On the eve of a vigorous eightieth birthday, the most French of American musicians has chosen the Musee de la musique to assemble a host of young artists who are dear to him: William Christie has watched over their budding skills, and they have already become masters. This program celebrates the composers he has so passionately championed and, in some cases, brought back to life.
The musical legacy of the Bach family is inseparably linked to the progress in instrument making of the time, which was dominated by the Silbermann family. Offering a fascinating comparison between the two dynasties-composers vs. Organ builders and fortepiano makers-for this recording, Louis-Noel Bestion de Camboulas and Les Surprises used superb copies of Silbermann instruments, but also a magnificent original: the famous Silbermann organ at the Cathedral of St. Mary in Freiberg, Saxony.
Lovers of Moliere are often deprived of an essential dimension of his output: the music! Several of his masterpieces, written in collaboration with Lully or Charpentier, regain their full meaning and profundity when heard with the original scores. In this respect, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have been true pioneers for over forty years now: to accompany such legendary achievements as Le Malade imaginaire, they have recorded other, equally emblematic pieces from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, George Dandin and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac specially for this new album.
Ever since it's release in 2011, this album has been one of the jewels of Isabelle Faust's discography, with Daniel Harding and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra providing tremendous accompaniment in the concerto. The coupling is a poignant reading of the delicate and highly personal Sextet no.2. "Her performance is wonderfully proportioned... never grandiose nor unnecessarily rhetorical, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra supplying perfectly scaled support..."(The Guardian).
After a formidable first volume, Cedric Tiberghien continues his exploration of Beethoven's corpus of variations. At the heart of this new album are the famous Thirty-two Variations in C minor and their tangy reminiscences of Bach - the Ciaccona from Partita No.2 for violin solo, presented here in Brahms's masterly transcription. He also takes the opportunity to show us what a certain school of American composers (Crumb, Cage, Feldman) has made of this tradition of variation form.
Following on their impressive debut album [Ex]tradition, the Curious Bards - an early music ensemble founded by violinist Alix Boivert in 2015 - continue to explore material from the Scottish and Irish folk traditions preserved in 18th-century publications. This new collection of airs and dances is a chance to discover more of this fascinating repertoire, in which the distinctions between serious music and popular inspiration need no longer apply.
Passionate about travel, Saint-Saens was strongly influenced by the cultural diversity he encountered in North Africa. Zahia Ziouani, as one immersed in these twin cultures herself, is able to shed new light on the composer's travel-inspired works by reflecting them through the prism of traditional Algerian music, ranging from Ahmed El Alaoui to Idir and performed in the company of Rachid Brahim-Djelloul, this is a fascinating musical dialogue.
in 1961, the discovery of a manuscript caused a sensation in the music world. The archives of Radenín Castle, preserved in the National Museum in Prague, contained the part copy of Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto in C major. Until then, the existence of the piece was known only through the entry in Haydn's own catalog of works; the sheet music, however, had been lost. The first performance in Prague and a first recording as well as a printed edition of the sheet music made the public acquainted with the piece in 1962 - the success was resounding.
Although the concerto was composed between 1761 and 1765, Haydn's first years as Kapellmeister to Prince Eszterházy, the piece presents itself as a fully realized masterpiece. There is no fumbling and experimenting, Haydn masters all formal and structural problems with which a composer in the epoch of the early classical awakening was confronted. With rapid virtuoso passages, it also places high demands on the soloist, and the melody is often enough in the technically demanding high register. Thus, the composition also testifies to the outstanding level of the princely court orchestra. Haydn had already entrusted the cellist Joseph Weigl, who was a member of his orchestra between 1761 and 1769, with several solo parts in his early symphonies. With his C major concerto, he made this extraordinarily talented virtuoso immortal.
The Second Cello Concerto, composed in 1783, also had a checkered history. The composition was dedicated to Anton Kraft, who, according to contemporary testimony, was the "first master of his instrument. Kraft's fame as a cellist seemed to outshine Haydn's esteem as a composer in the 19th century; otherwise it can hardly be explained that he was also considered the composer of the piece for a long time. Furthermore, the work was performed for a long time in an arrangement from 1890, which, although it did not challenge Haydn's authorship, virtually distorted the piece by profound interventions in the musical text. Thus a persistent prejudice of lack of tension and ponderousness against the D major concerto could arise. Only the recovery of the autograph in 1954 restored the work to its original beauty, its cheerfully entertaining tone and its sheer inexhaustible richness of melody.
