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German pianist Markus Becker was a student of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and was mentored by Alfred Brendel. He won the International Brahms Competition in Hamburg in 1987. Becker has performed music from the Baroque period to the modern era, as well as jazz. He is a frequent guest artist at major music events, including the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, and the Kissinger Sommer. He has appeared with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, as well as several other orchestras. Becker has been a professor at the Hanover Academy for Music, Theatre, and Media since 1993, and he gives lectures at the International Music Academy for Soloists in Hanover. He recorded the complete piano works of Max Reger on Thorofon, for which he received the German Record Prize in 2000. He has also recorded for CPO, Dreyer-Gaido, and Hyperion, among other labels. ~ Blair Sanderson

In his youth, Felix Draeseke was an enthusiastic follower of the New German School, whose music drew the attention of Liszt. In his old age, however, deaf and perhaps disillusioned by too many years spent teaching and too few years gaining accolades as a composer, Draeseke had become conservative, attacking the excesses of the Strauss generation even while maintaining an idiosyncratic style of his own.

Draeseke entered the Leipzig Conservatory at age seventeen, studying with Julius Rietz. He abandoned the conservatory three years later, after hearing Wagner's Lohengrin. Besotted with this new, heightened, German-nationalist form of musical expression, he began an opera in a similar vein: König Sigurd, which attracted the support of Franz Liszt. In 1861, Liszt's performance in Weimar of Draeseke's Germania-Marsch met with angry protests. Germany seemed to have a new musical firebrand on its hands.

Draeseke met Wagner in Lucerne in 1859, and the young composer, too, would move to Switzerland in 1861. He would be based there for fifteen years, toiling as a piano teacher in towns around Lake Geneva and never gaining the attention for his own music that his early notoriety suggested would come easily. Liszt hailed Draeseke's Sonata quasi Fantasia, composed during this time, as the best piano sonata since Schumann, but few other cognoscenti seemed to share this opinion.

He returned to Germany in 1876, settling in Dresden and gaining a job at the conservatory there in 1884. This position gave him a stable enough base that he could now compose more prolifically, though no longer as a member of the Romantic avant-garde. The 1880s saw the completion of his first staged opera, Gudrun, and several large orchestral works, most notably his Third Symphony, "Symphonia Tragica," as well as chamber works, including a sonata for the short-lived viola alta.

From the 1890s Draeseke turned increasingly to dramatic stage works and large-scale sacred music, including his once highly regarded Mysterium: Christus (completed in 1899). His use of harmony and methods of voice-leading remained distinctive, but Draeseke was now firmly entrenched in the musical establishment, and he was appalled by the flamboyance of Richard Strauss, which he parodied in his 1912 "Symphonia Comica."

Draeseke's music fell into obscurity; only a murky recording of his "Tragic" Symphony kept his name alive in the second half of the twentieth century, although since 1986 the International Draeseke Society has revived his work in print and recording.

Michael Sanderling is a German cellist and conductor active in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. He began his career as a virtuoso cellist and discovered his calling as a conductor later in his life. He was born in East Berlin in 1967 to a musical family. His father Kurt Sanderling was a very successful conductor, and his mother Barbara Wagner was a respected double bassist. When he was five years old, he started taking cello lessons. In 1978 he enrolled at the Spezialschule für Musik Berlin, where he studied with cellist Matthias Pfaender. After he graduated in 1984, he was accepted at the Hanns Eisler Hoschschule für Musik, where he became a student of Josef Schwab. Sanderling also studied privately with William Pleeth, Yo-Yo Ma, and other master cellists. He began performing professionally in 1987 as the principal cellist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. This was followed by an appointment in the same position with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1994 to 2006. During this time, he started an additional career as an educator, with appointments at the Hanns Eisler Hoschschule für Musik, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and the Hochschule der Künste Bern. Sanderling made his conducting debut in 2000 with the Kammerorchester Berlin, and three years later was appointed principal conductor of the Deutsche Streicherphilharmonie. He also conducted the Kammerakademie Potsdam beginning in 2006, which led to a recording of chamber symphonies by Shostakovich in 2008. He discontinued his career as a cellist in 2010 so he could focus on conducting and teaching. From 2011 to 2019 he was the chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, and he recorded the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich. This was followed by an appointment as chief conductor with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra beginning in 2021. He led the Lucerne SO on tours in Europe and Asia in the 2022 season, and in 2023 he released a recording of Brahms’ symphonies on the Warner Classics label. ~ RJ Lambert