German composer York Höller's orchestral cycle Sphären, which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in composition in 2010, receives its first recording in this performance with Semyon Bychkov leading WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln. It's an attractive, inventive piece of non-doctrinaire modernism with the appeal to reach fans of contemporary music. Höller's language tends to be dense, but it is colorful, if generally skewed to somber and subdued colors.

Moritz Eggert was born in 1965 in Heidelberg. As a composer he is glad not to be pigeonholed into any of the usual categories, a fact that bewilders both avant-garde and classical concert audiences. To an extent unequalled by any other instrument, the piano can become a kind of “workshop” or “laboratory”. Almost anything can be realised on it, although it is limited in timbre and tone production compared to other instruments or an orchestra. But this is precisely the quality that turns it in the direction of musical abstraction – which can be of interest to composers. Free of specific ensemble requirements, compositional ideas can be tried out on the 88 keys in downright exemplary fashion.

Martin Schlumpf, born in 1947 in Aarau (Switzerland), studied clarinet, piano with Warren Thew, conducting with Ferdinand Leitner as well as theory and composition with Rudolf Kelterborn. In the late 70's, he returned to improvised music as a saxophonist and clarinettist, and in the late 1980s he has been active in the interface between composition (classical) and improvisation (jazz) in a new “post-modern” environment with a strong focus on rhythmic language. His compositions, which range from solo pieces to large concertos, are performed in many countries.

When the first concert of the series founded by the composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann (later designated as musica viva) took place at Munich's Prince Regent's Theatre on 7 October 1945, it marked the birth of an important new cultural event in post-war Germany. Up to the present day, this oldest concert series for New Music still brings together the world's most important artists - conductors and interpreters alike - in the field of new and the newest music, also continuing to set new standards for the interpretation of new classical music with the outstanding Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

York Höller was born in Leverkusen and studied from 1963–70 in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Herbert Eimert, and Alfons Kontarsky, among others. His participation in Pierre Boulez’s analysis seminars at the 1965 Darmstadt Summer Courses motivated him to explore serial music. After temporary employment at the Bonn Opera House, he worked in 1971/72 in the West German Radio’s Studio for Electronic Music, whose artistic director he was from 1990 to 2000.

One can occasionally puzzle over why some music of high quality is hardly noticed in musical life, only finding its way into the repertoire with difficulty, if at all, and this is case of the works of Roberto Gerhard. The works recorded here were all composed during the 1960s. In them, one recognises a musical handwriting with roots in the classics of modernism; it succeeds in forming the kind of synthesis, so pronouncedly realised by Stravinsky, of methods schooled by Schönberg with concertante elements and a rhythmical and sonorous sententiousness. “Dodecaphonic, but human and even a bit divine” – as Frank Harders-Wuthenow entitled an essay dedicated to Gerhard.

Christine Hoock is a versatile virtuoso. She can be heard in the most varied constellations in classical music, world music and jazz. Concert tours have taken her all around the world. Today, Christine Hoock is Professor of Double Bass at the Mozarteum University Salzburg. She plays an English instrument by William Tarr built in 1848.

Aaron Cassidy is a composer and conductor with a growing international reputation and his works have been performed by leading contemporary music specialists. He joined the composition faculty of the University of Huddersfield in 2007 and is coordinator of the MA in New Music. This collection also includes Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and other works.

Hefti has won many prestigious composition competitions and was a pupil of Rihm. These world premiere recordings, conducted by David Zinman and performed by his Tinhalle Orchestra Zurich, are a discovery.

Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher met in1981 at the ages of 15 and 16 and have worked together ever since. These transcriptions, mostly for two pianos, include Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso Op.28 and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise.

This Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha is very significant in the field of contemporary music. In June of this year he is being awarded the Ernst-von-Siemens-Musikpreis (endowed with 200,000 Euro). Here we have the opportunity to hear his clarinet works performed by the virtuoso artist Andreas Schablis.

As its title suggests, John Cage's ASLSP is to be played "as slow as possible," though this sparse keyboard work could take anywhere from the 64:05 timing Sabine Liebner gives it on this Neos release, to the 639 years it is calculated to last in the much-publicized performance given on the organ in St. Burchard Church in Halberstadt, Germany. Because Liebner takes this piece at a comparatively brisk tempo, it is possible to detect some shape in the work, and to feel a degree of connectedness in it, even though each pitch or chord is separated by extremely long silences.

Alberto Ginastera left his massive orchestral piece Popol Vuh, which had been commissioned by Eugene Ormandy, unfinished at his death in 1983, and it was only after it was discovered by pianist Barbara Nissman that it had its premiere in 1989, with Leonard Slatkin and Saint Louis Symphony. A musical reimagining of Mayan creation mythology, it's a monumental piece that viscerally evokes a primitive world using both folk elements and sophisticated modernist techniques. The composer wrote that he was aiming for a "reconstitution of the transcendental aspect of the ancient pre-Columbian world," and the piece is fully successful at capturing that vision with music that is powerfully primal, strange, and darkly beautiful.

Much of the solo literature for double bass requires the instrument to change its tuning from its standard orchestral arrangement, raising the pitch of each string by a whole step (if not more) in an attempt to increase its clarity, projection, nimbleness. This Neos album, Music for Double Bass with German bassist Frank Reinecke, steers away from works that employ scordatura in favor of those that use the typical orchestral tuning on the bass. The idea: to focus on and explore the depth and resonance for which the instrument was constructed.