The tradition of bringing out New Year publications on January 2, “Berchtold’s Day”, goes back as far as the 17th century. Societies and guilds provided printed books, illustrations or music to the young people of the city in return for a financial contribution, which went towards the heating of the society rooms. Founded in 1629, the Stadtbibliothek initiated the practice by distributing a New Year engraving by Hans Conrad Meyer with a poem by Johann Wilhelm Simmler for the year 1645, founding this form of New Year offering. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich, created in 1914 from the fusion of the Stadtbibliothek and Kantonsbibliothek, initially kept up this tradition, 1925 marking the first interruption in the practice, which was completely abandoned in 1939. A 2005 CD of piano music by the Winterthur composer Johann Carl Eschmann, whose documents are held in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, marked the revival of the old tradition in a new guise.

The New Year release CD for 2024 brings together works by six composers, male and female, all of whom except one were born and trained in French-speaking countries. Even Paul Juon had Romanic roots, since his grandfather had emigrated around 1830 from the Swiss canton of Grisons to Russia. Short pieces have been grouped around César Franck’s Sonata in A major: composed between 1880 and 1924, all – except Ernest Bloch’s three lieder movements From Jewish Life (1924), whose Judaistic timbre became Bloch’s trademark – conform to our present-day perception of a rhapsodic fin-de-siècle sound.