Late chamber and piano music by Günter Bialas, written when he was in his late seventies: a piano cycle of 1983-86, the piano quartet Herbstzeit of 1982 and the Fourth String Quartet, Assonanzen, of 1986. Siegfried Mauser is the pianist, joined by Christian Altenburger, Barbara Westphal and Julius Berger, and the quartet is played by the Auryn Quartet.

Günter Bialas was born in 1907 in Bielschowitz in Upper Silesia and died in 1995 in Glonn, in Upper Bavaria. After studies in Breslau and Berlin, where he studied composition with Max Trapp, he taught at the Detmold academy from 1947 to 1959 and was professor of composition in Munich from 1959 until 1972. His pupils included Wilfried Hiller, Nicolaus A. Huber and Peter Michael Hamel. The recordings were made in Studio 3 of the Bayerischer Rundfunk on 5 April and 2 May 1988 and in the Hans-Rosbaud-Studio in Baden-Baden on 11 April 1989.

Lamento, vier Intermezzi und Marsch for piano frames four short intermezzi between a substantial Lamento of six minutes and a closing March of almost the same length. Herbstzeit - Autumn is a quartet for violin, viola, cello and piano, about eleven minutes long. Assonanzen, the String Quartet No. 4, is the largest work at over twenty minutes; it belongs to a series of five quartets that Bialas wrote between 1935 and 1991.

A composer finds himself, in the words of the Wergo notes, through a mediation between the stylistic demands of the moment and his own concerns, somewhere between sealed self-absorption and constant adaptation. Bialas kept his own character through all the changes of style he lived through. He was known in Munich for an open, undogmatic way of teaching, and his honours ranged from the Münchner Musikpreis in 1962 to the Bayerischer Maximiliansorden in 1991. His operas range from Hero und Leander (1966) to Aus der Matratzengruft (1992), written in his eighties.

CD, Wergo WER 6164 2, released in 1990. Total time 53'27.