GWK RECORDS presents four new sonatas by Stefan Heucke, each for a woodwind instrument and piano, which were created during the Corona lockdown in 2020 and immensely enrich the relatively narrow repertoire of the genre, in the first recording with internationally leading soloists and promising newcomers. With his Opus 114, Stefan Heucke (*1959; Germany/Italy) has composed a sonata cycle that captures the different characteristics of the four most prominent European woodwind instruments and, reinforced by highly demanding, complex and virtuoso piano parts, plays them off in a rousing way. In his “integrative tonal” (Heucke), subjective-emotional and at the same time intellectual-constructive musical language, Heucke dissolves the boundaries between the classical European tonal system and new music and further develops the traditional forms. The flute sonata, which Daniela Koch (flute) and Kimiko Imani (piano) interpret in a highly musical manner, breathtakingly expresses the flexible, bright, brilliant character of the flute. Expressively recorded by Ramón Ortega Quero (oboe) and GyuTae Ha (piano), the oboe sonata is deeply touching in its succinct melancholy and its piercing, sometimes cartoonish intensity. In the expressive interpretation of the bassoon sonata by Marceau Lefèvre (bassoon) and Kimiko Imani (piano), the extremes of the bassoon, the elegiac and bizarre, the majestic, and its poetry fascinate. An exception is the clarinet sonata in the sonata cycle as well as in Heucke’s oeuvre, insofar as the composer incorporated biographical circumstances into it: the second pandemic lockdown. For Heucke, this found its excellent symbol in the video of the song “O du stille Zeit” by C. Bresgen, which the composer’s fellow singers posted in November 2020. The quiet drama and turmoil, gloom, heaviness and shadows, even a tarantella-like dance of death develop around Bresgen’s folk song-like, simple, innocent theme. Simon Degenkolbe (clarinet) and Tobias Haunhorst (piano) express the drama of the sonata and the time it was written in a profound and compelling way.