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Music For My Cello
Various composers

Julius Berger

Music For My Cello

Price: € 12.95
Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917237627
Catnr: CC 72376
Release date: 30 April 2010
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Label
Challenge Classics
UPC
0608917237627
Catalogue number
CC 72376
Release date
30 April 2010

"You have to number Julius Berger among the most talented Cellists of the prestent. You have to prize his commitment to contemporary music, which he plays with virtuosity and airiness as there are no technical difficulties; there are no one in interpretation anyway."

pizzicato, 01-3-2011
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About the album

Mastercellist Julius Berger is a champion of contemporary music and he is very closely connected and works together with composers. Composers love to dedicate their works for cello to Berger: al cellist who doesn’t make music but is music.

"These were always the great moments in my life: when I held a work written especially for me in my hands for the first time; when I tried to tune into mysteries and hidden meanings with my cello; when the doors opened up to a new space that had never been there before. The effect on me was always spellbinding. The horizontal dimension of this path through life is transformed into a vertical one. Time stands still, time becomes fundamental. This new birth holds in its hand the key to the deepest and innermost feelings. Perhaps this is why Mikis Theodorakis or Bertold Hummel fight to hold back their tears, perhaps this is why Wilhelm Killmayer seems “unendingly” faraway, perhaps this is why Krzysztof Meyer or Hermann Regner burst with joy as never before. – We embrace on the concert platform and know that in this moment we have become “one” through music." - Julius Berger in the linernotes of "Music For My Cello')
Cellist Julius Berger is een boegbeeld van de hedendaags gecomponeerde muziek
Meestercellist Julius Berger staat bekend als iemand met een enorme toewijding aan de hedendaagse muziek. Hij speelt ongelooflijk mooi en is vaak de eerste die nieuwe composities aangereikt krijgt door zijn persoonlijke relaties met hedendaagse componisten. Alle werken zijn dan ook opgedragen aan de cellist.

"He plays with a mesmerizing communicative power that comes direct and irresistible from the platform into your very soul." - The Guardian
Alle Werke der vorliegenden CD sind Julius Berger gewidmet. Im ausführlichen Booklet erzählt er von der jeweiligen Entstehungsgeschichte und seiner Beziehung zu den Komponisten. Wenn Julius Berger Konzerte gibt, tritt irgendwann der Moment ein, da man wie in einer zweiten Wachheit aufschreckt, sich der eigenen Selbstvergessenheit bewusst wird und den Cellospieler aus den Augen verloren hat. Er spielt eines der ältesten Celli der Welt, das Violoncello Andrea Amati aus dem Jahr 1566 - "König Charles IX." und ist Professor für Violoncello und Kammermusik am Leopold-Mozart-Zentrum der Universität Augsburg.

Artist(s)

Julius Berger

Born in Augsburg in 1954, Julius Berger studied at the Musikhochschule of Munich, Germany under Walter Reichardt and Fritz Kiskalt. Later, he studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria under Antonio Janigro (who´s assistant he became from 1979 to 1982) and at the University of Cincinnati, USA under Zara Nelsova and on the occasion of a master-course under Mstislav Rostropovic. With 28 years Julius Berger was appointed to the Musikhochschule Wuerzburg and was one of the youngest professors in Germany. Starting in Wuerzburg, later in Saarbruecken and Mainz, and since 2000 in Augsburg, he took efforts to promote the top new talents in his subject. Since 1992 he  leads a class at the international summer academy at the Mozarteum Salzburg. Julius Berger...
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Born in Augsburg in 1954, Julius Berger studied at the Musikhochschule of Munich, Germany under Walter Reichardt and Fritz Kiskalt. Later, he studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria under Antonio Janigro (who´s assistant he became from 1979 to 1982) and at the University of Cincinnati, USA under Zara Nelsova and on the occasion of a master-course under Mstislav Rostropovic.
With 28 years Julius Berger was appointed to the Musikhochschule Wuerzburg and was one of the youngest professors in Germany. Starting in Wuerzburg, later in Saarbruecken and Mainz, and since 2000 in Augsburg, he took efforts to promote the top new talents in his subject. Since 1992 he leads a class at the international summer academy at the Mozarteum Salzburg.
Julius Berger devotes a big part of international concert- and recording-works to the rediscovery of Luigi Boccherini´s complete works, the performance and CD-edition of the works für Violoncello and pianoforte by Paul Hindemith, the works of Ernst Bloch, Max Bruch, Richard Strauss, Robert Schumann and Edward Elgar.
Julius Berger is known for his big commitment of contemporary compositions. He published remarkable CD´s, that are known all over the world, featuring the works of John Cage, Toshio Hosokawa and Sofia Gubaidulina.

