Brief description: American Doll Posse is the ninth studio album by singer-songwriter Tori Amos. Musically, the album is a drastic departure for Amos, it is a new chapter in her career and is her heaviest, most rock-influenced album to date.
"The main message of my new album is: the political is personal. This as opposed to the feminist statement from years ago that the personal is political. I know it has been said that it goes both ways, but we have to turn it around. We have to think like that. I’m now taking on subjects that I could not have been able to take on in my twenties. With Little Earthquakes I took on more personal things.
But if you are going to be an American woman in 2007 with a real view on what is going on, you need to be brave, and you need to know that some people won’t want to look at it." Tori Amos
The "American Doll Posse" of the title consists of five different female characters that Amos developed, representing different aspects of her own personality.

Brief description: More than 20 years have passed since our first visit to Japan.
Through our concert tours travelling all around the country, we met a lot of warm-hearted hospitable people.
We also got to know that many regions have its unique songs having been cherished by local people.
In this album, we packed such kind of pieces together with our love for Japan.
Eduard und Johannes Kutrowatz were both graduated University of Vienna. While at the university, they met Renate Kramer-Preisenhammer, who provided opportunities for them to be specialized in the repertoires for 2 pianos and a piano 4 hands.

Brief description: This concert (recorded at Musikverein in Vienna, Austria on Friday, November 21st, 2003) was a very special event, and not just because of its honorific circumstances and the music itself. When in any walk of life a major figure acquires venerable status, he or she can take on a quality different from and more notable than mere charisma.
As DVD customers will immediately appreciate, the outstanding camera work captures the entire ethos and mood of the evening, not just the musicians´performance. The shots of the auditoriumare as revelatory -and important-as those of the bandstand. This audience really wanted to be there. Not to be seen or for any other posturing socialite reasons, but to assist at the appearance in their city of arguably the last of the great jazz masters whose art has touched millions of lives.
Oscar Peterson "A Night In Vienna" is therefore more than an evening of distinguished music-making. On one level it is a distillation of all that he has accomplished and embodies, all that has made him indeed, in the words of Quincy Jones, "one of the greatest musicians on the planet."

Brief description: Schubert Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959: The completely untamed explosion in the second movement of this sonata is a singular event within Franz Schubert´s piano sonatas - perhaps in his entire instrumental oeuvre. The interpreter sees an outburts of naked panic: a suffering soul experiencing a state of inescapable surrender to a higher authority; a spirutual eruption that can only diminish its energy by slowly ebbing.
Schoenberg Suite for Piano op. 25: The five movement Suite plays a central role in Schoenberg´s works for piano. The period during which he composed it - from 1921 to 1923 - in no way represents a caesura, but an intensive transitional phase travelling "to another planet". This was also the time in which Schoenberg wrote some of the Five Piano Pieces op. 23 as well as the Serenade op. 24, a work which is not completely composed according to twelve-tone principles.

Brief description: "All my life I worked for the tango, now I hope it will work for me. Only at the age of 60 did I start earning a living from it, now I´m almost 70 and I´ve still got lots of plans. I´ve got no reason to complain.m I was always commited to what I believed in, namely my music, and I´ve never to starve. Many great musicians lived and died in poverty and did not anticipate that their music would be acknowledged after they died. Me, I survived to see this acknowledgement," Astor Piazolla
In more profane words: Piazolla´s music is not about trite clichés of stranded people `s loathsome passions. It does not cover warmed up tales of frustrated immigrants, of prostitutes dragged away from Europe, of smug knife heroes. And we do not automatically come up with images of couoples who expertly contort their bodies while dancing,. What facinates about Piazolla´s music is its tremendous liveliness, its depth, its passion, its intripid look at all that makes up humanity - which moves, requires compassion and shakes up.

Brief description: In 1954, Leonard Bernstein saw himself as a serious composer trying to write songs. George Gershwin, who had started his career in 1914 as a humble song-plugger at Remick´s, always wated to be acknowledged in the world of serious concert music. Bernstein earned his degree in composition cum laude from havard University and went on to study conducting at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Gershwin was a dropout from the High School of Commerce when he applied for a job at Remick´s in Tin Pan Alley.
All his life he had studied privately with various teachers, he even dared to approach famous European composers like Maurice Ravel later in his life for further tuition. The more Gershwin became known as a professional musician, the more he began to feel the lack of a thorough academic training.
Both musicians nevertheless became worldwide icons of popular classical American music, and maybe because of their different positions towards musical styles during their career.