Star oboist Albrecht Mayer was praised by the press for his successful Baroque album »Tesori d'Italia«: »What makes Albrecht Mayer's musical treasures, tonal beauty and technical mastery so precious in these five treasures, is hard to beat.« (FonoForum). Now he presents his new recording Longing for Paradise, recorded with the Bamberger Symphoniker.

Stravinsky, Bartók and Martinů were established international figures when they wrote these works for violin, travelling across Europe as well as the United States. With the onset of World War Two, all three composers would ultimately emigrate because of their rejection of fascism. In an age of political upheaval and cultural displacement, each of them found an individual approach to reinventing the language of tonal music, laying down roots in the west without abandoning their Eastern European identities. While the Russian-born Stravinsky was experimenting with possibilities of modern violin technique in his concerto, Martinů took these efforts a step further in his Suite concertante by blending the sounds of his native Bohemia with the colours of French neo-classicism. In the Rhapsodies, Bartók turned to the folk music of Hungary and Romania.

Alberto Ginastera was one of the most admired and respected musical voices of the twentieth century, who successfully fused the strong traditional influences of his national heritage with experimental, contemporary, and classical techniques. The two Cello Concertos are among his most innovative, brilliant and technically formidable compositions.

Carl Goldmark was not a symphonist – and that is no secret. His few attempts in this field – an early work, in part lost, and his second symphony, his op. 35, did not add up to much, and the Ländliche Hochzeit, to which the generic label 'symphony' was assigned, does nothing more than confirm that this master of orchestral colors was above all good at atmospheric and character pictures. Goldmark very evidently needed a programmatic or dramatic 'pretext' in order to rise up to his creative best, which is why he was able to gain the greatest fame and to score his most important successes with his stage works (tops here: Die Königin von Saba) as well as with his concert overtures. As he himself said, a change of milieu was good for his powers of inspiration, and so he repeatedly sought out extremes while selecting his materials and subjects.