​High level chamber music, special concert venues with Lake Constance as spectacular setting and culinary highlights after the concerts - the festival offers delights for all senses. From September 7th to 15th the Sea Park Kreuzlingen, Castle Arenenberg and the ship MV Sonnenkönigin turn into concert stages.

Besides the Swiss Piano Trio participating artists in 2013 will be the Camerata Bregenz, the lucernestring trio, the aronquartett Wien and soprano Franziska Hirzel with pianist Jan Schultsz.

For more details about the festival please click here.

image 2: Schloss Seeburg
image 3: Schloss Arenenberg
image 4: MS Sonnenkönigin
image 5: Konzert MS Sonnenkönigin
image 6: Konzert MS Sonnenkönigin
Photo Credits: Swiss Piano Trio

The ICS is a UK-wide association of Independent Classical CD retailers. Member shops range from Edinburgh to Hove, from Abergavenny to Norwich. Each offers the record buying public an unusually high standard of service with knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff, extensive CD stocks and  fast ordering of out-of-stock items at great value. You can find more information on the ICS here.

​Unlike in the elegiac, lyrical interpretations of his mature period, Celibidache also reveals his youthful, boisterous side in these recordings. This edition contains numerous first releases and paints a comprehensive picture of the conductor at that time. But his later development also already becomes perceptible.

Celibidache during his early years in Berlin - a sonic compendium of music history during the post-war era.

The Premio Paolo Borciani was founded in 1987 and is dedicated to the famous founder and first violinist of the Quartetto Italiano Paolo Borciani. Laureates in the past were e.g. the Mandelring Quartett, the Artemis Quartett and the Kuss Quartett. You can find more information here:

competition
jury
history
Paolo Borciani
past winners
Quartetto Italiano

​As of now our products will be distributed through Ducale Music in Italy. We are looking forward to good co-operation!

​​The new audite series The RIAS Amadeus Quartet Recordings, whose first volume documents nearly the complete cycle of Beethoven's string quartets recorded between 1950 and 1967, is now added by an radio interview from the eighties. The musicians of the Amadeus Quartet talk about their foundation and nature of  the genre string quartet.
Here you can listen to the interview!

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​Felix Mendelssohn did not write his six mature string quartets continually, but instead at particular pivotal points in his life and compositional career. In his youth, studying Bach and Beethoven proved to be fruitful, and later in life he was inspired by the exceptional violinist Ferdinand David to write his three Quartets Op. 44 between 1837 and 1839 (represented on this SACD by the final work in E flat major). They document the mature, formally assured Mendelssohn who sums up his instrumental writing: brilliantly composed (particularly for David's violin), full of colour and formal attractions, romantic in their conduct.

After completing his Quartet Op. 80 (contained in the second volume of the complete recording), Mendelssohn had not much time left to revisit and renew the string quartet. Two single surviving movements - a tenderly transfigured, but also irascible, Andante with five variations and a whispering Scherzo - were integrated into Op. 81 after Mendelssohn's death. To Mendelssohn admirers, this Scherzo is faintly reminiscent of the Scherzo in the Octet Op. 20 with which the sixteen-year-old Felix, in a coup de main, created a new genre: "symphonic" chamber music where all "pianos and fortes need to be very precise and clearly separated and more distinctly emphasised than it is normally the case with pieces of this genre." The jubilant opening of the octet, the romance-like Andante, the elastic, elf-like Scherzo and the rapid fugal finale - every movement is proof of the resourcefulness and the youthful genius of this "lovely episode in German music", as Friedrich Nietzsche once referred to the composer Mendelssohn.

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