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The two Sonatas Op. 120 are Johannes Brahms’ last chamber music works, written in the summer of 1894, three years before his death. After having heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld in concert, he dedicated to him this opus, and they performed the premiere together in November 1894, in front of an audience including Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim. Brahms himself transcribed the sonatas a few months later for the viola, an instrument whose range, fairly close to that of the clarinet, found in his ears an intimate sound adequate for these two romantic masterpieces.

PRD 250 177

Anthology dedicated to one of the great contemporary Czech composer, Jindřich Feld, successor and spiritual heir to Martinů through his non-conformism and his francophilia, humanistic having built a language „out of time“, on the basis of Stravinsky, Bartók and then Berg without erasing his atavistic Slavonic expressionism. He dedicated one of his last major works to the viola, the instrument of its youth, of which Feld knows the song and the nostalgic splendor. The viola main song is supported by a spacious and well worked orchestration.

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Erwin SCHULHOFF : 8 June 1894 (Prague) - 18 August 1942 (KZ Weissenburg, Bavaria)

In 1926, Schulhoff was at the peak of his glory, his neo-Classical writing has succeeded in blending expressiveness, a playful nature, Bohemian poetics and innovative jazz influences: a clear picture of degenerate music according Goebbels, ten years later..

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Gideon KLEIN : December 1919 (Přerov, CZ) - January 1945 (KZ Fürstengrube)

Terezin-Memorial : http://www.pamatnik-terezin.cz/

Yad Vashem : http://www.yadvashem.org/

Mes musiques régénérées (jewish music ) : http://claude.torres1.perso.sfr.fr/

Self-taught composer Gideon KLEIN, who died in a gas chamber when he was 26, was influenced essentially by the Second Vienna School and by the music of his elder, Leoš Janáček. In addition to his two masterpieces, the Fantasy and Fugue and String Trio, written during his detention in the Terezín camp in order to enliven the cultural life there, earlier chamber works (1938-41), miraculously preserved in a briefcase not opened until 1990, have been published thanks to the work of Vojtěch Saudek (1951-2003). Here, the Kocian Quartet, specialising in ‘degenerate’ music, presents the complete chamber works for strings.

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William Primrose, violist

A tribute to the Scottish born American violist William Primrose, famous for his commissioning and rendering of Bartok’s viola concerto. This work features alongside three other pieces exquisitely played on instruments crafted by Andrea Guarnerius (1697) and Stradivarius (McDonald, 1700 or Gibson, 1734). Miraculous achievements.

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