★Wergo
Music & Graphic / Organ Improvisations
2025 stock Are we now in a position to experience within ourselves every kind of music as a harmonious system? In this case there would be only one music existing independent of the composer and the notation. Is it then the case, that the responsibility for the music has not only been shifted from the composer to the performer, but even further to the listener? The person who listens to this record will have to decide.
Zsigmond Szathmáry: organ
Pierrot lunaire Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds „Pierrot lunaire“ (Melodramen), op. 21
2025 stock WERGO's unique "studio reihe" series continues with a rather special CD release:
The present recording of Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot lunaire" was the first long-playing record released by the newly founded label WERGO in 1962, which laid the foundation of the label's decades-long story of success. This important recording –with the soprano Helga Pilarczyk and under the direction of Pierre Boulez – has not been available on CD up to now. Now the label releases this highlight from its…
Komposition Für Streichquartett / Komposition Für Violine / Disappearing Musics
2025 stock Jakob Ullmann's career can be measured by the obstacles placed in his path. It was in the teeth of these obstacles that he learnt his craft: they have left their mark on his artistic stance, and the fact that he ultimately overcame them proved the rightness of his approach. For a number of reasons, Ullmann's works failed to blend into the musical landscape of the former state of East Germany. Avoiding peremptory gestures and unalterable laws, his restrained scores seemed strange and a…
Musica Ricercata / Capriccio 1&2 / Invention / Monument · Selbstportrait · Bewegung
2025 stock "Musica Ricercata" of 1951-53 is a collection of 11 piano pieces which even with their traditional character went beyond what was considered appropriate for performance in Hungary in the early 1950s. The tenth piece, e.g., was considered too "decadent" because of the abundance of minor seconds. The short "Capriccios" and "Invention", written in 1947-48, reveal convincingly the emergence of Ligeti's musical identity. "Monument · Selbstportrait · Bewegung" (three pieces for two pianos) …
Zyklus Für Einen Schlagzeuger In Zwei Fassungen / Klavierstück X
2025 stock Under the title of “studio reihe neuer musik”, WERGO released outstanding recordings in the 1960s, thus creating a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the label's early days. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, WERGO now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.“studio reihe” now continues with works by Karlheinz Stockhausen:On this CD, “Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger” [“Cycle for One Percussionist”] can…
Etudes Boreales / Harmonies / 10'40.3"
2025 stock Enormous technical requirements make John Cage's "Etudes Boreales" a highly virtuosic work, which requires an extreme sensitivity of feeling for the coordination of fingers, instrument, and intellect. On this CD it is presented in versions: for piano solo and later for cello solo with piano solo. As in the sister works, "Etudes Australes" and "Freeman Etudes", Cage based the "Etudes Boreales" on a star chart. He used the chart of the northern sky that the Czech astronomer Antonín Bečv…
Metastrofe / Fragment / Stress / In Processo Di Tempo / Bewegung
2025 stock Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin / Michael Gielen: conductor / Westphal Quartett / Percussionensemble Siegfried Fink / Claus Kanngießer: cello / Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin / Peter Ruzicka: conductor
Agon, Ballet For Twelve Dancers
2025 stock With “studio reihe neuer musik”, WERGO created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, WERGO now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.
