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Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens – Mozart: Overtures (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:02 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the overture became an orchestral piece intended to precede a large-scale dramatic work. This recording brings together twelve overtures from Mozart’s operas. They foreshadow the action, sometimes stylistically, sometimes by quoting themes that will appear later, to create a dramatic impression before we even see anything on stage – think of the memorable overtures to Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte. The twelve overtures brought together here cover 21 years of Mozart’s career: from Mitridate, composed when he was just 14, which testifies to the young composer’s familiarity with the galant style then in vogue, to La Clemenza di Tito (1791), the high point of his work in the opera seria genre that was to disappear with him, not forgetting masterpieces such as Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte. The Kölner Akademie, playing on period instruments, and its conductor Michael Alexander Willens demonstrate Mozart’s unrivalled ability to capture the audience’s attention with these brilliant overtures, some of which are among his most famous works, both on stage and in concert.
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Tobias Koch, Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens – Emilie Mayer: Piano Concerto · Overtures (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:49 minutes | 720 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO
„Women who compose independently are rare in the music world. As abundant as the literary world is with female talent, the musical scene has few to champion, and among these few, Emilie Mayer is at the top. Her prolific output resembles a wellspring. She transforms every sensation, every feeling and every emotion to music.“ Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr (c. 1828–1901) described Emilie Mayer’s unique position in the music world of the time with these words in a Biographische Skizze (biographical sketch) published in 1877. Indeed, no other composer of her generation was so unimpressed by patriarchal gender conceit and rigid role attributions as „Europe’s greatest female composer“ (as Emilie Mayer is described in the subtitle of a recently published biography).
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Ronald Brautigam, Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens – Weber: Complete Works for Piano & Orchestra (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:58 minutes | 947 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Carl Maria von Weber wrote music that has been admired by composers as diverse as Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. But in his lifetime he was also recognised as one of the finest pianists of the period, with an exceptional technique and a brilliant gift for improvisation. Especially during the 1810s he toured extensively, and like other composer-pianists he wrote works to use as his personal calling cards, among them the two piano concertos recorded here. They were both composed in 1811-12, but while the First Concerto takes Mozart’s concertos as its model, Piano Concerto No. 2 looks towards Beethoven. This change of direction was probably influenced by the fact that Weber had acquired a score of Beethoven’s recently published “Emperor” Concerto. In any case there are some striking similarities between his concerto and Beethoven’s: the use of identical keys, and the inclusion of a slow, subtly orchestrated Adagio and a closing playful rondo in 6/8.
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Beate Mordal, Elvira Bill, Georg Poplutz, Matthias Vieweg, Andrey Akhmetov, Kölner Akademie, Michael Alexander Willens – Wolf: Christmas Cantatas (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:15:42 minutes | 820 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO
In the 18th century, “well-stocked” church music was a natural tradition throughout central Germany: church services were embellished along the ecclesiastical year with cantatas appropriate to the liturgy for the glory of God, but also for the joy and “spiritual edification” of the visitors. From this treasure of hitherto unknown Christmas music, four cantatas by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf are presented for the first time on this recording. Wolf worked as court kapellmeister in Weimar, and the fact that Goethe rejected him as “self-indulgent” should not prevent us from admiring him as a very important composer of the transition. Musically, Wolf was greatly influenced by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the empfindsamer Stil and by the works of the Berlin Kapellmeister Carl Heinrich Graun. He was also a prolific composer whose works were received with admiration by his contemporaries. The four cantatas show elements of the early classical and sensitive styles; the cantata choruses are often homophonic and songlike, polyphonic sections rather rare. All the cantatas prove to be individually conceived works that testify to the composer’s mastery. Beautiful sounding arias, the naturalness of their expression and the dramatic compression in the individual movements are still convincing today. At the same time, the cantatas bear witness to the high quality of Protestant church music in the period after Johann Sebastian Bach and illustrate the high value of music within the liturgy. Today they can be a welcome addition to the repertoire for the Christmas season.
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