Classical Music

Classical Music

Bach's late, contrapuntal masterwork, left incomplete upon his death in 1750. Played here on an untempered piano and complete on 2 CDs. French/Swiss pianist Cedric Pescia has concertized throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Professor of piano at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Geneve. Gold Medalist - 2002 Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA).

Classical Music

Classical Music

...Gervasoni not only writes notes, he writes about the distance that can be found between and around them, the very distance that Emily Dickinson refers to in her poems. That distance contains the hidden meaning of Philip Levine's poetry, the upheaval and the plenitude of man that Francis Ponge conjures up out of staring eyes, here transmuted into listening tension. - Ph. Albera

...Here is my humble tribute to someone who, with his music, managed to cultivate in me the taste and desire to champion the character and colours of the folk music of Argentina. - Robert Aussel

Classical Music

Classical Music

Some of the most inventive cello repertoire of the modern day is presented on this new release by Aeon.; Accompanied by electronics, these works inspire a sense of wandering, adventuring, and experimentation, discovering new realms of tonal possibilities.; Arne Deforce and Yutaka Oya blend seamlessly in this atypical pairing.

A landmark recording does full justice to Ockeghem's famed Mass

"This," says Fabrice Fitch in his review, "is a recording that was waiting to happen." Ensemble Musica Nova presents various complete versions of the Ockeghem Mass alongside each other. So if you can’t get enough of this Mass, here is your ideal answer. As variations on a theme, as it were, it’s a fascinating and rewarding exercise. The performances are excellent; one for the collection.

-- Gramophone [2/2008]

Musica Nova, with its rich experience performing the ballades and motets of Guillaume de Machaut, set out to rewrite the book on his most famous and emblematic work: the so-called Messe de Nostre Dame. The very elaborate construction of the mass and its strange and subtle harmonies win the admiration of all. But do we really know what its true sound was? Though we cannot be quite sure, our research into the 14th-century theory of musica ficta, led by specialist Gérard Geay, has allowed us to come close, opening up an unheard sound world. In order to perform this music the singers worked from various 14th-century manuscript sources. They used the reading techniques of that era in an attempt to stay as close as possible to the phrasing and vocal movement that Machaut would have had in mind. Reading from the manuscript places the singer in a world of long note values with ternary divisions (modus perfectus), which automatically suggests a longer breath and a more spacious performance. Machaut's mass alternates between two styles of composition: the conductus (Gloria and Credo), a 13th-century legacy in which all voices follow the same rhythm, and the isorhythmic motet (Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Ite missa est, and the final Amen in the both the Gloria and Credo), which is specific to the Ars Nova.

Canat de Chizy: Moving

Lucid music. Vivacity, wit, intensity, foldings and unfoldings of the pointillist material, embracing the thing itself and its contradiction- sensuality, drollery, dances, abysses like sudden draughts of air. Movement and standstill… Music that slaps, pinches, bites, muffles, growls. Here Pesson reinvigorates what might already be his own classicism (Carmagnole); draws a pencil moustache on Mozart, who is more than willing to wear it (Transformations du Menuet K. 355); hounds his language so far into the corner that it seems different, and probably becomes so, in the intransigent light of Opalka (Blanc merite); a language that ramifies and scintillates in Proust (Ne pas oublier coz rouge dans jour craquele); grows geometric in Perec (Neige bagatelle); and denudes itself in ‘enfantines’ (Musica ficta). The Ensemble Cairn, a faithful partner of the label, under its director Guillaume Bourgogne, leads us into territories that could hardly be droller.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Founded in 1992, the New York-based Brentano Quartet is known for its interpretations combining perfect technique and matchless musicality. Those qualities are even more obvious in this series of late Beethoven quartets with this first volume bringing together the Op. 127 and 131. This pure crystal of intelligence and brilliance will doubtless constitute a milestone.

Classical Music

Unless I’ve missed something, this is the first recorded performance of the Magnard Quartet since the Artis Quartet’s tilt at it nearly two decades ago (Accord 220 602). A reading by the estimable Via Nova Quartet may have been offered about the same time, but seems never to have been available domestically. Composed over 1902–03—between Guercoeur and the Hymne à Vénus—and similar in appeal to the symphonies, the Quartet offers a propulsive, substantial first movement, a briskly bracing Sérénade, an extended movement in his familiar funèbre vein, and a frolicsome finale of Danses. Of Magnard’s 21 extant works this is the most difficult to know, by virtue of its compactness, and the one, once known, one may well come to love the best. Which is to say that you will want this more than passable performance. On the other hand, Fauré’s Quartet, his final work, does not lack for recorded performances, though most—the Ysaÿe’s included—run aground on the shoals of stylistic incomprehension. For both composers tautness is all, which puts them immediately at odds with the Ysaÿe’s kinder, gentler, nuance-rife readings. Chez Fauré, this approach clutters his austerity and dims its slow flare of radiance in an effusive mushiness. Magnard is more resistant but does not wholly escape blunting. His abruptness—his notorious brusquerie—was not merely a gesture of concision but a coup de théâtre, a call to order, a demand to listen. It is a closely argued work, and to occlude its fleet directness is to labor its argument. Still, there is enough of the essential Magnard here to make an acceptable introduction—while tracking down the Artis Quartet’s more incisively revelatory performance, lobbying for a reissue of the Via Nova, and pressing for other ensembles to essay it. For idiomatic Fauré, one may have to go back to the 1935 Pro Arte Quartet (Biddulph LAB 105), the Loewenguth Quartet (in an LP collection of French string quartets for Vox, SVBX 670), or—by default—the Miami Quartet as the best among recent issues (Conifer 75605 51291 2). Aeon’s sound is immediate and detailed within a spacious aural frame. With reservations noted, recommended.

