Rodion Shchedrin's “Carmen Suite” is well-known in the world of theater und of the opera. Its popularity is altogether unique in the history of modern music – but only a small part of his multifaceted oeuvre notable for its unmistakably Russian character and, at the same time, its international aura. A brilliant pianist and organist, Shchedrin has appeared throughout the entire world as a successful performer of his own works.

Expressly conceived as a “companion piece” to Carl Orff’s enduringly popular Carmina Burana, Enjott Schneider’s “Orbe Rotundo” received “exceptionally enthusiastic applause for a contemporary work” (Neue Musikzeitung) at its premiere. The composer describes the work (“a collection of pictures on Latin and medieval texts”) as a continuation and expansion of themes dealt with in Carmina Burana. Schneider also utilizes the exact vocal and instrumental forces of Orff’s composition, all of which were in top form for this live recording of the premiere performance. The Munich Motet Choir is the musical protagonist of the piece. Under the direction of Hayko Siemens, to whom the work is dedicated, the choir is by turns explosively dynamic, rhythmically supple, and expressively tender, while always maintaining an impressive and beautiful sonority. The work was clearly a labor of love for Schneider, an experienced composer of thrilling film music. How could it not be, since the sometimes earthy and extreme texts deal with the full range of human behavior? One critic even speculated about a cinematic realization of the music. Whatever the format, the work seems destined to achieve the success it so richly deserves, providing those who love Carmina Burana with a worthy successor and sequel: “Orbe Rotundo”.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–1970) was one of the most distinctive composers in the musical avant-garde after the Second World War. While Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a kind of "generator" in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s, inventing completely new sounds and techniques, Zimmermann was in many ways his opposite, a "transformer" who redefined previously existing material by placing it in new contexts and collage-like structures, anticipating the ideas of the Postmodernists.

Earle Brown’s involvement with the fine arts led him to reject previously fixed ideas of musical form and supposedly sacrosanct rules of composition in the early 1950s. His graphic notations, which are primarily oriented toward Jackson Pollock’s painting procedures, guarantee the opening of time and space which leads to the liberation of the sound and the expansion of the meaning of form. “[…] mobility of the sound elements within the work and the graphic provocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-performance process – were for me the most fascinating new possibility for ‘sound objects’ as they had been for sculpture and painting.” (Earle Brown)

Born in 1962 in Sofia (Bulgaria), Emile Naoumoff was discovered at the age of 8 by Nadia Boulanger, with whom he becomes one of the principle disciples for 10 years, until her death. Already at the age of 19 he is covered by diplomas for piano, composition, conducting, and he becomes teacher at the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau, and then the Conservatoire de Paris. It is in 1981 that Schott in Mainz decided to represent Emile Naoumoff, making him their youngest composer; but it is at the end of 1984 that Naoumoff’s career as a soloist takes off.

Études australes is one of several large works Cage wrote during the 1970s by laying starmaps over manuscript paper and using the placement of the stars to determine the pitches. Cage used the I Ching to determine some of the other musical parameters but left the dynamic levels, attacks, and tempos to the discretion of the performer, and this has led to extraordinary diversity in the lengths of performances. The original recording by Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote the piece, lasts 169 minutes, Steffen Schleiermacher's version is 203 minutes, and the fastest, at 112 minutes, is by Claudio Crismani. That gives some perspective to the monumentality of this 2011 version by Sabine Liebner, which clocks in at 260 minutes.

Hans Werner Henze was, during his lifetime, probably the most-performed composer of western modern music, and his advanced yet sensuously traditional music remains an important presence on stages around the world today. Henze was deeply attached to Italy, where he spent a large part of his life. The roots of this album go back to a personal meeting between Henze and the Italian double bass virtuoso Daniele Roccato when Roccato was attempting to obtain Henzes blessing for a theater piece about the composers friendship and correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann.

The paths of our thoughts, fantasies, and dreams are often convoluted. Since ancient times, the labyrinth has been a symbol of life itself with its paths, crossroads, dead ends, and odysseys. Some such mazes, though full of nooks and crannies, have only one path, one goal, and one exit. Others offer various routes. Written in 2016/17 for saxophone quartet, Poética del Laberinto [Poetics of the Labyrinth] by the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas is a cycle about three particularly iconic labyrinths from ancient times to the present day. In contrast to his usual way of composing, these three pieces are also framed by freely determined paths of reminiscence and a successive evolution of the instrumental sound from uniformity of four soprano saxophones through the diversity of four distinct registers to the dominance of the bass register at the end.

Live report or music-theatre production? In the piece 'Im Bau' Michel Roth plays with studio sounds and live recordings and cannot be tied down to a certain genre. Swiss composer Michel Roth adapted the text for the stage and composed the ca. one-hour monodrama 'Im Bau' (In the Burrow: Fifteen Sound Spaces after Franz Kafka) as a commission from the ensemble æquatuor, the Lucerne Festival, and the Theater Basel. The work was produced in 2017 as a music-theatrical obstacle course. The fifteen composed sound spaces interacted with a total of fifty-three real space situations, on the one hand in public partial performances, on the other under studio conditions. Likewise explored were the boundaries to reportage with participants moving through the rooms.

When it was first heard in 1962, Mauricio Kagels organ piece 'Improvisation ajoutée created a scandal. The cause was clearly the sounds the organist and his two assistants were required to produce in addition to the sounds of the instrument Big Data the title reveals the defining themes of this recording! The Decoder Ensemble considers the possibilities and consequences of the limitless availability of media in the digital age. All of the pieces here focus in different ways on common contemporary practices like remixing, copying & pasting, sampling, and recycling.