auskopplungen des Rappers schiebt Peter Fox 2023 sein neues Album »Love Songs« hinterher.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg in 1809 and died in Leipzig at the age of 38. He was very early musically gifted. Mendelssohn performed in public at the age of 9 and composed already from the age of 11. As a pupil of Friedrich Zelter, who was a friend of Goethe, Mendelssohn composed at the age of 17 his first masterpiece: the Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream. This is included in the extensive CD box as well as a large number of other known or less known pieces by him. The String Quartet in F Minor Op. 80 - written in memory of his beloved sister Fanny - which was recorded in this collection by the Aurora String Quartet is undoubtedly one of his most beautiful works. The Gächinger Kantorei with Helmuth Rilling, the Bach Collegium Stuttgart, the Bartholdy Piano Quartet, the Heidelberger Sinfoniker with Thomas Fey, Ana-Marija Markovina and other renowned interpreters and orchestras can also be heard.

A popular German singer and radio and TV host, Bernhard Brink was born on May 17, 1952, and by the early '70s he was well on his way to a law degree in Berlin when he decided to concentrate on music instead. He eventually signed to Hansa Records and released a dozen or so charting singles between 1974 and 1981, many of which were thinly disguised adaptations of English pop tunes.

One of today’s most sought-after conductors, acclaimed for his charismatic leadership and inspirational performances in both symphonic and operatic repertoire, Sir Antonio Pappano is Chief Conductor Designate of the London Symphony Orchestra (assuming the full title from the 2024/2025 season) and has been Music Director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden since 2002. He is Music Director Emeritus of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, having served as Music Director from 2005-2023. Nurtured as a pianist, repetiteur and assistant conductor at many of the most important opera houses of Europe and North America, including at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and several seasons at the Bayreuth Festival as musical assistant to Daniel Barenboim, Pappano was appointed Music Director of Oslo’s Den Norske Opera in 1990, and from 1992-2002 served as Music Director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. From 1997-1999 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Am 11.9.1992 spielten Die Toten Hosen in Buenos Aires zum ersten Mal live in Argentinien, es war der Beginn einer großen Liebe zwischen einer Band aus Düsseldorf und den Fans aus Südamerika. 2022 jährte sich dieser Auftritt zum 30. Mal und gefeiert wurde dieses Jubiläum natürlich dem Anlass angemessen mit einigen Konzerten in der argentinischen Hauptstadt und einer weiteren Show in Tandil. Zu Trainingszwecken ließen wir einige der Abende mitschneiden. Vor ein paar Monaten schmiss Kuddel auf unserer Weihnachtsfeier zu vorgerückter Stunde die Aufnahmen noch mal in den Player und wir waren überrascht, dass diese nicht nur alle Anwesenden, sondern sogar die Polizeibeamt*innen, die wenig später wegen Ruhestörung anrückten, begeisterten.

Die schweigsame Frau was first presented in 1935; Hitler and Goebbels refused to attend because Stefan Zweig, the librettist, was a Jew and Strauss had restored his name to the program after the Nazis had insisted it be removed. It was a great success but was withdrawn for obvious reasons after three performances. It was not played again until 1946.

The new album “Our Songs” combines interpretations of very different top hits from Germany, which Anastacia now wants to bring out into the world in English. For her fans here in Germany, it is both familiar and completely new.

SOS Verhackertbrot! Wo knüpft man an nach dem Erfolgsjahr mit „Böll böll Kernöl“? Am besten dort, wo man gewesen ist: bei handgemachter Musik im Dialekt und in der Steiermark, dem grünen Herz von Österreich, die nicht nur musikalisch, sondern speziell auch im Bereich der Kulinarik so einiges zu bieten hat! Das neue Album 2024 lässt dabei musikalisch-kulinarisch keine Wünsche offen – vom Verhackertbrot bei einer Buschenschankjause über die Essgewohnheiten der Söhne Kuahtuttnmichls bis hin zum kulinarischen Kulturschock des Rasta Sepp in Jamaka. Überall wird die österreichische Kulinarik genossen und gefeiert – und das zurecht! Selbst etwaigen Körperreaktionen nach dem Genuss sollte man seinen Freiraum lassen, denn G’sundheit geht schließlich vor Anstand.

