Nayler&Co Boekhandel & Modern Antiquariaat*Ramsj-on-Line

Tolzer Knabenchor

The Notenbuchlein possesses the charm of an arbitrary collection with its mixture of serious and light-hearted compositions and has the character of the later very popular musical house-book, which allows us to glance into Bach's private family life. Although this selection of pieces is only a small excerpt of the Notenbuchlein it conveys the special character of these compositions.

Within their first four years together Bach twice compiled a Clavierbuchlein for Anna Magdalena, one in 1722 in Cothen and one in 1725 in Leipzig. Together with the Clavierbuchlein commenced earlier for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, the two volumes for Anna Magdalena give some idea of domestic music-making in the Bach-family. Here education and diversion went hand in hand.

With her unique, mellifluous tone quality and vocal colouring, and her intelligence of musical phrasing conveying the essence of each fleeting mood, be it eager and ecstatic, or grief laden and despondent, this is a perfectly wonderful collection of songs by Janet Baker.

The story of the Lyric Suite begins with trauma. Over the course of eight days in the spring of 1925, Alban Berg, married for fourteen years to his wife Helene, was overwhelmed by a grande passion for Hannah Fuchs-Robettin.
The emotional impact of this impossible romance galvanized Berg. He resolved to memorialize their passion in the intimate form of a string quartet.

Compared with such prolific twentieth-century contemporaries as Strauss, Milhaud, or Hindemith, Alban Berg, dying at fifty, left scarcely more than a dozen substantial scores. But, by compensation, these appeared to encompass the work of two quite different composers. How did Berg manage to fuse his innate feeling for his late-Romantic musical heritage with the labyrinthine calculations of his crossword-puzzle mind...

Gustav Mahler was twenty when, in true Wagnerian style, he wrote both the text and the music of Das klagende Lied, the rather peculiar cantata in which he first found his own voice, albeit not yet consistently.
In the 1850s, Wagner fell in love with his patron's wife Mathilde Wesendonck. She wrote some rather sickly poems which Wagner set as songs for female voice and piano. Wagner himself then arranged Traume, the last of the five Wesendock-Lieder.

Ravel's first published work, Menuet antique for piano, was written when he was a twenty-year old student at the Conservatoire. Though extravagantly influenced by one of his Parisian composer heroes, Chabrier, it is prophetic of the mature Ravel. Ravel never wrote a symphony; Sypmhonic enterprise in France at the time was most likely to be found among disciples of Cesar Franck or those who, like Roussel, had been educated in his principles.

Brahms borrowed deliberately from his own national musical heritage. Forty of his original songs are settings of German folk-poetry. He collected folk-tunes and made arrangements to them. In 1894 he compiled a major collection of 49 folk-songs, 42 of which are sung here.

One of today's most sought-after lieder interpreters, German tenor Hans Peter Blochwitz performs the 15 romances that Brahms composed at the age of 28 to extracts from Ludwig Tieck's novel The Story of the Beautiful Magelone
and Count Peter of Provence.

One of Britten's first creative tasks on arriving in America, 1938, was the completion of the song-cycle Les illuminations. The work was finished by October the same year. As is evident from this recording, it was not the first time Britten had turned to the French language, but a world of experiences separates the intrepid wunderkind of nearly fifteen years old - Quatre chansons francaises- from the cosmopolitan artist in his mid-twenties.