Stéphane Denève / Brussels Philharmonic GUILLAUME CONNESSON Lost Horizon

After Lucifer (2014) and Pour sortir au jour (2016), the French composer Guillaume Connesson returns to Deutsche Grammophon with "Lost Horizon", a new double-album directed by Stéphane Denève at the head of the Brussels Philharmonic. Already awarded the Victoire de la Musique Classique in the Composer category in 2015, Guillaume Connesson received last February his second award as Composer of the Year 2019 for "Les Horizons perdus", Concerto for Violin created in September 2018 that we find within this double album. These two CDs show two facets of the composer's art and offer two trips. One outside, with the fantastic and festive "Cities of Lovecraft" and the saxophone Concerto A Kind of Trane performed by Timothy McAllister. A work that recalls the memory of the jazzman John Coltrane, real incarnation of the solo instrument as he imagines it. The other is a journey inside oneself illustrated by the Violin Concerto Les Horizons Perdus. Performed by Renaud Capuçon, this score refers to James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon" (1933), adapted for film by Frank Capra. "The Tomb of Regrets" is a slow movement in which Guillaume Connesson was tempted by a very linear, almost choral writing to explore intimate feelings, those of time passing, buried regrets and impossible returns . Created in a short period between 2015 (A Kind of Trane) and 2018 (Les Horizons Perdus), these four scores show the many facets of a composer who draws his inspiration from the sources of scholarly art as much as popular, without borders or taboos.

Duo Cardellino DOUBLE JEU

The origin of duo Cardellino, two passionate twin sisters from an early age through music and the desire to play together. 

Curious to discover the abundant repertoire of the duo, they explore the original pieces and write many inedit transcriptions. 
Now soloists in two prestigious French orchestras, they are wanting to develop the Cardellino duo's activity on a regional, national and international level. 
The rich and complementary sounds of flute and cello have already charmed a wide audience at various concerts and festivals: 
Salle de l'esplanade à l'Arsenal de Metz, église de Vézelise, Festival Off Kultur à l'Autre Canal à Nancy, Salle Europa à Montigny-les-Metz, Chapelle Saint-Brieuc, Festival “Musiques’halles” de Dijon, Festival “Les Musicales” de Fontaine-lès-Dijon, Atelier Marcel Hastir à Bruxelles, Griselles, Château de Champlitte, Eglise de Saint-Apollinaire.
The Cardellino duo holds a chamber music diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music of Brussels

Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Stéphane Denève GUILLAUME CONNESSON Cosmic Trilogy - The Shining One

There’s a new generation of French composers we know little about on this side of the channel, names like Bacri, Beffa, Escaich, Zavaro, and Connesson, now around 40 (see Philip Clark, 1/10, for details of the French context). Thanks to this CD and Connesson’s association with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra we can start to discover more about him.

Aleph, the first part of Connesson’s Cosmic Trilogy, was commissioned by the RSNO and dedicated to its French conductor. The whole cycle is involved with ideas deriving from Stephen Hawking and Kandinsky but Aleph makes an orchestral showpiece on its own – a kind of supercharged version of Ravel’s Daphnis with more than a hint of John Adams.

Connesson admits that his style is eclectic but the much longer second section, also an RSNO commission, lacks the rhythmic impetus that sustains the first one and it wanders in a kind of Debussian reverie. The third section, Supernova, actually written first, inhabits the limitless vistas of outer space. Influences stream past – Messiaen, Milhaud, Bartók, Stravinsky, film music – in an efficiently scored panoply. The CD ends oddly with The Shining One, described as a piano concerto although it lasts only nine minutes. There’s a central section that starts by recalling John Ireland – that must be a coincidence – before the piece whips up to a hyperactive finish. Committed performances vividly recorded. (Peter Dickinson / Gramophone)

GUILLAUME CONNESSON Musique de chambre

Guillaume Connesson, born in 1970, is currently one of the most widely performed French composers worldwide. Commissions are at the origin of most of his works (Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre National de France...) including Pour sortir au jour, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2013) and Les Trois Cités de Lovecraft (co-commission of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lyon). Moreover, his music is regularly played by numerous orchestras (Brussels Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra et al.)
He won a Victoires de la Musique award in 2015 as well as Sacem’s Grand Prize in 2012.
His discography includes, amongst others, two monographs of chamber music and two symphonic monographs on the Deutsche Grammophon label. The first, Lucifer, obtained a ’ Choc’ from Classica magazine, and the second, Pour sortir au jour, numerous critical distinctions such as the ’Diapason d’Or de l’Année’ as well the Classica ’Choc de l’Année’.
After studies at the Conservatoire National de Région in Boulogne-Billancourt (his birthplace) and the Paris Conservatoire, he obtained premiers prix in choral direction, history of music, analysis, electro-acoustic and orchestration.
He has been professor of orchestration at the Aubervilliers-La Courneuve Conservatory since 1997.
In residence from 2016 to 2018 with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra as well as with the Orchestre National de Lyon, he is also devoting himself to the composition of an opera, Les Bains macabres (on a libretto by Olivier Bleys), commissioned by the Opéra National de Bordeaux.

