Star soprano Christine Schafer sings scenes and arias from one of Handel’s most popular operas. The combination of Handel and Schafer ensure this is going to a major release.

Standard repertoire doesn’t get any more “standard” than Bach’s concertos for violin in A minor and E major–and every violinist from minor to major has recorded them. Which means that there are about a zillion versions available, many of them first rate. Well, here’s another to add to the list, excellent performances in fine sound–sturdy, stylish, reliable, lustrous, with lively tempos and some nifty, well-integrated ornaments–all the components needed to confirm this as a worthy staple of any library. And for good measure, the program includes two concertos not usually presented as violin works but in their later incarnations as keyboard concertos.

After the great success of his last Deutsche Grammophon album dedicated to works by Mozart, oboist Albrecht Mayer now turns to the uniquely gifted Bach family. "Bach Generations" is based on the thread of genius that runs through the different generations, producing works that span late Renaissance, Baroque and Classical styles.

Following the album Arias, her much-acclaimed debut album on Sony Classical, the German soprano returns to Bach with three famous cantatas she has never recorded before. Regardless of their extraordinary musical beauty all of these cantatas are concerned with religious considerations of grief, guilt and farewell. Based on the Italian model of solo cantata which reached its peak in the extensive output of Alessandro Scarlatti, these melodious and touching pieces highlight Schäfer´s outstanding vocal abilities and musical taste. The arias offer most delightful duets with various instrumental solo parts such as flute, oboe and violin. Christine Schäfer is accompanied by the Berliner Barocksolisten, a first-class ensemble of players from the Berlin Philharmonic who perform on modern instruments in historically informed style.

It is a constant source of amazement that to this very day, musical gems even by famous composers often fail to receive the exposure they deserve or have even - despite modern digital access - been unjustly consigned to oblivion. The four works by Carl Friedrich Abel presented here are just such treasures, and two of them - the Sinfonie Concertanti WKO 42 and 43 - are released on record for the very first time to mark the composer's tercentenary in 2023. The reason for this is surely that Abel's activity and fame as a gambist and as a composer for his instrument has obscured the fact that he wrote these four important concertante works for the violoncello. The present recording seeks to help restore the reputation that these works deserve.

Michael Rische belongs to the small group of musicians, even internationally, who consistently enrich musical life with authoritative discoveries. After Michael Rische presented a recording of compositions on the notes b-a-c-h by Johann Sebastian Bach up to the present in the Bach Year 2000, he is working with growing success to re-establish the almost forgotten piano concertos of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel in musical life. With his recordings to date, he has received extensive international attention right from the start. Leipzig 1733: a significant date for a musical genre that has been an integral part of our musical life for more than two hundred years - the piano concerto. In this year Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his great Concerto in D minor BWV 1052 and his second eldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel, at the age of 19, his first piano concerto, the Concerto Wq 1 in A minor. If one listens to the concertos in direct comparison, one hardly wants to believe that both were composed at the same time and in the same place. The Concerto in D major Wq 45 was written in Hamburg in 1778, with two horns added to the orchestral sound. Of all his piano concertos, the Concerto in E minor Wq 15 (1745) is by far the most experimental.

Every generation creates its own forms of expression. Often, this happens in abrupt rejection of what has gone before. And not infrequently, the provocative gestures in which a new attitude to life is articulated disappear again just as quickly as they appeared. Such thoughts may also have moved Johann Sebastian Bach when, in the early 1740s, his two eldest sons took up the genre of the symphony, which had come from Italy and was accompanied by a novel treatment of the orchestra and compositional technique. Together with their generational peers, they created an independent line of tradition that was later referred to by music historians as the "symphony of the North German school." The fact that the symphony did not remain a short-lived fashion, favored by a handful of young savages, but advanced to become a genre that was soon considered the "acknowledged paramount form of instrumental music", was one of the most significant and momentous musical achievements of the 18th century.

When in December 1812 the French violinist Pierre Rode (1774–1830) first visited Vienna, Beethoven wrote a work for Rode’s appearance before the “Associated Cavaliers” in the Palais Lobkowitz, his Violin Sonata op. 96, which received its premiere with Archduke Rudolph at the clavier: Beethoven, lover of humanity and advocate of peace among all nations, chose to stay at home and sulk, presumably so as not to have to offer his hand to a famous colleague. In the Great Hall of the Redoute, in which the public debut took place a little later, Rode for his part played works of his own.