In 1914, Franz Schmidt staged his opera Notre Dame at the Vienna State Opera to great acclaim. Immediately afterwards, he was looking for material for a new opera when he came across the novel Fredigundis by Felix Dahn, which is loosely based on historical events from the 6th century. Schmidt worked on the project from 1916 to 1921, with the premiere taking place in Berlin in December 1922. Schmidt’s music for Fredigundis marks the end of a development that runs through the so-called ‘Classic-Romantic’ period. The work is characterised by extensive chromaticism and a boundary-pushing expansion of the major-minor tonal system paired with dense counterpoint and perfect compositional artistry in the vocal parts. The dramatic mezzo-soprano Dunja Vejzovic, who became famous for her Wagner roles in Bayreuth and Salzburg, performed on all the major opera and concert stages of the world. The excellent cast of singers in this performance is supported by Austrian conductor Ernst Märzendorfer, who also mastered several instruments and composed piano concertos, incidental music and a ballet. On this recording, he conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has established itself as an opera orchestra through a long and successful collaboration with the MusikTheater an der Wien.

For the fourth volume in this collection dedicated to Mozart concertos by the younger generation of performers, the Orpheum Foundation and Alpha Classics present the Concertos nos. 23 and 24 (K488 & 491) performed by the British pianist Julian Trevelyan, who was awarded three prizes at the Géza Anda Competition in Zurich in 2021 and, at the age of sixteen, became the youngest-ever prizewinner at the Marguerite Long Competition in Paris in 2015. ‘Mozart’s music is full of life, humour and enjoyment. My life wouldn’t feel fulfilled if I didn’t have his music’, says the young musician, who is accompanied here by one of the most eminent Mozartian maestros, Christian Zacharias, conducting the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.