Isabel Gehweiler and Fiona Hengartner - Notre amour – Stücke für Violoncello und Klavier (2024) [Hi-Res]

The tradition of bringing out New Year publications on January 2, “Berchtold’s Day”, goes back as far as the 17th century. Societies andguilds provided printed books, illustrations or music to the young people of the city in return for a financial contribution, which went towards the heating of the society rooms. Founded in 1629, the Stadtbibliothek initiated the practice by distributing a New Year engraving by Hans Conrad Meyer with a poem by Johann Wilhelm Simmler for the year 1645, founding this form of New Year offering. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich, created in 1914 from the fusion of the Stadtbibliothek and Kantonsbibliothek, initially kept up this tradition, 1925 marking the first interruption in the practice, which was completely abandoned in 1939. A 2005 CD of piano music by the Winterthur composer Johann Carl Eschmann, whose documents are held in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, marked the revival of the old tradition in a new guise. The New Year release CD 2024 brings together works by six composers, male and female, all of whom except one were born and trained in French-speaking countries. Even Paul Juon had Romanic roots, since his grandfather had emigrated around 1830 from the Swiss canton of Grisons to Russia. Short pieces have been grouped around César Franck’s Sonata in A major: composed between 1880 and 1924, all – except Ernest Bloch’s three lieder movements From Jewish Life (1924), whose Judaistic timbre became Bloch’s trademark – conform to our present-day perception of a rhapsodic fin-de-siècle sound. The cellist Isabel Gehweiler is a prizewinner of the European Bursary for Young Artists, the Art Prize of the Art Foundation of Baden-Württemberg, the Art Prize of the Markgräfler region; she is also a recipient of grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Juilliard School of Music, the Rotary Foundation, the arteMusica Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Saarland region, the Richard Wagner Association, the Covid-19 Grant of the City of Zurich, the Notenstein La Roche Privatbank and the Vontobel Bank. As a composer Isabel Gehweiler has produced a body of work encompassing chamber music and orchestral compositions, which are regularly performed at international festivals.