“studio reihe” now continues with a work by Igor Stravinsky:
Stravinsky's last ballet composition “Agon. Ballet for Twelve Dancers” was written over a period of three years (1954–1957). During…
La Didone Abbandonata I 5. Studie I Streichquartett I Umbau 2 I Tragicomedia
2012 release ** "Michael Hirsch began to work as a composer in 1976, with occasional interruptions for theatre engagements. In addition to instrumental music and music theatre, the genre of musique concrète is an important part of his compositional oeuvre as is illustrated impressively by the works recorded on this CD. “La Didone abbandonata” is based on the opera seria text of the same name by Pietro Metastasio from 1724. For his version Hirsch reduced the number of the dramatis personae to the…
Iannis Xenakis - Mythos und Technik
*2025 stock**Bilingual Edition English and German* In the films of this DVD, Peider A Defilla provides an insight into the oeuvre of Iannis Xenakis. The films show musica-viva performances of the works ’Syrmos’, ’Synaphai’, ’Theraps’, and ’Nekula’, and the respective BR-alpha broadcasts on these compositions. In an exclusive interview, the composer Iannis Xenakis is asked about his compositional oeuvre. In addition, the data section of the DVD contains further information on Iannis Xenakis, the …
For Piano I / For Pianist / Burdocks (LP)
Original 1972 LP of Christian Wolff's seminal chance compositions featuring David Tudor, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, etc. on Wergo’s legendary Studio Reihe Neuer Musik series. Complete with insert.
Winter Music
John Cage's importance for a comprehensive aesthetic reorientation of New Music after the Second World War can hardly be overestimated. His self-discovery and compositional articulation took place particularly in the field of piano music: in the art-merging experimental laboratory of New York around the dancer Merce Cunningham, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the congenial performer and pianist David Tudor.
It is good fortune that Sabine Liebner, who has already released several internationa…
50 Years
In 2012, the Wergo label celebrates its 50th anniversary. For half a century, Wergo has been synonymous with contemporary music. The label's catalog reads like a virtual who's-who of modern music, both in terms of composers and performers. From the beginning, the intent of founder Werner Goldschmidt (from whom the label derives its name) was to provide listeners with a snapshot of current musical activity and innovation. Goldschmidt's label and mission, now managed by the publisher Schott, is ma…
Delusion Of The Fury
“It was only with Partch that a music began to take shape that could do equal justice to the physical desire for rhythmic pulse and a curiosity for new, unheard sounds; a music that enthralls us despite, or rather, precisely because of its unfamiliarity. A music for which we have no category, and which has no location, and yet in a strange way is grounded.” – Heiner Goebbels
The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is considered a pioneer of the Just Intonation movement and was far ahead o…
Recomposed
*2024 stock* 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.
Zimm…
-> Sonic Patterns
For decades, Ludger Brümmer has represented a unique, courageous, and often instantly recognisable voice in electronic, algorithmic, and computer music. He develops structures that lead to aesthetic experiences normally found, if at all, only in the most expressive of instrumental works.
Ludger Brümmer’s music is dominated by processes. All processes are on a trajectory towards a climax or evolve from a climax to a minimum. Ultimately, a complete lack of orientation is to be achieved in the clim…
Orient | Occident
*2024 stock* Live recording of the piano recital for the eightieth birthday of composer Hans Otte that Philipp Vandré and Elmar Schrammel presented at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. A selection of John Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano was interwoven with selections from Hans Otte's piano cycles "Das Buch der Klänge" (The book of sounds) and "Stundenbuch" (Book of hours). This concert experiment, conceived by Ingo Ahmels, paid quiet homage to the "beautiful piano so…
No Ideas But In Things
*2024 stock* “Don’t ask me what I mean, ask me what I’ve made.” - Alvin Lucier
The American Alvin Lucier is one of the most significant composers of New Music in the twentieth century. Being one of the first representatives of live electronic music, he explored in his works the nature and the effect of sound phenomena such as resonances, echoes and interferences, with the boundaries between installation, performance, composition and science becoming blurred.
In the present documentary film by Vi…
Hesse Between Music (Dichtung & Musik)
*2024 stock* Produced in 1974 by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, this synthesis of Hermann Hesse’s writing with Peter Michael Hamel’s music, of spirituality and art, of sitar and church organ, of meditative sounds and jazz rhythms, of silence and passion remains unique today and in the meanwhile it has obtained a legendary reputation. Further releases of the formation Between from the 1970s are re-released as cds on the Intuition label: "Einstieg - Re-Entry", "And the Waters Opened", "Silence Beyond Time…
Trio IX / Exercises
The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …