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Born in Reims in 1934, Philippe Entremont is one of the most famous pianists and French orchestra conductors. The exceptional career of Philippe Entremont began at the age of eighteen when he came to the international attention with his great success at New York’s Carnegie Hall, playing Jolivet’s piano concerto and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Since then, he has pursued a top international career as a pianist, and for the last 40 years on the podium as a conductor as well. Phillipe Entremont is one of the most recorded artists of all time, he has appeared on many labels, including CBS, Sony, Teldec and Harmonia Mundi, and has garnered all of the leading prizes and awards in the industry. In 2014 Sony Music issued a boxset of 19 CDs of all piano concerts he played under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa – to name a few…
For more than half a century Philipe Entremont has been thinking of Schubert Sonata No 21 D960 – this work is considerably haunting and captivating, in its simplicity it is very difficult too. The desire of recording it came later to him, much later, toward 2009, but it was still too early to record. This wonderful sonata has never left his mind and has had a home in his piano, and will remain there until the end… His thoughts about recording the Schubert fantasy for 4 hands was an immediate choice on his part. Like the Sonata D960 it is an absolute masterpiece. It was written about at the same time as the sonata and just a few months before the death of the composer, it is like a sonata in one movement.
It is very hard to find words to describe the beauty of such a masterpiece. To listen you have to close your eyes and let yourself be invaded by the incredible power of its enchantment.Schubert is so grand! (Philippe Entremont)

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Surely not many cellists are able to perform rare, original cello duets with their own father. The GinzelDuellohowever combines the professionalism and experience of father Reiner Ginzel (a professor at Munich’s University of Music) with the youthful freshness and creative spontaneity of young cellist and composer Hans-Henning Ginzel, some of whose remarkable arrangements can be heard on this CD. His takes on classics such as Bach’s famous Airand Debussy’s “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” feature alongside less familiar 19th-century compositions by BernhardHeinrich Romberg and Sebastian Lee that are well worth discovering. This is an oeuvre rarely heard – an attractive programme of delights that no classical music lover can resist.

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Johannes Brahms once stated himself that, besides learning the piano as his main instrument, he was also taught the violin, horn and cello during his early years. In any case, an early “Duo for Pianoforte and Violoncello”, which was later destroyed by the composer but is known to have been performed under the pseudonym “Karl Würth” in a private concert on July 5, 1851, marked the start of Johannes Brahms’s life-long compositional interest in the cello, the second most prominent string instrument after the violin. In addition to the two particularly noteworthy “Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violoncello” on this CD, No. 1 in E minor op. 38 and No. 2 in F major op. 99, which are undoubtedly among the most important contributions to the cello sonata genre of the 19th century, special mention should also be made of the great cello solo in the slow movement of the second Piano Concerto in B flat major op. 83 and the cello solo part in the famous Double Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in A minor op. 102, which was originally conceived as a concerto for solo cello, and the virtuosic cello solo at the start of the opening movement of the second String Quartet in G major op. 111, which Brahms actually intended to be his last ever composition when he wrote it in 1890.

Maja Weber, cello, and Per Lundberg, piano, have been playing chamber music together for more than twenty years, mostly in piano quartets and quintets. Maja (also a Member of the Stradivari Quartet) plays the Bonamy Dobree-Suggia cello made by Antonio Stradivari in 1717. Per’s activities as a concert pianist and chamber musician form the two main focuses of his artistic profile. As a chamber musician he performs in various ensembles across Europe. He works also with Sara Trobäck Hesselink and Claes Gunnarsson, who are respectively the leader and solo cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Hermitage in St Petersburg not only housed famous art collections, which were made accessible to the public after the October Revolution, but also hosted glamorous musical events. Catherine the Great had the Hermitage Theatre built, which still stands to this day, and the operas that were magnificently staged there were central to courtly festivities.

The idea for this CD came in conjunction with Claire Genewein’s elevation to Doctor of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in June 2014. In her thesis, she showed that in 18th century Italy, instrumental music was rehearsed with the aid of textual reflections – a method which, over time, was almost completely lost and which is hardly practised today. This CD documents the tradition of the mutual interaction between vocal and instrumental music and makes this stimulating impetus audible.
La Cetra Consort consists of members of the La Cetra Baroque Orchestra Basel, who cultivate this genre within a smaller and more intimate setting. Claire Genewein works as a flautist in various ensembles such as La Cetra Baroque Orchestra Basel, L’Orfeo, Venice Baroque Orchestra, Il gusto barocco, L’Arcadia, and Ensemble Miroir.