Four Trios One Quartet

April 27, 2016, would have been German composer and conductor Friedrich Goldmann's 75th birthday. Macro celebrates the occasion with a luxury CD box set collecting complete trios of 1986-2004 and Goldmann's singular oboe quartet (2000). Two of the recordings were produced by Goldmann himself, and all feature musicians with a long-term working relationship and deep expertise with the composer's oeuvre, including Ingo Goritzki and Björn Lehmann and members of the ensemble mosaik and the Ensemble KNM. The CD is accompanied by a 48-page booklet featuring extensive essays by Björn Gottstein (artistic director of Donaueschingen Music Days) and musicologist Bruno Santos exploring Goldmann's groundbreaking aesthetics. Born in 1941, Friedrich Goldmann studied with Stockhausen in Darmstadt in 1959 and went on to spearhead the young new music avant-garde of East Germany. Achieving widespread recognition in Western Europe with his fiercely modernist, highly integrative, and multilayered aesthetics since the late 1970s, his oeuvre comprises more than 200 works. As a conductor he has premiered major works by Lachenmann, Henze, Rihm, Hosokawa, and others with orchestras and ensembles such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and longtime collaborators Ensemble Modern. He also conducted the French and German premieres of Luigi Nono's seminal Prometeo and recorded Stockhausen's Gruppen for Deutsche Grammophon. As a professor at Berlin's Universität der Künste, he is considered to have been one of the most influential teachers of his generation. Among his students were Helmut Oehring, Enno Poppe, Steffen Schleiermacher, and Jakob Ullmann. After a period in the 1990s in which he withdrew from conducting due to health reasons, Goldmann's music has experienced a renaissance since 2009, with conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Heinz Holliger, Ilan Volkov, Peter Rundel, and Matthias Pintscher performing his orchestral works. His opera R. Hot bzw. Die Hitze has seen three restaging's since 2010. Since 2014 his entire orchestral and chamber oeuvre has been premiered in concert and is heard in concerts and at competitions in Europe, North and South America, Russia, East and South East Asia, Australia, and South Africa.