Go East! by Gülru Ensari & Herbert Schuch

Various composers

Gülru Ensari & Herbert Schuch

Go East!

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085533763
Catnr: AVI 8553376
Release date: 10 March 2017
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085533763

Catalogue number
AVI 8553376

Release date
10 March 2017

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

Everything began with Paul Hindemith's Waltzes, Op. 6. One morning, befor epracticing, Gülru Ensari and Herbert Schuch sight-read those eight miniatures for four hands, and were astounded to find that they featured a number of similarities with the Brahms Waltzes. Why not intermingle the two cycles? The Turkish-German duo - who are partners in real life, not just at the piano - decided to record the Brahms and Hindemith cycles for this album, along with two Turkish dances by Özkan Manav and the four-hand version of Igor Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'. ...And then it turned out that the 'Hungarian' element often gave us the chance to create smooth transitions between one composer and the other. It ends up sounding incredibly natural to us. The two composers are directing their gaze toward the same horizon: to the East.The duo got their idea of commissioning Özkan Manav to compose a work for them while in Vienna and Frankfurt. Brahms and Hindemith found their inspiration in Hungarian folk tunes. Özkan Manav arranged an American folk dance; in Paris, Stravinsky revisited the folk music of his Russian homeland to write 'Sacre'.

Artist(s)

Gülru Ensari (piano)

Herbert Schuch (piano)

Pianist Herbert Schuch has gained a reputation as one of the most interesting musicians of his generation with his strikingly conceived concert programmes and CD recordings.
He has worked with a number of renowned orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bamberg Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the radio orchestras of hr, MDR, WDR, NDR Hannover und Danish Radio, as well as with the Camerata Salzburg and the Festival Strings Lucerne, with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Valery Gergiev, Jakub Hru° ša, Jun Märkl, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jonathan Nott, Markus Poschner, Michael Sanderling, and Mario Venzago.
Herbert Schuch was born in Timi¸soara, Romania, in 1979. He had his first piano lessons in his native city with Prof. Maria Bodo, before his family moved to Germany in 1988, where he has lived since.
He continued his musical studies with Kurt Hantsch and then with Prof. Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Recently, Herbert Schuch has been especially influenced by his encounters and work with Alfred Brendel.
As a child, Herbert Schuch also played violin for 10 years and has been an enthusiastic chamber musician ever since, sharing the stage with musicians of the likes of Nicolas Altstaedt, Vilde Frang, Julia Fischer, Maximilian Hornung, Sebastian Manz, and Daniel Müller-Schott.
He also forms a successful piano duo with Gülru Ensari: together, they have recorded three releases for the CAvi-music label, featuring a wide range of repertoire from different periods.
In addition to his performance activities, Herbert Schuch is also involved in the organization Rhapsody in School, founded by Lars Vogt, which promotes classical music education in schools.

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Composer(s)

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

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Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith studied violin at the Dr Hoch's Konservatorium of Frankfurt and played from 1915 to 1923 in the Frankfurt opera. From 1921 to 1929 he played viola in the Amar Quarter, where he was advocate for contemporary music. Throughout the years, he held multiple positions as teachers, but he remained most popular as a violist. During the Second Worldwar he fleed to the USA and was given the American nationality in 1948, Later, he returned to Europe to teach at the university of Zürich.
His use rhythm, called "Motorik" by himself (a combination of Motor and Musik) is piercing, and at times even tormenting. It echoes the arrival of industralisation and the motor, as Hindemith opposes any form of sentimentality, psychology or personality. This way, Hinemith created shrill, neoclassicistic music (Gebrauchsmusik, music with a social or political aim). His body of works is quite extensive, with more than 100 compositions in all kinds of genres. Even though he was an advocate of contemporary music, he never felt affiliated with dodecaphony. He wrote several theoretic treatises, among which his Unterweisung im Tonsatz from 1937 in which Hindemith offers several systems in which the tension between intervals, harmony and melody is analysed and elevated into a compositional technique.

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Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase" which continued with works such as Renard, The Soldier's Tale and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony), drawing on earlier styles, especially from the 18th century. This style was often referred to as Neoclassicism. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, and of instrumentation.

Gülru Ensari & Herbert Schuch

Go East!

About the album

Artist(s)

Gülru Ensari (piano)

Herbert Schuch (piano)

Composer(s)

Johannes Brahms

Paul Hindemith

Igor Stravinsky

Özkan Manav

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