Jérôme Pernoo / Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo / Jean-Christophe Spinosi GUILLAUME CONNESSON Lucifer

Listen blind and you’d never guess this was music by a Frenchman operating in the post-Boulez era, the best clues being the iridescent sonorities achieved throughout and the reliance on early Messiaen as a model for the paradisiacal element of the third movement of the Cello Concerto (2008). As Guillaume Connesson himself admits, Shostakovich, John Adams, pop and jazz mean more to him than his intellectualising predecessors, so it is perhaps inevitable that the great Russian should influence key moments in his own Cello Concerto. Of course Shostakovich was writing for Rostropovich in a very different, anti-hedonistic cultural climate. Connesson’s more accessible piece is dedicated to Jérôme Pernoo, who plays it here with evident authority and commitment. 

Now in his forties, Connesson is a professional to his fingertips, and should you warm to the work of the classier commercial composers and orchestrators you may find his world wholly congenial. It is those sympathetic to the traditional contemporary music scene who might be taken aback by the brazenness of it all. Connesson’s retro, razzle-dazzle eclecticism knows no bounds: a bouncy rhythm borrowed here, a shiny instrumental effect there, glass harmonica and all. Dangerously familiar shards of Adams, Lutosawski et al can be the one ‘modern’ element enlivening a conventional romantic texture. Blink and Lucifer (2011) reverts back into Daphnis or Jeux or Spartacus or The Rite of Spring. The list is almost endless. For a ballet score contemplating Satan’s casting out of heaven alongside the legends of Prometheus and the Grail, Connesson would seem to have gone easy on the metaphysics. 

Is his really a major voice? There’s no doubting the enormous effectiveness of the ballet music in particular. Unprofound yet glamorous and self-evidently danceable, it makes several recent full-length scores of its type seem that much thinner. But whatever happened to the old idea that a composer should craft an idiom if not indubitably new then at least indubitably his own? On its own terms the present disc is a conspicuous success. The Monte Carlo forces are galvanised by Jean-Christophe Spinosi into playing of fire and energy, and the booklet takes in a helpful composer interview. Non-sceptics should seek out the earlier Cosmic Trilogy (Chandos, 3/10), immortalising Connesson’s association with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its erstwhile Music Director Stéphane Denève. DG’s sound is a little less spacious, its physical presentation oddly flawed. The album’s French-language text is not difficult to read but the English translation, grey then brown on grubbily framed off-white, is presumably not intended for the over-fifties. Perhaps we oldies aren’t expected to dabble in postmodernism. (Gramophone)

Mathieu Dufour / Stéphane Denève / Brussels Philharmonic GUILLAUME CONNESSON Pour Sortir au Jour

Born in 1970, Guillaume Connesson is too young to have had to submit to the ideological and aesthetical diktats imposed on the previous generation of composers.
His music, always well-sounding and often spectacular, has absorbed all sorts of multiple influences. His very personal world is a work in progress, growing out of the mix of pragmatism and naïveté which is the trademark of all great creators. Over time and along a great diversity of compositions, Guillaume Connesson’s inspiration follows, in the composer’s own words, “the complex mosaïc of the modern world”.

His first steps were guided by a need to open up to other influences, like pop music - as evidenced in Night Club for orchestra (1996), Double Quatuor (1994) and Disco-Toccata (1994). This primarily rhythmic and hedonist vein, so rare in contemporary ‘serious’ music, reached its peak with the brilliant Techno-Parade for flute, clarinet and piano (2002). As in the works of American composers of the repetitive school (Reich, Adams) - another decisive influence, to wit Sextuor (1998) - the spirit of dance is omnipresent in Connesson’s music. It is therefore not surprising to learn that the cinema also inspired him : L’Aurore (1998) was composed as soundtrack to Murnau’s eponymous silent movie. Guillaume Connesson’s orchestral writing tries to create strong images, that will have a long-lasting effect on the listener. Yet he likes the uncertain, the unpredictable, the meandering melodies which find their resolution in a rich, dense, sometimes thick-woven yet always intell(e)gible writing. L’Appel du feu, a suite from L’Aurore, Enluminures (1999) or Triptyque symphonique (1997-2007) demonstrate his unequalled know-how as an orchestrator, whose harmonic twists and turns are always at the service of expression. In other words, the composer’s luminous compositional language is never the result nor the starting point of vain experimentation. Pragmatism vs idealism ? Yes indeed, if that means giving the pleasure of the ear precedence over fruitless speculation. Connesson - how revolutionary - writes music for the knowing musician. With all the means at his disposal, he also tries to adress a wider public by capturing its attention and sharpening its curiosity.

Add to his love of opera the fact that he is not afraid of lyrical outbursts, and it logically follows that Guillaume Connesson would write for the voice. Liturgies de l’ombre, Le Livre de l’amour and Medea, for female voice, all composed between 2000 and 2004, certainly mark a shift, if not a turning point in his career. The pieces reveal a more tormented, anguished inner world. Elegies fraught with emotion (De l’espérance, on a poem by Charles Péguy, or the complete Liturgies de l’ombre cycle ; My Sweet Sister on a poem by Lord Byron in Le Livre de l’amour and even in an orchestra piece from the same period : Une lueur dans l’âge sombre, 2005) or desperate, passionate scenes (the fierce Medea after a text by Jean Vauthier) let new interrogations show through.
His cantata for solo voice, choir and orchestra Athanor (2003) - an ambitious, striking, flamboyant piece - synthetizes all these influences and inspirations. The title is a reference to the alchimist’s furnace. A symbol, not to say an emblem for an artist in ceaseless pursuit of the miracle that would let music instantly turn the next minute into eternity. (Bertrand Dermoncourt)