SKU: HL.48024663

ISBN 9783793142171. UPC: 888680951511. 9.0x12.0x2.92 inches.

Jacques Offenbach's more than 100 stage works are an endless treasure trove of vocal highlights with highly different musical moods and lyrical themes. To mark the 200th birthday of the great composer in 2019, which is at the same time the year of the 20th anniversary of the Offenbach Edition Keck OEK, the editor and Offenbach expert Jean-Christophe Keck has assembled a selection of arias. The four-part collection arranged according to voice category shows a rather unknown, romantic side of Offenbach. Apart from rediscovered works and first editions, however, the collection is not complete without some of his unrivalled hits. Among the characters figuring in the soprano volume are not only title figures like the Beautiful Helen, the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein or the Princess of Trébizonde but also figures from more serious operas: Armgard from Les Fées du Rhin or Elsbeth from Fantasio. The volume presents stage works, including excerpts from Barkouf, Les Bergers or Le Roi Carotte, that are accessible for performances only as of recently. Romantic Offenbach is aimed at fully trained and budding professionals as well as at Offenbach fans of every shade and colour, providing repertoire pieces for recitals, studies or private music-making.

SKU: HL.49047364

ISBN 9798350124866. UPC: 196288207610.

Four Arms, Two Necks is a setting of a 17th century anonymous poem. The timelessness of the words in the love poem struck me and I set it to music, later dedicating the song to two friends, Anda and Bill Winters, in celebration of a wedding anniversary. Orpheus is from William Shakespeare�s play The Life of King Henry VIII. Between 1996-2000, I composed and produced the music for audio recordings of all 38 Shakespeare plays in the Complete Arkangel Shakespeare collection. This song from the play was originallywritten for lute accompaniment and I later arranged the lute part for piano. Agua, Dónde Vas? is a setting of a poem by Federico García Lorca. In 1998, I visited Barcelona to renew with a dear friend, Lucia from an illustrious family of flamenco musicians and dancers. We had met in 1985 when I first visited Granada and was hanging out in the flamenco tablao�s of the Albaicin and Granada proper. Through Lucia I got a glimpse of a world in which Lorca�s poetry vibrated daily and as casually as the music, songs and rhythms that peppered and punctuated conversations, discussions, exchanges of opinions, mealtimes in homes and bars and the precious moments of just hanging out.

SKU: HL.49046394

ISBN 9781540086570. UPC: 840126910186. 9.0x12.0 inches.

In 2010 I lived in Rome as a Villa Massimo scholarship holder. During my time there I came across a few poems by Michelangelo that touched me a lot and soon had the plan to set some of them to music. But I wanted to combine it with something contemporary - just like in Rome the old and the new always meet. The poet Marcel Beyer, whom I met in Rome, then wrote the cycle of poems Die Grillmeisterin for me, which takes up many motifs from the Michelangelo texts (fire, tears, getting burned, loneliness, etc.). I then alternately combined this cycle of poems with the Michelangelo poems. The Italian songs have a sometimes melancholy, sometimes dramatic character, while the German songs are rather bizarre, sometimes even humorous. Despite these contrasts in character, there are also many musical connections between the German and Italian songs. Individual motifs and chord sequences sometimes return in completely different contexts, and there is even a direct connection between the first and last song, in that the same vocal line is underlaid with a completely different text. This creates a musical framework that holds the very heterogeneous selection of texts together. -Anno Schreier.