Finghin Collins / Rosanne Philippens / István Várdai / Máté Szücs MOZART Piano Quartets

PIANO QUARTETS

Lidy Blijdorp JOURNEYERS

                                                                    JOURNEYERS

Rosanne Philippens INSIGHT

Thinking up new programmes is something I usually do on my own at my desk. But for this solo album I wanted to take up a new challenge to create a programme with my audience. I had the feeling that this would provide me with new insight. With just my violin as travelling companion, I set off through Europe for a series of solo recitals with a collection of pieces to try out. After each concert I asked the audience for feedback: how had they experienced the programme? The atmosphere, the sequence of the pieces and the length. Instead of treating my audience as passive listeners, I invited them to discuss these matters and feel involved.

On my way to the next recital I thought about the reactions. Slowly but surely the programme began to form a logical entity. This is what INSIGHT is all about. The liner notes tell more about the process of making a programme, and the actual music is the final result. What is in store for you? Not the average classical programme. Don’t be surprised if a Baroque piece dating from 1676 is split into two or if the Sarabande by the twentieth-century composer Enescu is embraced by dances by Bach. Be open to new insights and enjoy! (Rosanne Philippens)

Rosanne Philippens MYTH

What a surprise it was when my friend the pianist Julien Quentin introduced me to the music of Szymanowski several years ago. A world full of myths opened up, a landscape with fast streaming rivers where frightened nymphs timidly glanced back at lascivious satyrs with goat hooves. And full of colourful stories about the shepherd’s boy seduced by a princess, and the firebird hiding in the bushes. In the three myths I recognised Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I managed to track down the poems of Szymanowski’s countryman Tadeusz Micinski, which inspired him. In pursuit of the composer’s roots, I visited his villa Atma, where I heard the wonderful music of the mountains of Zakopane, which had moved him as well. And so ‘Myth’ came into being, an issue imbued with the Polish soul, and including, from further afield, some Russian myths as well.

Rosanne Philippens / Julien Quentin DEDICATIONS

It began with a piece which I fell in love with: Eugène Ysaÿe’s Poème élégiaque. You have to tune the bottom violin string a tone lower. That explains the dark character, which you hear particularly in the middle, which is a funeral march. Ysaÿe dedicated it to Gabriël Fauré. And so the idea for this CD was born: violin music by composers who honoured and inspired one another. I found out, for example, that Fauré often visited the famous singer Pauline Viardot’s salon. It was there that he premiered the Romance. At first it sounds like a rather sweet Fauré, but passions rise high in the middle. Fauré was briefly engaged to a daughter of Viardot. The Russian writer Ivan Toergenjev, Viardot’s lover, used the affaire in his short story Le chant de l’amour triomphant, on which, in turn, Ernest Chausson based his Poème, with its dreamy music and a tragic ring. Chausson dedicated it to Ysaÿe and drew inspiration from his Poème élégiaque, as one hears in the high violin trills at the end of both pieces.