It is through a double CD that Musique en Wallonie is honoring the Belgian composer Lucie Vellere. When, in 1957, the jury (entirely male) of the International Composition Contest for Women Composers, organised by Grace Spofford and the American division of the Conseil international de femmes, awarded her a first prize, Lucie Vellere found herself, for the first in her life, in the public eye. She who had always cultivated discretion now aroused curiosity. Throughout her fifty-year compositional career, Vellere cultivated an art of the melodic line that one could liken to the curves of Art nouveau, which left their mark on many composers, among them the early Debussy of the Arabesques. While Franck and Faure are often cited as her aesthetic influences, the mature Debussy appears only as filtered through Jongen. Many of the references of pictorial, poetic and musical impressionism were adopted by the composer: the elements (earth, air, fire, water), landscapes, times and seasons (evening, moonlight, autumn), evocations of temporal or spatial distance (an indeterminate past, Antiquity, the Orient). Vellere strove also for a classical sobriety and sense of proportion. This recording highlights the composer's eclectic compositions, mixing work for voice and piano, string quartets and octets, women's choir and even piano music, a panorama of her compositions that will reveal several facets of her personality.
Incomparable virtuoso, called the Paganini of the harp, Felix Godefroid was also a composer and a teacher. This recording, performed by Sophie Hallynck, highlights the composer's studies in high virtuosity. Designed for his own use and that of professionals, partake of both "absolute music" - as with the deservedly famous etude in B Flat Minor, op. 193 - and the character piece, picturesque or sentimental. These musical miniatures are pieces overflowing with musicality, in a refined style, but they express a pedagogical programme first and foremost. Godefroid conceived of his etudes as a true school for harpists. Each technical problem becomes the medium for a musical expression - an approach that gives these etudes exceptional richness and relevance. Often based on one of those melodies for which Godefroid had such a knack, each one is set apart by a strongly marked expressive character, ranging from laughter to tears, as well as by it's structure, rhythm, novel sonorities, and harmonic surprises not lacking in audacity. Sophie Hallynck has risen to the technical challenges specific to each etude while staying faithful to the spirit of the era, with the aspiration to achieve a subtle balance between virtuosity and expression. Her essential objective has always been to make technique live through music, without ever obscuring that emotion that emanates from it.
Though Belgium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was known above all for it's "school" of violin-playing, represented by figures such as Henry Vieuxtemps and Eugene Ysaye, it was also home to a flourishing piano "school". After independence in 1830, the new nation's conservatoires opened numerous classes, method-books and anthologies proliferated, and piano-makers kept pace with new patents and instruments. This dynamic environment naturally had an effect on composers; everyone who wrote music wrote for this king of instruments, and promoted the results either by performing them themselves or by confiding them to virtuosos to execute in concerts or competitions. The most famous of these, the Eugene Ysaye Competition (since 1951 the Queen Elisabeth International Competition), opened to pianists in 1938, with Emil Gilels emerging victorious. A quarter of a century later, Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden entered this prestigious contest and, at sixteen years of age, came away with a third prize. Trained at the Brussels Conservatoire by Eduardo del Pueyo, he would go on to an international career still active six decades later. The programme of this CD is an homage to this long lineage of teachers and students. It testifies to the practices as well as the networks of friendship that gave this "school", throughout it's various ramifications, a particular character.
Sensual - that's undoubtedly the word that best describes the music on this album dedicated to the early works of Josquin des Prez. In his early thirties, the composer was already developing a unique sense of sound and language. He knew how to make rhythms resonate, rendering them sometimes enveloping, sometimes liberating. His melodies are full of life - sometimes gentle, sometimes sinuous - and his duets seem to be made of glances exchanged between voices. Josquin composes with great finesse, playing on the contrasts between the intimate and the radiant. As in the art of his time, even when he addresses religious subjects, his music retains a sensual beauty, full of emotion and humanity.
