María Bayo / Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra / Ernest Martínez Izquierdo CANCIONES ESPAÑOLAS

CANCIONES ESPAÑOLAS

Tabea Zimmermann / Javier Perianes CANTILENA

                                                                    CANTILENA

Ruby Hughes / Clara Mouriz / BBC Philharmonic / Juanjo Mena XAVIER MONTSALVATGE Orchestral Works

The four works recorded here usefully span Montsalvatge's long creative life and encompass different parts of his large and varied output while also providing a welcome opportunity to appreciate his stylistic progress over all these years.
Montsalvatge's idiom is clearly of its time and often embraces various influences without ever attempting at pastiche or parody. His global outlook is that of a composer happy to work within some well-meaning Neo-classicism often spiced with piquant dissonances and polytonality that sometimes bring Milhaud to mind. This is fairly clear in the Partita which earned him the 1958 Oscar Esplà Prize. The Partita as well as the Cincos Canciones Negras and the Calidoscopi simfònic also displays another characteristic of Montsalvatge's music at the time, i.e. the reliance on some exotic dance rhythms such as the habanera. The Partita is in four compact movements without any real connection between them. The Neo-classical tone of most of the music is still more evident at the close of the third movement when it nods (consciously or not) to the Gavotte from Prokofiev's First Symphony. This most attractive work ends with a joyful final, at times fugal movement that also includes a section for percussion alone.

Eugénie Warnier / Marine Thoreau La Salle / Quatuor Les Heures du jour SOIR - BERCEUSES (MAIS PAS QUE...)

My singing debut was very abrupt, a matter of urgency. I was at the time an intern in gynaecology and obstetrics, and one evening, returning home from attending a performance of Rusalka at the Bastille Opera, I knew I had to sing. Starting to work your voice at the age of 25 is a difficult challenge, I ‘did’ everything as a matter of urgency. I use this word because despite my desire to learn to sing I had above all to do it very quickly, almost immediately on stage. I was able to enter the great temple through the door of early music. Little by little, by learning as I went, I was able to make progress, ‘carve out my space’, often with a certain form of violence, because I had to get ahead as fast as possible. The idea of this disc was born, I believe, a very long time ago and it has been shaped slowly, delicately. It was a journey towards peaceful reassurance, a gentle desire for songs that came from afar, for a melodious childhood, music-loving, melodic, for the love of the beautiful : a text, an air, easy to remember, soothing, reposeful. This ever present desire took form, became reality. With maturity came a self-confidence built up day after day until its first manifestation at Bordeaux Opera where I met an audience that was open-minded, moved, receptive and that had rejuvenated my desire to touch and move... the seed had been planted. (Eugénie Warnier)

Kim Kashkashian / Robert Levin ASTURIANA Songs from Spain and Argentina

Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin have been playing together since the mid 1970s. Their debut ECM release was “Elegies” recorded in 1984, with music of Britten, Vaughan Williams, Carter, Glasunow, Liszt, Kodály and Vieuxtemps. This was soon followed by the Sonatas for Viola/Piano - and for Solo Viola - of Hindemith. In 1990 they recorded Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano op 147 for the New Series, in 1996 the Brahms viola sonatas in a recording that won the Edison Award.

Kim Kashkashian’s international career was given impetus by her early success at the Munich ARD competition. From the outset she was much in demand as a chamber musician and as a guest at festivals including Marlboro, Spoleto, Mostly Mozart, Lockenhaus und Salzburg. Previously a music professor in Freiburg and at the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, she teaches today at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Robert Levin is renowned for his restoration of the classical period practise of improvised embellishments and cadenzas, and his many recordings include Mozart piano concertos with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, and Beethoven concertos with John Eliot Gardiner und the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Alongside his concert activities Levin is also a noted theorist and Mozart scholar. His completion of the Mozart Mass in C Minor was premiered in Carnegie Hall in January 2005. Robert Levin is a professor of humanities at Harvard University, and was recently appointed artistic director of the Sarasota Music Festival.