Véronique Bonnecaze CHOPIN Complete Sonatas

 

COMPLETE SONATAS

 

Laurent Cabasso BACH Complete Toccatas

 

COMPLETE TOCCATAS

Stéphanie Paulet / Élisabeth Geiger INTUITIONS

 

INTUITIONS

 

Collectif Trytone BACK TO BACH

 

BACK TO BACH

 

Aimo Pagin CHOPIN Complete Waltzes

 

COMPLETE WALTZES

 

Sébastien Llinares LUYS MILAN

LUYS MILAN

 

Alissa Zoubritski TRANSCRIPTIONS LYRIQUES

TRANSCRIPTIONS LYRIQUES

La Quintina / Jérémie Couleau HEAVENLY SONGES

HEAVENLY SONGES

Alla francesca / Brigitte Lesne VARIATIONS AMOUREUSES

VARIATIONS AMOUREUSES

Silas Bassa OSCILLATIONS

OSCILLATIONS

Varduhi Yeritsyan SWEET DREAMS

SWEET DREAMS

Duo Aurore IGUAÇU

IGUAÇU

Duo Palissandre MOSAÏQUE

MOSAÏQUE

Alia Mens Ensemble / Olivier Spilmont LA CITÉ CÉLESTE

The Alia Mens Ensemble features singers and period instrumentalists led by Olivier Spilmont. The ensemble has performed at numerous festivals and national concert halls, including Lille Opera, ”Embaroquement immédiat”, Festival de la Chabotterie, the Mont-Blanc Festival, Midsummer Festival, le Bateau feu-Dunkerque, le Phénix-Valenciennes, Arras Theater, the ”Musique et Mémoire” Festival, Teatro de Vicenza, Bozar Brussels, ”Tage alter Musik” Regensburg and many others.

Since 2012 the Alia Mens Ensemble has dedicated a substantial part of its activities to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Weimar cantatas in particular. The ensemble also regularly performs Bach’s multi-keyboard concertos with harpsichordists Pierre Hantaï, Maude Gratton and Olivier Spilmont.

The group of Weimar cantatas is exciting on many levels. The purpose Bach expressed in his Mühlhausen resignation letter – which became a master beam of the musical edi ce he built throughout his life – is expressed with an even more seminal vigour, due to the restrictions it suffered previously. Besides the beauty of the surviving works, which renders the loss of the missing ones all the more bitter, it is moving to see the musician engage, with each new piece, in experiments with form, ideas, and the language for expressing the word of God through the most sensitive possible texts. The choice of developing themes dear to him enabled him to affirm and deepen his faith.

Trio Khaldei VERKLÄRTE NACHT

This CD is a double journey through time. On one hand, the three pieces selected span a century in the history of the Viennese piano trio; Hummel’s work, composed in 1799, keeps a foot firmly in the classical era; Brahms’ second piano trio, written in 1882, is a crown jewel of Viennese romanticism, and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is a perfect example of the atmosphere that reigned in the city at the turn of the century. In addition, the three works mirror the intensities of the day. Hummel’s light and sparkling trio evokes the morning, Brahms’ resplendent and well-worked piece represents the afternoon and evening and Schoenberg’s composition, as the title already indicates, relates to the dark, moonlit night.

Joanna Goodale BACH IN A CIRCLE

Born into a British-Turkish family, Joanna Goodale is a French-Swiss pianist with an eclectic and creative identity, opening up the classical repertoire to traditional world music and to her own comprovisations. 

She has been invited to perform in Switzerland, in France, in Germany, in Turkey, in Spain and in the United Kingdom. Graduate of a Master of Arts in Piano (Geneva) and a Master of Arts in Anthropology (London), she has benefitted from the support of the Fondation L’ABRI in Geneva and of the advice of internationally renowned pianists such as Alice Ader, Alain Kremksi, Cedric Pescia, Menahem Pressler and Anne Queffélec. Deeply convinced that music can transcend borders and touch the sublime, she invites her public to enter in communion with sound and silence in a space-time of rare intensity. 

BACH IN A CIRCLE proposes an encounter between the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the Sufi whirling dervishes, weaved around a programme where the pieces are in a dialogue, questioning the mysteries of the human soul and reflecting the movements of the Universe. 

After visiting Turkey many times, I realised that Sufi music brought out in me similar emotions to those I feel when listening to Johann Sebastian Bach. This led me to do some research and then highlight the similarities between these two universes which, at first glance, can seem very different. Indeed, sacred Sufi songs and the works of Bach are both characterized by an expression of deep spirituality, a quest to represent the cosmic order and the use of repetitive cyclical patterns in perpetual movement, leading to a sense of transcendence and inner silence. (Joanna Goodale)

Véronique Bonnecaze DEBUSSY

At the end of the XIXth century, most French bourgeois families own a piano. This primarily decorative object is played, – sometimes reluctantly – by young girls who are looked upon with some condescension. The novels describing society in these times, have used and abused this somewhat futile image, but with some truth to it. From salon to salon, are played both virtuoso works from the romantic era (naturally by gifted amateurs) and works more accessible to all, garnered in a repertoire ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) to César Franck (1822-1890). All piano history fits in these two centuries and there is little room for a new language. The young Debussy ripens his only slowly.

Incidentally, he’s not among the most gifted among pianists. He’s even reluctant to play virtuosic works, stunning his teachers with his rather unorthodox style of playing. His first compositions are in a rather outmoded romantic style that led Piotr Tchaikovski (1840-1893) who was sent his score of Danse Bohémienne, to deem rather insipid the writing of the one he used to call “The Little Bussy”.

