golden
Sensational what you can create with four saxophones - as long as they are virtuosos like the sonic.art Saxophone Quartet! In masterful arrangements, the four musicians with roots all over the world approach the truly golden 20s and early 30s of the last century and provide the audience with a top-class musical experience that is as entertaining as it is profound.

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nuanced
The title of Max Butting's suite is "Heitere Musik" ("Cheerful Music"), and this pioneering piece from the early days of radio lives up to its name: lively dance rhythms are juxtaposed with strict counterpoint, which comes across as surprisingly fresh in the arrangement by baritone Annegret Tully. Because of the extremely poor transmission quality on the radio at that time, the original largely does without sensitive string sounds in this respect - how good that with today's recording technology even the finest nuances can be experienced!

illuminating
Steffen Schleiermacher contributes three arrangements to this highly interesting collection: There is the suite that the versatile Hanns Eisler put together from various film scores. Three little piano pieces by Alexander Mossolov cast an extremely illuminating light on the short but very fruitful period between the October Revolution and Stalinist terror, and then Béla Bártok's wonderful collection of

Romanian Christmas carols, which in their dance-like exuberance leave everything traditionally contemplative about the festival far behind.

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rousing
Annegret Tully has arranged Hans Gál's string quartet for her ensemble, which is harmonically highly romantic to late romantic, and Christoph Enzel's effective arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich's "Jazz Suite" No. 1 - amazing what was possible in the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union! Today, the three dance pieces would rather be classified as vaudeville than Jazz, but be that as it may: the extremely colourful performance by the sonic.art Saxophone Quartet will hardly keep anyone in their seats!