Die Sopranistin Miriam Alexandra hat für diese Produktion ein spannendes Lieder-Programm mit hohem Repertoire-Wert (darunter einige Ersteinspielungen) der Komponistin Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) zusammengestellt. Die meisten Gedichte auf dieser CD stammen von Eduard Mörike. Aufgenommen hat sie die Lieder vergangenen August im Studio Britz des Deutschlandradios in Berlin. Begleitet wurde sie dabei von keinem Geringeren als vom renommierten Liedbegleiter und Professor Eric Schneider.

It has long been known that William Youn has joined the ranks of the world's leading Mozart and Chopin interpreters. The complete recording of the Mozart piano sonatas, made for the Oehms label by the South Korean pianist based in Munich, is already setting new standards of excellence in their interpretation on the modern grand piano.

Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), a priest, was maestro di cappella at San Marco for the last 25 years of his life, following Adrian Willaert and Cypriano de Rore. A year after arriving at San Marco, he published this book of 13 motets for six voices. These motets are being published this year (2013) in a modern edition by Cristle Collins Judd, the annotator of this disc, along with four motets for four voices published a year later (not recorded here).

The name of Georg Kreisler is not much known in English-speaking countries, but his death in 2011 occasioned considerable notice in his native Austria. Of Jewish background, Kreisler fled Vienna in 1938 for the U.S., where he served in the army fighting his former homeland. He wrote songs in English, one of which, Please, Shoot Your Wife, is recorded here. That song was rejected by American publishers, however, and Kreisler returned to Europe and eventually to Vienna. He has been compared to Tom Lehrer, and indeed several of his songs, notably Tauben vergiften im Park (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park) are close enough to Lehrer's to have inspired charges (and counter-charges) of plagiarism. Actually his range was greater than Lehrer's, and he was more prolific, even if he lacked the deadly satirical accuracy.

German men's vocal sextet Die Singphoniker was established in the early '80s and has made it its mission to take on a promiscuous variety of music, including plainsong, the repertoires of music for men's voices of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras, as well as folk song and American popular song. In this album the group brings its commitment to diversity to new level. Taking Pierre de la Rue's Requiem, Missa pro fidelibus defunctis (ca. 1506) as its central work, the group intersperses its seven movements with a wild variety of other pieces, including the spiritual Deep River; a movement from Weill's Berliner Requiem; German folk songs; contemporary pieces by Einojuhani Rautavaara, Knut Nystedt, and Hans Schanderl; and arrangements of songs by Sting and Eric Clapton.

The solo piano music of Béla Bartók is sometimes compared to that of Schoenberg, but Bartók's works are more emotionally accessible to listeners, particularly when they are played as Andreas Bach does on this album. While a great importance is placed on the percussiveness of Bartók's music, Bach instead focuses on the harmonies and the temperaments of these works. He does not ignore those more primitive aspects of the music, but rather than being sharply aggressive, Bach uses more of a forceful follow-through to control the sound.

Few atonal piano compositions are so amenable to generate new meaningful, extremely sombre soundscapes as ‘ Triadic Memories’, according to different modalities of execution some would call rendition. This one execution, excruciatingly slow, generates aural hallucinations in the guise of rational insights. Beware of the illusion of order, this Feldman classic piece proves that that is way more harmful, as in pathetically alienating, than the illusion of depth..

Morton Feldman's late period was characterized by works dedicated to friends, his "For …" pieces. One of the best-known and most frequently performed is the piano piece For Bunita Marcus, who was a composition student of his. The work consists of single notes and short patterns of notes spatially notated, without precise rhythmic values. The effect is of a very leisurely improvisation, using a limited number of pitches, played in apparently random manner over the whole expanse of the keyboard. Listeners expecting a structured musical experience governed by conventional musical logic would probably find the piece infuriatingly scattered and pointless.

Old technology meets modern technology on this release from Germany's Oehms label, a top-notch Bach organ recording equally worth the consideration of the first-timer or those with large Bach collections. Featured is one of the monuments of central German organ-building, the Silbermann Organ at the Catholic Hofkirche in Dresden. The organ was dismantled during World War II but subsequently rebuilt and later thoroughly restored. It's a magnificent beast, with plenty of power and some unusual, highly evocative tone colors in the quieter registrations.