Adrian Corleonis, FANFARE

Classical Music

Andreas Staier made a spellbinding recording of Schubert's monumental A minor sonata D. 845 for Teldec in the mid-1990s. His remake for AEON is bookended by a two-movement work from Brice Pausnet, written specifically for Staier and his Christopher Clarke fortepiano. Taking its cue from D. 845, Kontra-Sonate processes Schubert's stark unison melodic writing and toccata-like patterns through Pausnet's essentially atonal vocabulary. His style is largely characterized by gesture as opposed to rhythm, and as a consequence, even the most rapid flourishes have a slow moving, decorative effect. As the music progresses, I find myself less interested in Pausnet's note choices and more fascinated with the subtlety with which he deploys the fortepiano's extraordinary pedal and percussion effects, registral differentiation, and unpredictable intonation. The continuity and caring precision of Staier's performance minimizes the music's static, academic countenance.


If Staier's angular and dynamically vivid Schubert A minor remake seems more settled and less impetuous than in the aforementioned Teldec version (especially in the last two movements), it's probably due to a more distant microphone placement than Teldec's tighter pickup. Is the una corda pedal responsible for those harp-like sonorities in the first-movement development section? What a gorgeous, totally unexpected sound! This is a profoundly fascinating release, but why do projects like this invariably include booklet notes packed with poetic, conceptual, philosophical, and mythological hooey?
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

"On Easter Day, 1043, King Edward the Confessor was crowned in Winchester Cathedral. The Discantus ensemble have here brought back to life the nascent polyphonies of ancient England. These compositions are drawn from the Winchester Tropary, one of the most fabulous musical testimonies of the era. Inserted are two contemporary pieces by composers Pierre Chépélov (b. 1979) and Joel Rust (b. 1989), commissioned by Discantus on texts excerpted from Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy."

The English translation excellently acted gives this fiery Peer new appeal.

Based on concerts the Suisse Romande Orchestra gave in Geneva and Lausanne, Guillaume Tourniaire's performance of the Benestad/Andersen critical edition of the score (essentially the 26 numbers given at the play's 1876 premiere) first appeared in 2005 (A/05). In my Gramophone Collection piece on Peer Gynt in November of that year I would have hailed it unreservedly as the best complete version of Grieg's theatre music had the dialogue and melodramas not been spoken in French. Now those spoken passages have been rendered into English, in a translation by Stephen Taylor which resonates without either period whimsy or banal updating.

The linking narrations and filleting of the play by Main Perroux have been made with sharp knowledge of the Ibsen drama and of what works in concert and on disc. The national characteristics of the actors intriguingly alter the feel of the piece. While Lambert Wilson and his French colleagues are more distanced, Brechtian and mysterious, the British trio immediately embrace a warmer, more comic naturalism. Alex Jennings's voice grows from rough Ulster into an assumed English RP as Peer travels the world; Derek Jacobi is a cunning mix of spooky and funny as the Boyg, here called the Great Obstacle, and no less effective in 10 other parts; Haydn Gwynne hops with enjoyable confidence across the age and sanity barriers from Peer's mother to his various girl friends.

Tourniaire has as much of an eye on the drama as the exceptional discs of excerpts under Beecham (EMI) and Masur (Philips). He has intuited and delivered a true Grieg style from his orchestra, alert, light, swift but not afraid to punch home the ironies (of the Trolls' various numbers) and the intentionally noisy stage effect climaxes (like the Act 5 shipwreck music). The two big melodramas ("Peer and the Obstacle" and "Night Scene") — perhaps the most compelling reasons for getting to know the complete score — find Grieg at his most progressive and inventive and Tourniaire paces them beautifully. Even his rits and rails in the tricky little vocal numbers of Peer's African sojourn in Act 4 come off to a tee.

With English-speaking listeners now as well catered for as French ones, Aeon should seriously consider a Norwegian version, even retaining Perroux's taut narrative material. The Ole Kristian Ruud/Bergen BIS Norwegian set (A105) is authentically self-recommending but it lacks the special fire and imagination of Tourniaire's.

-- Mike Ashman, Gramophone [3/2007]

Philomela, by British composer James Dillon, inspired by Ovid and Sophocles, is his first scenic work. Whether opera or musical theatre, his score gives us an original and intense reading of the Princess of Athens' tragedy. Philomela is a visionary work. While being within the history of music, it invents its forms, its time, its own aesthetic sphere. It is probably for that reason that James Dillon qualifies it: music/théâtre (note the first term in English, the second in French, that authenticates the paternity of this history) so that it does not belong to the history of opera (too long) neither to modern musical theatre (too short). James Dillon imagines a space between Baroque and Noh theatre, a space we can perceive, we can seize immediately, as we contemplate this production. The writing in itself is a kind of metaphor of the myth! It's a cut tongue. For this recording, the best interpreters of our times have been selected. This is one of the major contemporary lyrical successes of the last decade, both innovating and thoroughly gripping.

Classical Music