Brandenburg Historica was founded in 1996 by longtime enthusiasts of German military music, German militaria and German history. For almost two decades, we have been a recognized source for rare, hard-to-find CD's of German- and European military band music.
In 2005 we launched our acclaimed Brandenburg music label, which specializes in high quality, scholarly reissues on CD of vintage German military band recordings. Our goal, simply stated, is to objectively present this important musical genre within the context of its time and place, and in so doing, recreate the atmosphere prevailing at the time this music was composed, played and sung.
Each Brandenburg CD is devoted exclusively to the music of a particular period of German history, a selected military unit or a designated branch of the German armed forces, and features studio remastered transcriptions of archival 78rpm recordings dating from the actual period under consideration. All our productions are accompanied by richly illustrated insert booklets that include detailed historical notes on the period or subject depicted, as well as a wealth of carefully researched background information on the musical works presented.
Our ever-expanding record archive serves as the primary source for the material featured in all Brandenburg productions and is augmented by ready access to the archives of numerous advanced collectors of German martial music from around the world. Our in-house collection of over two thousand 78rpm records dating from 1898 to 1945 (the golden age of recorded German military band music) includes hundreds of performances by such legendary bandmasters as Adolf Becker, Fritz Brase, Friedrich Ahlers, Carl Woitschach, Adolf Berdien and Hermann Müller-John, as well as hundreds of recordings of famous Soldatenlieder and patriotic songs by German soldiers’ choruses and classical performers of the early twentieth century.
Our first release, Gott, Kaiser, Vaterland: Military and Patriotic Music of Imperial Germany 1903-1915, was called "a masterpiece... the musical portrait of an era" by a reviewer in a prestigious German music publication, and since then we have striven to maintain an equally high standard of authenticity and scholarship in our productions. In 2013 we delved into the previously neglected field of Tsarist Russian martial music with our ground-breaking CD compilation God Save the Tsar: Military Band Music of Imperial Russia 1900-1912, which has received an equally positive reception for its sound quality, its 36-page booklet packed with original research and the extreme rarity of its material.
From the previously unpublished photographic material that helps to make our productions as visually interesting as they are musically fascinating, to the exhaustive research that goes into the selection of source records and the composition of their album notes, Brandenburg CDs set a standard of quality and scholarship in the field of historic martial music recordings that will be difficult to surpass.
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