"Echos de la Terre," the first album with Cypres by the highly promising Trio O3, is intended as an aural journey into the immensity and immeasurability of the world around us. Each composition resonates with one of the fundamental elements present in nature. However, the element earth, mentioned in the title of the CD, is not directly linked to any of the four pieces. Rather, it is light (Fiorini) that appears as a crucial element alongside air (Kõrvits), fire (Saariaho), and water (Crumb).

Interpreting these complex works as if they were their mother tongue, Lydie Thonnard, Eugénie Defraigne, and Lena Kollmeier, thanks to their mastery of unconventional playing techniques, bring them to life and fuse their distinct instrumental voices into a harmonious whole, lavishing the listener with unexpected pleasures and profound emotions.

Italian instrumental music was at its zenith when the works of these ten composers were written and each of those selected was a significant figure in the expansion of music for the harpsichord. Frescobaldi, represented by two athletic Toccatas, was influential across Germany while Merula’s beautiful Capriccio and Zipoli’s gracefully austere Sonata in C major reveal the breadth and variety to be found in Italian keyboard music of the period. The Venetian-born Pescetti draws the music from the Baroque onward to the new galant style.

The depiction of emotions came to the fore in the music of the late 16th century. Religious content is foregrounded, told from the perspective of the protagonists in order to generate compassion and understanding. In Tarquinio Merula's Canzonetta sopra la nanna, Mary's love for her child is just as palpable as her fear of his impending fate. Sacred songs such as the Salve Regina are transformed by Claudio Monteverdi into an intimate prayer to the Virgin Mary. Placing secular texts in a spiritual context was another means used by early Baroque composers. Claudio Monteverdi rewrote the then-popular Lamento d'Arianna as Lamento della Maddalena; Arianna, who laments for her beloved Theseus, becomes Marie Maddalena, who has been abandoned by Jesus. The Aria sopra la Romanesca by Paolo Quagliati is a reinterpretation of a love sonnet. "Working out and showing all these emotions in an almost theatrical style is the appeal of this music. We particularly enjoyed doing that," says Pia Davila.

These four central-European composers share a history of persecution and emigration but survived the worst excesses of the time. Their works for flute and piano reflect very different aesthetic positions. Schoenberg’s uncompromising Sonata for Flute and Piano is an arrangement of his Wind Quintet, Op. 26 of 1923–24 made a few years later by the Austrian composer Felix Greissle. The Suite by Ernst Krenek is delightfully neo-Classical, whilst the Czech Emil Burian crafted an eloquent, light-hearted work, heard here in its first recording. Paul Dessau’s Guernica was written for piano in 1937 and memorialises the tragedy of that bombed city.

The present program presents the kind of music that might have been heard at the Feast of the Swan, an annual banquet held by the Confraternity of Our Illustrious Lady in ’s-Hertogenbosch, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century. The combination of “sacred” and “secular” pieces might come as a surprise. However, the border between what we in the twenty-first century might imagine as two different musical realms was actually quite porous in the sixteenth. 

One of the Confraternity’s regular banquets, held each year on the first Monday after Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December), was the Feast of the Swan. The Swan was the Confraternity’s heraldic beast, a symbol of grace and purity, attributes of the Blessed Virgin. In the medieval imagination, the swan had musical associations. The anonymous bestiary Physiologus states that the Latin name for the swan (cygnus) comes from the verb “to sing” (canere), because it produces such a beautiful song from its long and flexible neck. It was thus fitting that the Feast of the Swan should include a rich musical component. Some of the singers also played instruments at the banquets.

Since 1991, Radio France has been organising the Presences festival of contemporary music: several hundred new scores have been heard (a third of them world premieres), and the festival is also characterised by a series of portraits of composers from the late 20th century.
This CD, along with another volume devoted to Kaija Saariaho, marks a new stage of the Presences festival, which is extending its activities to include discs.
Tonal versus atonal, consonant versus dissonant, neo-classical versus serial, reactionary versus avant-garde, those who mourn a dreamed-of golden age versus those who claim to embody the meaning of history, Landowski versus Boulez, the list goes on and on. These binary and caricatured oppositions have fuelled a debate that has dominated the 20th century, and which is still sometimes in turmoil today.
In this context, we are struck by the emergence of spectral music, of which Tristan Murail is one of the initiators and most brilliant exponents. Spectral music proved that history could emerge from this sterile debate, that new territories of sound and harmony existed, that consonances were possible without being part of a backward-looking approach ¬–in short, that composers could move forward, continuing to invent, without having to resort to historically exhausted systems, such as those of tonal music or serial music.
The advent of spectral music was a major turning point in the great history of music, and its scope is such that its concepts, vocabulary (spectrum, fusion, partials, transients, inharmonics, etc.), writing principles and approach to sound and time have spread throughout the world and over several generations.
Few composers today have not been influenced in one way or another by spectral music. From George Benjamin to Kaija Saariaho, from Jonathan Harvey to Fausto Romitelli, via Philippe Hurel, Marc-Andre Dalbavie and Magnus Lindberg, spectral music and its concepts are everywhere.

When Fanny Hensel, nee Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the wife of the Prussian court painter Wilhelm Hensel, died unexpectedly on 14 May 1847 at the age of 41 as a result of a stroke, the music writer and poet Ludwig Rellstab coined the beautiful phrase that she "also shared the sisterhood of talent with her famous brother".

This assertion has only recently been recognised in its full significance. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's eldest sister, granddaughter of the philosopher and Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, niece of the scandal-ridden Dorothea Schlegel, was not only a musical prodigy, an outstanding pianist and conductor, her brother's closest confidante and advisor and a brilliant writer of letters, but also "the most important female composer of the 19th century" (Franz Krautwurst). Jahrhunderts" (Franz Krautwurst in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Supplement, article Fanny Hensel, 1979).

The present CD offers mostly first recordings of some piano compositions, primarily works that were published by the composer herself, and thus helps to gain a more differentiated picture of the creative abilities of this unusual woman.