Named after a lyric from the first piece in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle, the Delian Quartett’s programme of Im wachen Traume combines said cycle – in a new arrangement for soprano and string quartet by the late Aribert Reimann – with music by Renaissance composer William Byrd and Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Most of the music appears in world premiere recordings here. The earlier English repertory bookends the album, framing Frauenliebe und Leben in a thematic embrace and, as the quartet’s violinist Andreas Moscho puts it, “in dazzling harmonies, that colour the musical span from the bliss of the moment to the end of things”. Claudia Barainsky, one of the foremost interpreters of Reimann’s music, is a striking presence throughout the programme and especially expressive in the Schumann cycle, delivering the music with conviction and a keen sense for the text’s emotional delivery. The majority of the Byrd and Purcell pieces appear in reworked versions by Italian composer Stefano Pierini.

Bach contemporaries such as Jan Zelenka (1679-1745) and Johann Pisendel (1687-1755), both of whom spent most of their creative lives at the Dresden court, are enjoying a well-deserved period of “discovery”–and so is Johann Schein (1586-1630), a less-interesting contemporary of Bach’s most illustrious predecessor, Heinrich Schütz, who preceded Bach as Kantor in Leipzig by a little more than a century. Schein’s primary claim to importance is his incorporation of Italian madrigal style into Lutheran church music. But it’s also clear that he was influenced by the big block-chord sound and antiphonal choir scoring favored by Gabrieli and similarly employed by Schütz.

Biggest Tip possible! ** English/German edition. 288 pp + 5CD plenty of incredible music, most of which have never been heard before ** From the Wolke Verlag imprint, who've already brought us incredible books like Karl Berger's "The Music Mind Experience", "FMP Free Music Production - The Living Music", Peter Brötzmann's Along the Way, and George Lewis' "Composing While Black. Afrodiasporic New Music Today", to name only a few and a great many more - comes one of the most engrossing volumes we've encountered all year: Harry Vogt  and  Martina Seeber’s “Radio Cologne Sound The Studio for Electronic Music The WDR”. Revealing the complex and fascinating history of one of the earliest and most important dedicated electronic music studios in the world, comprising three central portraits of its important directors - Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and York Höller - as well as a wealth of material, including essays, pictures, personal memories and anecdotes, in addition to texts that shed light on the intense interplay between technology, aesthetics, and those who worked in and at the studio, across its 288 pages - soundtracked by an incredible X5 CD collection gathering many of the most important works recorded by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Thomas Kessler, Franco Evangelisti’, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Iannis Xenakis, John McGuire, and Luc Ferrari (to name only a few) - one of the most important discrete histories in the development of avant-garde and experimental electronic music over the course of the second half of the 20th century.

The Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra dedicates itself here to a “forgotten master”. In drastic, enigmatic images of the Apocalypse of St. John, Louis Spohr’s oratorio The Last Judgement deals with the fundamental questions of humanity: justice, responsibility and redemption. Shortly after its world premiere, one could say that this work was an international success. Since the Spohr Year of 2009 it has returned to concert stages all over the world and was performed brilliantly in Salzburg on 6 June 2013. OehmsClassics presents a live recording here of this concert from the Mozarteum.

Today it is the Passions of J.S Bach which are most commonly known. The Passion Oratorio by J.S Bach’s nephew, godson and pupil Johann Ernst Bach is lesser known. On this Capriccio re-release his Passion Oratorio is performed alongside an Ode on the 77th Psalm for tenor, chorus and orchestra and a Motet for solo voices, four-part chorus, strings and continuo.