Martin Luther Und Die Musik

℗ 1982 © 1992 MusiContact GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany (Booklet p.15). The dates alone also appear at foot of booklet verso, just above the Christophorus address, and of the back cover (bottom right). CD is manufactured by Sonopress, Gütersloh - Made in Germany Recording: 5/1982, Studio Baumgarten, Wien. Shares catalog no. with [r12774254] from 1992, but IFPI codes imply a date “not before 1994”. The cover art is strikingly different from its precursor. On the 1992 front cover the background is plain white. Label name, German and English titles and artists' names, in sans-serif fonts of varying height, weight, direction and alignment, surround one of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Luther portraits, 2.25 x 2.45 in., positioned to the right and close to the top. Beneath it a heavy, rhombus-shaped horizontal bar runs from a point close to the left edge, to end just before the right. The overall design is geometric and spare, and its grey-green border typifies its carefully restricted colour range - white, grey, grey-green, black-green. In the present version, however, the front cover's border is blue-green, framing what is now a textured, luxuriant mid-green, with artists’ names and German title placed right of center in unobtrusive, sentence-case white characters. The most noteworthy change, however, concerns the new Luther portrait - another from Cranach’s Luther image-factory but far larger (3.5 x 3.25 in.) than in 1992, closer to the left-hand margin and not boxed off from the green background. The booklet's "Lucas Cranach d.Ä., Martin Luther, 1526 (Wartburg)" is surely a holdover; it is the 1992 cover image that resembles the 1526 painting in the Wartburg-Stiftung. The later release, with Doktor Luther in doctoral beret, is closer to the Cranach images of 1528.