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Composer(s)

Mikis Theodorakis

Mikis Theodorakis was born on the Greek island of Khios in the Aegean Sea on 29 July 1925. He grew up with Greek folk music and was early influenced by the Byzantine liturgy. Even as a child, he decided to become a composer.   Theodorakis’ life has been characterized by his political commitment to the Greek people and their freedom, by persecution and struggle for survival. His activities as resistance fighter during the occupation of Greece by German, Bulgarian and Italian troops led to his arrest and torture in 1943. The Civil War of 1947-49 to him meant being tortured again and finally banished to the penal colonies of Ikaria and Makronissos, where he barely survived.   From 1945 Theodorakis studied intermittently with Philoktitis...
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Mikis Theodorakis was born on the Greek island of Khios in the Aegean Sea on 29 July 1925. He grew up with Greek folk music and was early influenced by the Byzantine liturgy. Even as a child, he decided to become a composer.
Theodorakis’ life has been characterized by his political commitment to the Greek people and their freedom, by persecution and struggle for survival. His activities as resistance fighter during the occupation of Greece by German, Bulgarian and Italian troops led to his arrest and torture in 1943. The Civil War of 1947-49 to him meant being tortured again and finally banished to the penal colonies of Ikaria and Makronissos, where he barely survived.
From 1945 Theodorakis studied intermittently with Philoktitis Economidis at the Odeion music school and from 1954-1959 with Eugène Bigot and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1957 he was awarded the gold medal of the composition competition of the World Festival in Moscow for his ’Suite No.1’ and in 1959 the American Copley Prize for the best European composer. Furthermore he received the first prize of the International Institute of Music in London. During that time, he created ballet musics such as Greek Carnival, Les Amants de Téruel and Antigone in close collaboration with international theatres.
This successful period was interrupted by a bitter cultural struggle in Greece in which right-wing and left-wing groups and factions were engaged in fierce controversies. Theodorakis became one of the leading personalities among the renewers of Greece. After the assassination of the left-wing politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 he founded the Lambrakis Youth and took his seat in the Greek Parliament. During that time, he also notched up great successes and achieved worldwide fame with compositions such as the film music Zorba the Greek and the oratorio Axion Esti. The internal political disturbances of the following years led to the formation of a big and a small junta and their coup d’état. Theodorakis founded the underground movement ’Patriotic Front’. Shortly afterwards, his music was banned, and he was arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp of Oropos. He was released in 1970 in response to an international initiative of important artists such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Hanns Eisler and Leonard Bernstein. Having become a symbol of the European student movement, not least by Zorba the Greek, Theodorakis started to live in exile in Paris from 1970. At concert tours he called for further resistance to the military dictatorship and for the restoration of democracy in his home country where he could return to as a politician in 1974. At that time, his compositional work focussed mainly on numerous large-scale song cycles.
It was not until the beginning of the 1980s that he moved back to Paris and fully resumed composing. He began to create increasingly symphonic works, cantatas, oratorios such as Canto General on the occasion of the accession of Greece to the EC, sacred music and operas such as I Metamorfosis tou Dionisou. In the time that followed, the independent left-winger Mikis Theodorakis was appointed Minister without Portfolio in the Conservative government of Mitsotakis, making an educational and cultural reform his particular task from 1990 till 1992 and promoting the reconciliation between Greece and Turkey.
After retreating from politics, he was appointed general music director of the Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of the Hellenic Radio and Television in 1993 and was also in great demand as conductor of his own works. In the years before and after 1990 Theodorakis composed the great lyric tragedies based on classical literature: Medea, Elektra, Antigone. At the beginning of 1998 he donated his entire collections to the Lilian Voudouri Foundation at the Megaron in Athens.
In 2000 Mikis Theodorakis was proposed as nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize with great support of not only the Greek population and was shortlisted by the Nobel Committee. For his artistic œuvre in the field of film music he has been awarded the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Prize at the International Film Music Biennial in Bonn in 2002. In November 2005 Theodorakis has been awarded the UNESCO prize for arts and music in Aachen/Germany.

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Press

You have to number Julius Berger among the most talented Cellists of the prestent. You have to prize his commitment to contemporary music, which he plays with virtuosity and airiness as there are no technical difficulties; there are no one in interpretation anyway.
pizzicato, 01-3-2011

No quote
The Strad, 01-1-2011

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