A lover of historical keyboard instruments, Alexander Melnikov has already successfully met the challenge of exploring 'Four Pieces, Four Pianos' on record and in concert back in 2018. Today, he has chosen to perform seven emblematic works of the fantasia genre on harpsichord, fortepiano, tangent piano, early grands, and so on. In this journey through the keyboards of time, we can discover these pieces as they sounded at the time of their creation, but also grasp the invisible thread that links them to each other.
These two works represent the alpha and omega of Mozart. With these performances of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (1782), probably the composer's first absolute masterpiece, and Die Zauberflote (1791 - the year of his death), Rene Jacobs penetrates to the heart of Mozartian singspiel. Featuring singers, a chorus and an orchestra ideally suited to the works, these two complete recordings are now among the benchmarks of the discography.
With selections ranging from Praetorius to Britten, plus all-time favorites such as J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Handel's Messiah, this album brings together some of the most beautiful and justly famous musical settings of the Nativity story. Festive or intimate, exuberant or elegiac, these highlights from iconic recordings in harmonia mundi's voluminous catalogue are an ideal sampling of the Christmas magic across epochs and styles.
Almost twenty years ago, Isabelle Faust and Jiri Belohlavek established a new milestone in the discography of Dvorak's Violin Concerto. The coupling, the tumultuous Trio in F minor, inaugurated the violinist's long and fruitful collaboration with Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras.
Paul Lewis's recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas at once took it's place as one of the great modern sets. To celebrate twenty years of collaboration with the British pianist, harmonia mundi invites you to rediscover some of the finest sonatas from this monument, each with it's own unique character. A splendid opportunity to admire Paul Lewis's infinite range of touch, with it's combination of rigor and imagination, which brings out all the poetry of these famous works.
This collections celebrated Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlins' forty years of excellence with and around the Bach family. In addition to such famous works as the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites, this anniversary set invites you to explore the golden age of a veritable dynasty, from Johann Sebastian's distant cousin Johann Ludwig to his sons Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian - from the finest works of the Baroque era to the first examples of the Classical style: simply breathtaking.
With it's forty-five chorale preludes, the Orgelbuchlein bears witness to a mastery of the art of improvisation on the organ, as the congregation heard it at the time before singing the hymn in it's turn. It was a tempting experiment to revive this primary function: by collaborating with the combined forces of the Ensemble Vocal Bergamasque and the Maitrise de Notre-Dame de Paris, Benjamin Alard gives the 'little organ book' it's full significance and expressive power.
Paul Lewis completes his exploration of Schubert's sonatas, begun almost twenty years ago, with three early masterpieces. The Sonatas D.537 and D.568 display the daring and freshness of their youthful creator, while with D.664, dazzling in it's artless charm, he already opens a window towards new musical horizons.
Invisible Stream: the "unseen currents" are those that connect people and musical works by transcending styles or customary aesthetic and cultural boundaries. A feast of poetic expression organized by four key representatives of both the classical and jazz music scenes of today, this record initiates a dialogue - motivated by the purest spirit of improvisation - between the compositions of Raphael Imbert and those of Schubert, Wagner, and Ornette Coleman.
Delving into black magic and folk culture, Weber created with Der Freischutz a new aesthetic that was to nourish the imaginative world of a whole generation of composers. Rene Jacobs has gone back to the sources of the initial project and here offers us a completely new reading of the very first German Romantic opera. The prologue initially conceived by the librettist is restored to it's original place, giving due symbolic and structural weight to the character of the Hermit. This is a fascinating rediscovery.
For more than forty years, Lalande was the French court's favorite composer, cultivating the most elevated and touching aspects of the spirit of the Grand Siecle. Sebastien Dauce and the Ensemble Correspondances offer us some remarkable examples of his output here: with the imposing Miserere, ample and sombre, the Dies irae and the rarely heard Veni Creator, this 'Latin Lully' brought the art of the grand motet to it's zenith.
