Tobias Koch – Schumann & Hiller: Piano Quintets (2015/2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Tobias Koch – Schumann & Hiller: Piano Quintets (2015/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:05:54 minutes | 584 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Berlin

Among the composers of his day, he was a heavyweight who left a great number of works to posterity: over 200 compositions, including works for the stage, a string of song collections, various concertos and four symphonies, apart from a multitude of writings about music, personal diaries and over ten thousand letters. We are not referring to Robert Schumann, but to Ferdinand Hiller. Ennobled in 1875, he was still ranked without hesitation among the most influential musical figures of his time by the end of the 19th century. Yet his great reputation as a composer and a pianist paled alongside his prominent role as orchestra director and as organizer of the Lower Rhine Music Festivals in Düsseldorf and in Cologne. In 1865, for instance, 20-year old Friedrich Nietzsche participated along with hundreds of other chorus singers in that year’s festival, and wrote to his sister about those unforgettable experiences: “The most beautiful moment of all was the performance of Hiller’s symphony with the motto ‘Spring has to come!’; the musicians were in a state of rare enthusiasm, since we all held Hiller in the highest esteem. After each section, everyone broke into tremendous applause, and once the work was finished we started a similar ruckus that escalated even further. His throne was covered with wreaths of flowers and bouquets, and one of the artists placed a laurel wreath on his head. The orchestra then broke into a threefold fanfare; the old man covered his face and cried for joy.” It might be surprising that young Nietzsche found 53-old Hiller “old”, probably only because the composer had already held important, honored positions for so long. Contemporaries of his own generation such as Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin had been his friends, but were long deceased; Hiller must have felt like a monument from another era. Almost defiantly, he viewed himself as the heir of a tradition he traced back to Mozart, and in his writings he adopted a public stance against the New German School. Just as foreign as its main representatives Liszt and Wagner remained to him, he revered Johannes Brahms all the more, and wholeheartedly supported the career of Brahms’s Cologne pupil Max Bruch. (…….from the Liner Notes)

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Tobias Koch – 2nd Chopin Festival Hamburg 2019 (Live) (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Tobias Koch – 2nd Chopin Festival Hamburg 2019 (Live) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:49 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos

Following the success of the 1st Chopin Festival Hamburg 2018, the 2nd Chopin Festival Hamburg 2019 continues its unique approach of inviting pianists to perform on original historic instruments and, by way of comparison, on a modern grand piano in the same concert. Performances range from Chopin heard on his Pleyel ‘pianino’ of 1832 to the most technically advanced Shigeru Kawai grand piano built in 2019. Listeners are invited to discover ‘old’ and ‘new’ in completely fresh ways through these multifaceted interpretations.

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Tobias Koch – Zukunftsmusik: Franz Schubert – Die letzten drei Klaviersonaten (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Tobias Koch – Zukunftsmusik: Franz Schubert – Die letzten drei Klaviersonaten (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:23:41 minutes | 2,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Musik Museum

The well-known German hammer piano specialist Tobias Koch has long been intensively engaged with the three great Sonatas from Schubert’s year of death in 1828, which he regards in many respects as “music for the future”. Now, the artist has decided to document his idiosyncratic and sophisticated Interpretation of these sonatas, which he sees as a cycle that belongs together, on CD. Conrad Graf’s beautiful hammer grand piano from the collection of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck was chosen as the Instrument for the project. The sophistication and richness of color of this precious instrument come into its own in the convincing interpretation.

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Tobias Koch – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 8-18 “On search of new paths” (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Tobias Koch – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 8-18 “On search of new paths” (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 03:53:01 minutes | 2,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

The pianoforte pianist Tobias Koch has researched deeply to discover new paths, forms, ideas in the sonatas of Beethoven’s middle period. This album presents uniquely personal interpretations of the sonatas 8 to 18, including the composer’s iconic “Moonlight” Sonata.

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Tobias Koch, Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens – Emilie Mayer: Piano Concerto · Overtures (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Tobias Koch, Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens – Emilie Mayer: Piano Concerto · Overtures (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:49 minutes | 720 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO

„Women who compose independently are rare in the music world. As abundant as the literary world is with female talent, the musical scene has few to champion, and among these few, Emilie Mayer is at the top. Her prolific output resembles a wellspring. She transforms every sensation, every feeling and every emotion to music.“ Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr (c. 1828–1901) described Emilie Mayer’s unique position in the music world of the time with these words in a Biographische Skizze (biographical sketch) published in 1877. Indeed, no other composer of her generation was so unimpressed by patriarchal gender conceit and rigid role attributions as „Europe’s greatest female composer“ (as Emilie Mayer is described in the subtitle of a recently published biography).

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Premysl Vojta, Tobias Koch – Metamorphosis, Horn & Piano (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Premysl Vojta, Tobias Koch – Metamorphosis, Horn & Piano (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:37 minutes | 551 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Přemysl Vojta doesn’t play “a” horn here, but rather several very different horns. He starts out with a natural horn from 1833 for Beethoven’s Sonata − for anyone familiar with this work being played on a modern chromatic instrument, the surprise will be massive! Much due to the fact that most of the notes, unavailable in the natural scale of the primitive instrument, are generated by changing the position of the right hand in the bell, creating a deaf, nasal sound in addition to the natural notes playing at full sonority. The result is quite unique, but foreseen by Beethoven when writing his Sonata; it’s as if two different instruments were playing, exchanging notes within a single phrase.

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