★Wergo

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…

2025 stock. A portrait of the early work of Peter Ruzicka, the German composer and conductor who later directed the Salzburg Festival and the Munich Biennale. The five pieces collected here range from a large orchestra to string quartet, percussion and tape, and share a music built on tension, fracture and sudden release. Metastrofe, subtitled "attempt at an outbreak" for 87 instrumentalists, is performed by the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Michael Gielen. ...fragment... is a set of fi…

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…

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…

*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 …

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.

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…

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…

“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…

*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…

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…

*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…

*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…

*2024 stock* Produced in 1974 by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Hesse Between Music sets readings from Hermann Hesse against the music of Peter Michael Hamel and his group Between. The texts come from Siddhartha, the Steppenwolf materials, The Glass Bead Game, Peter Camenzind and other writings, and are read by the actor Gert Westphal. It is a synthesis of spirituality and art, of sitar and church organ, of meditative sounds and jazz rhythms, of silence and passion, from the moment when German musicians…

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 …

*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…

*2022 stock* '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 Henze’s blessing for a theater…

'Morton Feldman has proved one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. Yet he remains one of its most enigmatic, and his late works retain an aura of mystery steeped with the grandeur, anxiety and quietly changing colour he adored in abstract expressionist painting and, latterly, Anatolian rug design. Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is perhaps the most rhythmically active of these famously long, static pieces, which showed his increasing preoccupation with matters of form, scale a…

Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces…

'The literal meaning of “amphibian” is “double life” and applies to animals living part of their lives in water and part of their lives on land. In the program note to his electroacoustic classic Music for the Double Life of Amphibians, Morton Subotnick states that “amphibian” is to be taken as a metaphor for the work’s structure and programmatic content, which follow a metamorphosis of being through the stages of amphibian to beast to angel. But it also applies to the musical material, the doub…