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Music at the Bauhaus on CD

This extraordinary album sheds light on a phase in German cultural history never before documented with such encyclopedic depth. Here the pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, who has just received further important recognition as an interpreter of twentieth-century music as the recipient of the ECHO Classics Prize 1998, presents music by select composers from the Bauhaus movement. Joseph Matthias Hauer devoted himself to synaesthetic ideas throughout his life and lamented the separation of painting, architecture, and music. This alert, highly imaginative thinker came up with a thousand dodecaphonic "Zwolftonspiele" alone- to the delight of fellow creative artists like Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who is also represented with a work on this album. Along with such caricatures, this album also includes an anthology of fascinating, strange, and surprising pieces off the all-too-beaten path of music history: a morbid tango by Stefan Wolpe, a piano piece with the intriguing title "einsames getropfel" (lonely dripping) by Wladimir Vogel, and the sonatina "Death of the Machines" by the bad boy of the music world, George Antheil.