German music treasures saved

Nearly 10,000 works by composers from former East Germany have been transferred to CD by Germany's national music archive, preservin 40 years of music composec under the communist regime.

The Deutsches Musikarchiv in Berlin has transferred 2000 hours of music to disc from a collection of taped radio broadcasts, live concerts and recordings inherited from the former Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR, the Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der DDR [\TKM].

About 75 per cent of the material has never been available on CD. All the transfers are currently being checked and catalogued and will be available to scholars who visit the archive.

At this stage, commercial releases are unlikely due to complications surrounding copyright ownership.

The CDs covers every genre of classical music, from orchestral works to music for brass band. The Hollywood film work of Harms Eisler and theatre music of Reiner Bredemeyer feature, as does the 1970s Darmstadtinfluenced output of composers such as Friedrich Schenker,

The VKM's music information centre became part of the centralised Deutsches Musikarchiv in 1992.

Varg se- sed

Swiss label Philharmonia is issuing 34 CDs of historic performances by the Hungarian violinist Tibor Varga (b192 1).

The recordings - available as individual full-price discs or as a boxed set - are drawn from more than 40 discs' worth of material from the archive of the Tibor Varga Foundation, which is owned and operated by Philharmonia. The discs feature Varga in an array of roles, including violin and viola soloist, conductor and chamber musician. Twenty-four CDs have been released and 10 more will follow.

One of the first releases in the series is a collection of historic performances, recorded by the teenage Varga in the 1930s, originally made available on wax discs and released on vinyl in the 1980s. The fourth disc in the series features Varga's acclaimed recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Bruch Violin Concertos.

Varga gets his just desserts at last

A collection of music-inspired images by Swiss photographer Susie Maeder, Seeing Music, is published on June 4 to accompany an exhibition of her work. The photographs are complemented by texts from more than 30 international musicians including Daniel Barenboim, Evelyn Glennie, James Galway and Vladimir Ashkenazy. The exhibition opens at London's Hiscox Art Café on June 4 and runs until July 13. Hiscox Art Café, I Great St Helen's, London EC3, tel: 020 7448 6075.