The piano works with which the multi-award-winning duo Yaara Tal & Andreas Groethuysen once again underline their flair for rarities that are absolutely worth hearing come from the Francophone world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the program "Avec esprit" the duo has selected pieces mainly by unknown composers, which were written between 1874 and 1910, and thus show a wide range of French high and late romantic music.

The performance of this High Baroque piece in a Classical guise would not be worth mentioning at all if it had not contained the spark for the next folia, the Twenty-Six Variations on La Folia di Spagna of 1815 by Eybler’s teacher, Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). A recording of this instrumentation treatise in sounds, with a scoring enhanced by three trombones, bass drum and, above all, a harp, was included in the third album in our series Beethoven’s World.

With its fourteen fugues and four canons, all of which are derived from the same thematic germ cell, J. S. Bach’s "The Art of Fugue" contains within it a veritable cornucopia of constructional variants. In his own Studies, Reinhard Febel takes apart the constituent elements of Bach’s work and reassembles them in completely new ways, occasionally opening up the musical material and allowing it to range over the entire keyboard.