For some years now, Hamburg has been reinventing itself as a city of music. The recently opened Elbphilharmonie – the spectacular concert house on the river Elbe – is one of the factors in this development. As is the KomponistenQuartier (composers' quarter) in the Neustadt district between Rödingsmarkt and St. Pauli, with no fewer than half a dozen small museums dedicated to composers such as Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. All of these composers feature on this present Hamburg album, as well as a number of composers, male and female, who all wrote noteworthy miniatures for voice and piano. Mariana Popova was responsible for bringing together these 28 compositions and merging them into a dramatic entity – compositions that together result in a very personal, stylistically multi-facetted Hamburg album (including many worldwide first performances). This is a Hamburg album by two women who have chosen Hamburg as their home: Chinese-born Lini Gong and Bulgarian-born Mariana Popova both feel a close bond with the musical life and musical history of Hamburg. As the duo explain: “We consciously bring together musical languages from three centuries and play about with contrasts and with tone colours, in fact with the entire rich spectrum of the art song genre – a genre that we love very much.”
