DIE WELT VON GESTERN - Sigfrid Karg Elert: Impressions Exotiques, Op 134

Video direction: Julie De Clercq Buy here: Die Welt von Gestern, Toon Fret and Veronika Iltchenko’s second album, alludes to the culture of well-to-do pre-war Europe, whose end was so dramatically captured in Stephan Zweig’s book of the same name. The pieces selected for this recording present a varied picture of 75 years of German and Austrian culture, including works by composers as stylistically different as Schumann, Reinecke, Karg-Elert and Zemlinsky. These compositions cover a wide timespan ranging from Schumann’s Drei Romanzen (1849), composed in a newly post-revolutionary Germany, to Niemann’s Aus einem alten Patrizierhaus (1933), written on the cusp of the darkest period in German history, which would mark the end of Zweig’s World of Yesterday. Toon and Veronika’s second album can be seen as a natural successor to their first CD, Le Temps retrouvé, which was devoted to the music of the French Belle Epoque and received warm praise from audiences and critics alike.