It is partly thanks to his acquaintances among writers and painters from the end of the XIXth century that Debussy’s idiom evolved. In a context of heated international politics, the return to French classicism allows some artists to reaffirm the values of the age of Louis XIV. Some lock themselves up in pastiche while others make use of this technique in order to find more refined colours. The poems of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) invite the adoption of this impressionism of tone which Debussy first brings to his orchestral works. The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the Nocturnes for orchestra, Pelléas et Mélisande, widen prodigiously the sound field. Then it is his piano’s turn to experience a revolution which first goes almost unnoticed: Pour le piano in 1901 then Estampes two years later. All the works that came afterwards followed the process of this entry into the music of the XXth Century without the composer feeling the need to act as a pioneer. Indeed, his so prodigiously creative music, which today is played with too much caution, makes no claim of being avant-garde. In the musician’s eyes, it simply expresses the pleasure to play and to discover new sounds.

Yves Rechsteiner / Henri-Charles Caget MOZHAYIQUE

Recording an album is an exercise in itself, totally different from a concert, in which the musicians are galvanised by the audience’s presence. It is important to create comfortable surroundings in order to make music for a virtual audience, which will listen to us later, in rush hour traffic, or under the covers, with headphones on their ears.

We chose Bern Cathedral as much for its German Kuhn organ as for the particular atmosphere of its loft: one feels rather at home there, as in one’s sitting rom. However, the lavish sound of the organ reminds us that we are in a cathedral.

In order to start a recording, one must first place the microphones; this determines where our virtual audience’s “ears” are. In order to take advantage of the textures of the percussion and the organ, we deployed a forest of microphones which are close to the pipes and capture all the acoustic breadth of this impressive instrument. Thus we were able to play Mozart as if we were making chamber music, in which every detail counts. The organ, a small miracle of entirely Swiss mechanical and acoustic precision, was effortless to master, and became the zealous servant of our musical urges, from the gentlest caress to the wildest shouts. Even the Vox Humana pipes (a register which imitates the human voice) were willingly tuned to match the keys of the apartment belonging to Elie, who kindly hosted us during our stay.

Every day, the great 32-foot wooden C# (the organ’s lowest-pitched pipe, 10 metres high) welcomed us from above the staircase leading to the loft. Its placid, benevolent gaze, hidden behind its century-old screws, gave us the confidence to face the small musical difficulties that awaited us.

And so, over two evenings, we made a little night music, thanks to Mozart and Haydn, under a Gothic nave, in the shadow of an 18^th century wooden and gold facade, surrounded by state-of-the-art equipment, sensitive to the faintest sound. A moment outside of time, alone with ourselves, and yet connected to everyone who will one day listen to us.

Sometimes when the castanets were unleashed in the middle of a sonata for piano, we asked Wolfgang Amadeus for forgiveness, imagining that he would have had a good laugh if he had been there.

DSCH-Shostakovich Ensemble SHOSTAKOVICH Complete Chamber Music for Piano and Strings

While underlining Dmitri Shostakovich’s importance in the history of music, the musicologist Lev Mazel wrote: ‘if human culture does not die out, the life and personality of Dmitri Shostakovich will be studied in depth for centuries and centuries. Just as every detail concerning Beethoven attracts the attention not only of specialists, but a great number of layman, every detail of the life and work of Shostakovich will be of interest to posterity’. So, what do we know of the life of Shostakovich? That it was full, agitated, under constant public judgement and without any slowing of creative output until the end. A few friends and family members could experience an image of him as an engaged citizen assuming his civic responsibilities but also, most importantly, an image of a citizen engaged with and devoted to his art like few others. This image began to be modified after his death as soon as his memoires, journals and diaries started to be published, a process which increased and developed during the post-Soviet era. This contributed to a re-evaluation of Shostakovich during the period following the Cold War and, more generally, of the whole phenomenon of Soviet culture. The posthumous reception of Shostakovich and his music, beyond expanded recognition of his artistic value, became the object of unflagging fascination on the part of musicians, musicologists, journalists and the general public. Even today, we witness great debates on the extra-musical content of his work, particularly the autobiographical fingerprint that Shostakovich explicitly inscribed in certain pieces –for example, his eighth String Quartet, the tenth Symphony, the first Concertos for Violin and Cello and the Sonata for Violin and Piano–, by imposing an occult musical signature. The famous musical motif DSCH which corresponds to the first letters of his first and last names, which correspond to musical note names in German: Dmitri (S)CHostakovitch = DSCH = D, E flat, C, B. On 5 January 1944, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote in a letter to Antal Molnár: ‘Chamber music requires of the composer the most perfect technique and the greatest depth of thought. I would not be too far from the truth if I affirmed that, sometimes, behind the “sparkle” of the orchestral sound is hidden a lack of imagination. Composing chamber music pieces is, for me, significantly more difficult than composing orchestral works…a lack of depth in the thought process in chamber music is simply intolerable’. [….] (Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro)

Quatuor Girard THE STARRY SKY

“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You, you alone will have the stars as no one else has them… […] You, only you, will have stars that can laugh!” (The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

 

If the pieces recorded here owe their existence to the stars, the development of the disc itself is a great meeting of the stars. Perhaps we hear them laughing at the opportunity to travel between neighbouring galaxies…
Our wonderful experience of playing the complete Beethoven’s quartets live in concert, our radiant encounter with Philippe Hersant, whose fourth string quartet we have the honour of premiering on record, our truly enriching residence at the Queen Elisabeth Musical Chapel of Belgium, and the precious relationship that quickly grew with luthier Charles Coquet, leading us to play on a quartet of instruments… these are all lively and significant realities from a moment in our life as quartet musicians which we wanted to bring together in a single story.
The purpose of this recording is not to freeze shooting stars… It seemed important to us, in this fleeting life, to take the time to lift our gaze, because it is the starry skies that we cannot fail to contemplate and thank. (Quatuor Girard)