A popular singer when she was still a young teenager, Alice Babs had a long and varied career. She made her recording debut in 1939 at the age of 15 and, although her yodeling made her initially popular and the novelty "Swing It, Mr. Teacher" was her first hit, Babs even at the start had a highly appealing voice and a lightly swinging style. She mostly recorded in jazz and swing-oriented settings throughout the years of World War II. Babs remained active throughout the 1950s and '60s in Europe, singing everything from jazz (recording with Duke Ellington in 1963 and performing the classic "Heaven" at his second spiritual concert) and pop to a bit of classical music. By the late '70s, Alice Babs had become less active, but into the mid-'90s she occasionally performed on special occasions. Her important first set with Duke Ellington, Swing It!, does a fine job of summing up her first 15 years on records. Babs suffered from Alzheimer's in her final years, and she died on February 11, 2014 of complications from the disease. She was 90 years old.

2022 remastered edition. In 1975, the second album of the Berlin based electronic group Mythos was released. Mastermind Stephan Kaske and his band present the typical sound cascades and sequences of the Berlin school. Similar to the works of several other fellow artists on the same label, the album develops a science fiction concept around the story of an extraterrestrial visitor on a journey to Earth. Dreamlab is predominantly made up of peaceful and relaxed music. The meter is often determined by echoes from flutes and guitar riffs backed by expansive Mellotron arrangements. This remastered reissue comes in a digisleeve on the original Kosmische Kuriere label.

Hailed by the international music press and highly praised by music connoisseurs, the recordings of Bach’s entire body of vocal music made by the Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ), its conductor Masaaki Suzuki and numerous prestigious soloists, many of whom have remained remarkably loyal to the undertaking from the outset, are here brought together to form the only complete set of these works in high-resolution format.

After the success of his stunning album ‘Otello’, revered tenor Jonas Kaufmann returns with the sensational new album ‘Selige Stunde’. ‘Selige Stunde’ is the first recital in a small series of recordings that Jonas has made during the Covid-19 crisis. This stunning album includes a varied and heart-felt selection of songs that cover the most prominent Lieder composers. All tracks are short and are often performed as encores. The theme of the lyrics centre around love, longing, peacefulness and farewell. Kaufmann is considered one of the greatest tenors of this generation. He has performed at the world’s most prestigious concert venues including the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Kaufmann has won numerous prestigious awards including Gramophone Awards and Echo Klassik Awards.

The Deutsche Oper in Berlin had hardly opened on 24th September 1961 before it started preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary. How was that possible? Had it entered into some sort of time warp? That might indeed have been possible for a theatre that in the past had devoted itself to Richard Wagner’s works. But there was a simpler explanation: the Deutsche Oper Berlin had, in fact, originally opened on 7 November 1912 under the title of Deutsches Opernhaus.

The Christmas easy-listening album by Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, originally released in 1967, with bonus tracks released in 1971, 1977 and 1978 on the Philips label, together on one CD and remastered from the original analogue stereo tapes for Vocalion's trademark crystal-clear sound.

The chemistry between tradition and innovation powered Sir Simon Rattle’s relationship with the Berliner Philharmoniker, above all during his time as the orchestra’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Director (2002-2018). As the successor to Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado, his mission was to take this pre-eminent musical institution into the 21st century. “What Rattle has brought … is a new spirit of adventure,” declared The Times in 2006, and later looked back on the “exhilarating, epoch-hopping eclecticism of Simon Rattle’s era in Berlin”. Through all this Rattle preserved the orchestra’s distinctive sonority, notable, in the words of the New York Times, for its “sheer grandeur … and rich, red-blooded warmth”. He first conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1987, and the recordings in this 45CD box span the years from 1994 to 2012. Very much reflecting Rattle’s vision for the orchestra, the symphonic, choral and operatic works range from pillars of Austro-German Classicism, Romanticism and Modernism through French, Russian and Czech repertoire to showcases for contemporary contemporary composers from around the world – and even a film soundtrack. As Rattle said at the end of his tenure in Berlin: “Music is for everybody, and we’ve all believed this.”

