Sony Classical is excited to present the fantastic 1984 recording of Yo-Yo Ma, Seiji Ozawa, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a newly remastered re-release. This stellar line-up got together to record R. Strauss’ Don Quixote - indisputably the composer’s finest example of musical painting, his most daring in design and most controversial in effects - and Schoenberg’s fascinating arrangement of Monn’s Harpsichord Concerto for Cello and Orchestra.

In 2004, Jean-Guihen Queyras and the Freiburger Barockorchester offered us a prodigious interpretation of Haydn’s two cello concertos, coupled with a rare concerto by Georg Matthias Monn, a pioneer of the genre. A version now recognized as a landmark in the discography.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.

Nach unserer erfolgreichen Erstveröffentlichung der Instrumentalkonzerte Georg Matthias Monns lassen wir nun noch eine CD des Komponisten mit sechs seiner Sinfonien folgen, nicht nur um dem Komponisten den ihm gebührenden Rang zu verschaffen, sondern auch, um Ihnen die Bekanntschaft mit diesen lebendigen Werken zu ermöglichen. Monn schrieb mehr als 20 Sinfonien, die leider nur noch zum Teil erhalten sind.