Finnish baritone Arttu Kataja fell in love with Lied music in his first singing lessons at the age of 16 but the idea of his own Lied record was born only after he had worked as a professional for years. The collaboration with pianist Pauliina Tukiainen had already begun years earlier, and the joint record project also felt natural. Both artists have roots and identity in Finland, but both have grown up in the profession and worked in Germany for years. In addition, both Kataja and Tukiainen share a passionate and uncom-promising attitude towards Lied music. In recent years, the couple has given concerts not only in Central Europe but also in Helsinki, where their interpretation of Schubert's Winterreis was a critical success. They will start the 2020/2021 season with a Lied concert at the Berlin State Opera.

Featuring some of Schiller’s most restrained, stripped-down production output, the largely dreamlike "Sehnsucht" is formatted like his other studio albums, with vocal and instrumental tracks both part of the makeup. However, several tracks are ambient in the truest sense, consisting strictly of atmospheric wash and no beats. The album features collaboration with several established artists like Xavier Naidoo, Jaël, Kim Sanders, and Klaus Schulze among others.

When the Bureau B label contacted Karl Bartos and showed interest in releasing any archival material he might have laying around the lab, the former Kraftwerk member (that is, "classic lineup" member, joining for the Autobahn tour and leaving somewhere between Electric Cafe and The Mix) wasn't interested. After all, he's a never-look-back futurist, but as the liner notes to Off the Record explain, he's an open-minded futurist as well and allowed this initially rejected idea to morph into something new. Kicking off with "Atomium" - a grand bit of robot techno and possible sequel to Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" - Off the Record uses Bartos' archival tapes, zip drives, or computer files from 1975 to 1993 as its foundation, then mashes these off-hours audio sketches (recorded "off the record" from his usual band) with new ideas, overdubs, and vocoder vocals…

This set is a rerelease of recordings made in 1991, not previously reviewed in Read more . In the order listed in the header, these four cantatas were composed for the following festal days in the liturgical church calendar: the Third Sunday in Advent, the Feast of St. John the Baptist, Pentecost, and Easter Sunday. All stem from the time of the younger Bach’s increasingly fractious and unhappy years as director of music in Halle, which spanned 1747 to 1764. The first of these is definitely known to have been written in 1749; the dates for the others are less certain, but stem from the mid to late 1750s.

The abundant legacy of Gustav Leonhardt’s recordings for Telefunken’s Das Alte Werk series invites us to follow his trajectory as a performer from the early 1960’s onwards, a time when the new codes of early music had yet to be invented, when their success depended above all on the strength of conviction of the performer. Leonhardt’s was strengthened by dialogue: with a range of partners whose variety defies all preconceived ideas, with ancient instruments or modern copies of all types, with repertoires as diverse as Byrd, Purcell, Rameau, Johann Sebastian but also Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Not forgetting the 1970 Monteverdi LP, which has never been reissued since. The image of a pope of early music isolated in his tower and frozen in a school style does not last long after listening to this historical sum, extended here by the later series of recordings under the Virgin Veritas flag.

A new recording from renowned recitalist and winner of the Lieder Prize at the 1997 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, Christopher Maltman. Graham Johnson is both accompanist and curator of this series that presents the entire piano-accompanied songs and vocal works of Johannes Brahms.

The stylistic pluralism which informs so much contemporary choral writing pays rich dividends in the work of Jaakko Mäntyjärvi—a thrilling programme of some exciting, accessible, contemporary music.

Graham Johnson’s latest Lieder project for Hyperion reaches its fourth volume. Brahms is of course a giant of the Romantic era but his songs and vocal works are rather less well known than much of his other music. There is so much to discover and enjoy in the beautiful, often elegiac melodies and characteristic piano writing.

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson further demonstrates the phenomenal depth of his knowledge in the expert programming of this recital. Each disc in the series represents a different journey through the repertoire, and thus through Brahms’s life. This new volume is sensitively balanced, the opening and closing folksong transcriptions possessing beguiling charm and the five songs of Op 49 being performed in their entirety.

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson’s latest enterprise traverses the complete songs of Brahms. He is joined here on Volume 2 by the wonderful Christine Schäfer, whose contribution to the Schumann song series won a prestigious Gramophone Award.