Alban Berg

The latest release by the Signum Quartett showcases music written during the 20th century.

Berg, Bartók and Schnittke all took different approaches in their quest to further the development of the string quartet and this makes for an interesting and varied programme.

Pierre Boulez is an icon of today’s classical scene and closely associated with the works of Mahler.

Featuring the acclaimed Vienna Philharmonic and the chorus of the Vienna State Opera – historically connected to Mahler, Berg and Boulez.

These performances were recorded live at the opening concert of the prestigious Salzburg Festival in 2011, conceived as a tribute to Gustav Mahler, and will be released to coincide with the maestro’s 88th birthday in March.

Mahler’s 2-act Das Klagende Lied is a mythical tale of fratricide, guilt and retribution, based on stories by the Grimm brothers and Ludwig Bechstein.

Music in the early 20th century did pass from one medium to another, from late Romanticism into an unknown future. Refractions allows the listener to sample this transition through the choral music of four very different composers.

The Ensemble BonaNox present the next volume of their interpretations of the four elements; Fire. Their previous volume, Water obtained great reviews. (German booklet only)

Soprano Katherine Broderick makes her debut recording on Champs Hill Records with a recital disc of Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau.

Katherine Broderick was the winner of the 2007 Kathleen Ferrier Award. Following studies at the National Opera Studio in London, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Northern College of Music and the Mendelssohn Hochschule in Leipzig, she is now a member of the ENO Young Singers Programme. In demand at opera houses in the UK and Europe, her stage repertoire encompasses Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and Britten.

The repertoire on 'Open Your Eyes' was all composed between 1885 and 1908 and opens with Eight poems by Herman Gilm from his Letze Blätter which Richard Strauss set in 1885 while still in his very early twenties. The set includes three of his best‐loved songs (also recorded by Felicity Lott on CHRCD037), including Die Nacht, where he shows his flair for nocturnal tone painting and Allerseelen or 'All Souls Day' where the most lyrical of vocal lines is set against the background of flower‐decked graves.

Alban Berg composed his 'Seven Early Songs' starting in 1905, while a student of Schoenberg, with the songs influenced by Strauss, Mahler, Wolf and Debussy and having a distinct sense of a romantic musical world expanded beyond its limits, on the brink of dissolving into modernism.

Arnold Schoenberg's Brettl Lieder or Cabaret Songs of 1901 are tonal works, intended to use a more popular song idiom to convey more 'serious' ideas, and setting eight poems taken from a collection published as simply 'German Songs' in 1900 by Otto Julius Bierbaum. The most unusual of the set is Hugo Salus' Der Genügsamerliebhaber or 'Easily satisfied lover': a man tells us that his lady‐friend has a black cat with a soft, velvety coat. The woman spends all her time caressing her cat's fur while it sits on her lap, and it shivers when he strokes it. Later, he puts the kitty on his bald head and she plays with it and laughs. Throughout the songs, Schoenberg responds to the texts with simplicity and humour, and no little suggestiveness in this instance.

Chen Reiss’s debut album 'Liaisons' was internationally acclaimed for both the repertoire selection and the sheer brilliance of the musicianship displayed by Reiss.

Gramophone magazine called her performances of arias by Haydn, Mozart, Salieri and Cimarosa "standard-setting" and BBC Music magazine called it "top-drawer".

For her second ONYX CD Chen Reiss and pianist Charles Spencer have assembled a wonderful collection of songs on the subject of 'The Nightingale and the Rose' – songs that convey the magic of being in love, the heartbreak of love lost, the memories, the fun, the fantasies all associated with that strange, mysterious, dangerous and all-powerful condition –

love.

In repertoire that ranges from Purcell to Krenek, Hahn to Meyerbeer and Rimsky-Korsakov, and ends in Berkeley Square in London, this is a programme tailor-made for Chen Reiss’s remarkable voice and it will seduce you.