Covent Garden’s 2003 production of The Magic Flute , designed by John F. Macfarlane, directed by David McVicar, and conducted by Sir Colin Davis, is magnificent from a strictly musical standpoint. More than that, it’s vastly entertaining. The comedic elements of the story integrate far more comfortably than is often the case with Schikaneder’s high-minded (if vague) theme of a quest for enlightenment, particularly in the second act. Visually, the production is a feast, yet it doesn’t distract from the music.

One of the key German composers before Bach with more than 500 surviving individual pieces, Heinrich Schutz wrote mainly church music, and is credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany and continuing its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Although he lived most of his long life in Germany, in his twenties Schutz made two visits to Venice. The first was between 1609 and 1613 when he was taught by Giovanni Gabrieli; and the second in the late 1620s to meet and possibly study under Monteverdi. The two trips greatly influenced Schutz's music as he absorbed and began to combine the ornate and theatrical Venetian style with the more understated Lutheran tradition in which he grew up. This album explores his solo cantatas alongside examples of the brilliant and virtuosic Venetian style instrumental music.

A concept album exploring themes of broadcast communications, Radio-Activity marked Kraftwerk's return to more obtuse territory, extensively utilizing static, oscillators, and even Cage-like moments of silence to approximate the sense of radio transmission; a pivotal record in the group's continuing development, the title track – the first they ever recorded in English – is their most fully realized electro-pop effort to date, while "The Voice of Energy" precipitates the robot voice so crucial to their subsequent work.

Deluxe two CD set. Digitally remastered and expanded edition of the 1984 sophomore album from Austrian pop / rock / new wave artist Falco. Features a digitally remastered edition of the Junge Roemer album plus a bonus disc that includes remixes, edits, and live recordings.

Considered by many music historians as one of the most important group out of Germany, Faust were certainly ahead of their time. They took their music to unsuspecting heights somewhere in between Can, Velvet Underground, Neu, LA Dusseldorf or Henry Cow but also much farther and can be considered as founding fathers of the Industrial Rock. Having made their debut in 71 in Hamburg, Faust will never stop their groundbreaking and will be always one step ahead of everybody else including the groups above mentioned and are the prime example of Rock In Opposition (RIO) along with Henry Cow. Faust is definitely not for the faint-hearted person and can only be recommended in small doses because it is very dangerous for the sanity of the average proghead.

La Düsseldorf is Klaus Dinger's side project after the scission of Neu! in 1975. In this musical adventure, Dinger is accompanied by Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe who also participated to the recording of the third and last Neu! The self titled album "La Dusseldorf" was released in 1976, venturing from avant-garde for concrete noises, manipulated sounds, pre-punk atmospheres. This album has a total disregard for musical convention, the musicians don't hesitate to mix without restriction a bunch of sounds taken from a great variety of musical styles (with pop accents, motoric "electronic" pulses, krautrock weird instrumentals and punk's eccentricity). After this original and diverse collection of experiments, the band recorded their second "Viva" in 1978…

A special artist deserves a special gift for a special occasion:
On August 23, 2011, Anne-Sophie Mutter celebrated her 35th stage anniversary - her international career began in 1976 at the Lucerne Festival - and Deutsche Grammophon honored the artist with a deluxe edition ASM35: The Complete Musician. The 40CD box, strictly limited to 6,500 copies and numbered, contains for the first time all of her Deutsche Grammophon albums in the original cover design, from her debut with Mozart (1978) to the Brahms sonatas (2010), as well as 2 bonus CDs with rare and unreleased ones Finds. Including Mutter's “Jugend Musiziert” concert from 1974. The box, developed and elaborately designed by the American designer James Benard and the artist herself, also contains an impressively compiled 288-page book in hardcover format with new texts, interviews, anecdotes from companions and over 150 pictures of Anne-Sophie Mutter - hers childhood to today.

Performing on early 19th-century pianos from the Frederick Historic Piano Collection, competition prizewinners Dmitry Rachmanov, a Juilliard graduate, and Cullan Bryant, a graduate of Manhattan School of Music, explore the interrelationships between the keyboard music of Beethoven and his principal teachers in this fascinating double-album of rarities for piano four-hands, culminating in a revelatory account of the Great Fugue in Beethoven’s own keyboard arrangement. The distinctive sonorities of these highly esteemed period instruments transport the listener back to the time when Beethoven, his teachers or his own pupils, may have performed this music themselves for the first time.