LA HARPE REINE: CONCERTOS FOR HARP AT THE COURT OF
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$21.09Oct 27, 2023
The triumph of the harp! When Marie-Antoinette arrived at the French court in 1770, she brought a harp in her luggage. Thanks to her enthusiasm, the instrument was to enjoy a revival of interest that produced an abundant repertory. Available once more from the hamronia mundi archived, "Christie's collaboration with the superb Xavier de Maistre is an exquisitely refined account of Krumpholtz's enchanting Fifth Harp Concerto" (BBC Music Magazine). "This is rococo entertainment music at it's most decorously pastel... de Maistre's playing is a marvel of delicate coloring and shimmering, perfectly even passagework." (Gramophone)
From the overt Romanticism of Saint-Saens to the nostalgia-laden modernity of Poulenc, Bruno Philippe takes us on a journey through (almost) a century of French cello music. Alongside Tanguy de Williencourt, he also performs the cello version of Franck's famous Violin Sonata, one of the absolute peaks of nineteenth-century chamber music.
Francisco Goya's paintings have left a powerful imprint on the European imagination. It was undoubtedly Granados who best translated into music, with nobility and humor, this colorful universe where majos and majas dance to love and death in the twilight glow of a dying Ancien Regime.
Under the fingers of Adam Laloum, Schubert's music becomes a journey. The emotions that enrich it are those of a deeply human artistry and the murmur of a voice that still moves us 200 years after falling silent. Adam Laloum's way with Schubert is unique, as his first album (Sonatas D894 and D958) so eloquently demonstrated. A new world awaits us here with the Sonata D959 and the Moments musicaux, whose unassuming title belies the lasting impact they have had on piano lovers.
The three works on this album evoke the worlds of commedia dell'arte (Pulcinella), Don Quixote (El retablo de maese Pedro) and picaresque Spain (the Harpsichord Concerto). Telling their stories with color, rhythm and humor, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Pablo Heras-Casado and Benjamin Alard (playing a sumptuous Pleyel harpsichord) invite us to an exhilarating fireworks display.
Pierre Gallon and Matthieu Boutineau offer us an opportunity to rediscover Couperin's Concerts Royaux in a version for two harpsichords, a rare combination, yet one of which the composer to the Sun King was especially fond. Here is an interpretation at once brilliant and moving of these works full of tenderness, gaiety and invention, a veritable stylistic turning point between the twilight of the Grand Siecle and the dawn of the Enlightenment.
It was in Rome, where he resided between 1707 and 1710, that the young Handel composed these three dazzling sacred works. The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the RIAS Kammerchor give us an extremely lively and colorful reading of these pieces in which the composer showcased his talent: allegiance to the forms of the past, total mastery of counterpoint and, already, a unique feeling for storytelling. Everything here announces musical genius.
Bach: A Life in Music, Vol.1 / Agnew, Les Arts Florissants
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$22.49Apr 05, 2024
In this new series, Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants invite us to follow the creative itinerary of J. S. Bach through the times and cities in which he lived. The first instalment introduces us to a young master who remained faithful to the north German tradition of the sacred concerto, but already displayed an intensely personal invention.
Britten: Violin Concerto & Chamber Works / Faust, Hrůša, BRSO
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$22.49Apr 12, 2024
After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in it's language, combines drama with humor, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The program is completed by early chamber works.
Dutilleux: Tout un monde lointain... Metaboles - Symphonie No. 1 / Queyras, Gimeno, Luxembourg Philharmonic
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$22.00$22.01Save 0%Apr 19, 2024
The symphonic universe of Henri Dutilleux is a fascinating one. Mysterious and poetic, always remarkably expressive, his music explores the thousand and one colors of the orchestra with unique mastery. Gustavo Gimeno and the Luxembourg Philharmonic give us a flamboyant reading of three masterpieces from the composer's first creative period, showcasing the superb cello playing of Jean-Guihen Queyras in Tout un monde lointain.
The genre of the mélodie accompanied Fauré like a kind of personal journal. This music voluptuously - and sometimes vehemently - encompasses the meanderings of the soul: dreams, nostalgia, reflections or mirages. Stéphane Degout and Alain Planès take advantage of the iridescent tones of an 1892 Pleyel in their interpretation of some of his finest song cycles, including the testamentary, L'Horizon chimérique.
Far from the dark, tortured image often associated with his music, the works on this album testify to an astonishingly serene period in Schumann's life. A fine subject for this first album by the Hanson Quartet for harmonia mundi, whose members are partnered by Adam Laloum for a thrilling reading of a masterpiece of the Romantic repertory: the Piano Quintet.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lied increasingly took on orchestral garb. The boundary with opera became almost impalpable. That is what Samuel Hasselhorn and Lukasz Borowicz demonstrate here, in a splendid program mingling smiles and disillusionment, where some of the most characteristic orchestral lieder and operatic arias of this Austro-German 'fin de siecle' era blend perfectly together.
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas; The Fairy Queen / Christie, Les Arts Florissants
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$33.49Jun 21, 2024
In the late 1980s, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants recorded galvanizing versions of two masterpieces of early English opera: Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen. These two seminal interpretations are now available again, coupled for the first time in a single boxed set.
For their very first recording with harmonia mundi, the duo formed by Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy offers us three closely related works: Schubert's celebrated Fantasy, his Divertissement à la hongroise, full of contrasts between bursts of energy and enigmatic mists, and Leonid Desyatnikov's Trompe-l'œil, written specifically 'to echo' the Fantasy. This porgram is an intriguing hall of mirrors.
'The happy years': an expression that is particularly apt for J. S. Bach's period in Cothen. Freed from the obligations that held him back in Weimar and not yet caught up in the Leipzig treadmill, Prince Leopold's protege produced masterpieces of such flamboyance that Benjamin Alard could not resist the pleasure of inviting some of his dear musician friends to join him around the splendid three-manual harpsichord by Hass.
Conversation - Gaspard Le Roux: Suites for 2 Harpsichords / Taylor, Christie
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$22.00$22.01Save 0%Jun 28, 2024
An outlier in the French harpsichord world, Gaspard Le Roux composed music of unique inventiveness and richness at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Juxtaposing his pieces with others by Lully, Marais and Francois Couperin, William Christie and Justin Taylor have found the ideal alchemy to do full justice to the myriad colors of these Suites, as virtuosic as they are rich in new emotions.
Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia - patron of the arts, collector, woman of letters and composer - was an extraordinary personality. The flautist Jean Bregnac pays her vibrant homage with a program featuring works by her proteges Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, her mentor Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and the princess herself.
Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin / Prégardien, Bezuidenhout
HARMONIA MUNDI
CD
$22.49Aug 23, 2024
This first release in an exclusive recital collaboration with harmonia mundi presents Julian Prégardien's reading of a cycle that explores quintessentially Schubertian themes: nature, love, solitude, death. Taking full advantage of the unique timbres of a Graf-style fortepiano, the young German tenor and Kristian Bezuidenhout create an expressive palette of exceptional variety, full of striking contrasts.
