After a first recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations acclaimed by the critics (Diapason d'Or, BBC, Guardian, Le Monde) Filippo Gorini, a student of Alfred Brendel and winner of the first Prize and Audience Prize of the Bonn Beethoven Competition in 2015, pursues a fast-growing career. His concert appearances have drawn unanimous acclaim on many prestigious stages such as the Berlin Konzerthaus, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Munich Herkulessaal, Societ� del Quartetto di Milano and the Samsung Concert Hall in Seoul. Here he returns to Beethoven and tackles the perilous Sonata no.29, known as the 'Hammerklavier', which the composer himself said would pose a challenge for future generations, along with the Sonata no.32, which according to Thomas Mann represents the supreme accomplishment of and 'farewell' to sonata form.

“The French horn is notoriously difficult to play. You can practise all you like but there is no guarantee that the note you blow into the mouthpiece is the same one which will come out of the bell once it has travelled through all the twists and turns of the tubing. However, when all goes well, the horn is glorious and I absolutely love being a horn player, even with all risks – and maybe even because of them.” (Sarah Willis) After the enormous success of Mozart y Mambo (ALPHA578) which went straight to Number 1 in Germany on release in 2020, Alpha has decided to reissue one of the first albums recorded by this multi-talented and tireless ambassador of the French horn. In this re-release of the 2014 album, Horn Discoveries, Sarah Willis demonstrates all the rich potential of her instrument with exciting original compositions and beautiful arrangements of well-loved repertoire pieces such as Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un lieu cher, Dvorak’s Humoresque, Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles and Debussy’s Clair de Lune.

The pianist Anna Vinnitskaya has built up an impressive discography since her victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2007: Bach, Brahms, Ravel, and of course the Russian composers with whom she has been familiar since her childhood in Novorossiysk, then her studies with Evgeni Koroliov. She has now made her first Chopin recording, coupling the four Ballades, a cross between the miniature and the sonata, with the four Impromptus he composed at different periods of his life, between 1835 and 1842. Anna Vinnitskaya was born in the Russian city of Novorossijsk. She was a student of Sergei Ossipienko in Rostov and Evgenyi Koroliov at the Hamburg conservatoire. Since 2009 she has been a professor there herself - that is, when she is not touring the stages of the wide musical world.

Juliette Hurel and Hélène Couvert, who have long enjoyed a close rapport on the concert platform and on disc, here celebrate five French women composers at the turn of the twentieth century. Countess Clémence de Grandval was the composer of some sixty songs, of which Saint-Saëns said: ‘They would certainly be famous if their composer did not have what many people regard as the irremediable defect of being a woman.’ Augusta Holmès earned the admiration of Liszt, Wagner and Saint-Saëns. To mark the Universal Exhibition of 1889, she composed a monumental work for more than a thousand musicians. During her studies at the Conservatoire, Mélanie Bonis fell madly in love with a singer, but had to marry a rich industrialist. She later returned to composition and used the pseudonym Mel Bonis, leaving her gender in doubt. Cécile Chaminade displayed extraordinary gifts at a very early age. Bizet called her ‘My little Mozart’. Lili Boulanger received her first music lessons from her sister, the famous teacher Nadia. In 1913, at the age of nineteen, she became the first woman to receive the Prix de Rome. The word ‘compositrice’ was born!

Riga-born Ksenija Sidorova is today one of the most eminent global ambassadors of the classical accordion. She has proudly borne the colors of her instrument in appearances in the world’s leading halls and with the foremost orchestras. Here she pays homage to Piazzolla in her own way: ‘Piazzolla the revolutionary, the ground-breaker, a man thinking ahead of his time . . . Playing this repertoire gave me a sense of artistic freedom and ignited my belief in advocacy of my instrument. For this album, I wanted to celebrate Piazzolla the innovator by pairing some his masterworks with pieces written by other composers for classical accordion, the majority of which I have premiered in recent years. Being of Russian heritage, I couldn’t help noticing the similarity between the nostalgia of the tango and that of Russian composer Sergey Voitenko’s Revelation. French accordionist-composer Franck Angelis’s Fantasia is based on Piazzolla’s waltz-tango, and the programme is completed by the Nocturne of Italian accordionist-composer Pietro Roffi and a piece by Sergey Akhunov.’

The practice of composing for two keyboard instruments, very common in the illustrious Bach family, naturally achieved its apotheosis with Johann Sebastian, whose three concertos for two harpsichords are performed here by Olivier Fortin and Emmanuel Frankenberg with the Ensemble Masques. These works, particularly the concertos in C minor, are among the composer’s most admired. They suggest a conception of the concerto specific to Bach: rather than a dialogue between several individual entities, the piece presents a subtle intertwining of melodic lines and blurs the distinction between solo and tutti parts by making them respond to and quote each other, thus illustrating the principle of harmony dear to the composer. Finally, the recording on two harpsichords of the Prelude and Fugue BWV 552, originally composed for organ, is in keeping with the nineteenth-century tradition of transposing Bach’s works with the aim of giving their refined polyphony greater clarity.

Kerson Leong recently participated in the award-winning Tribute to Ysaye (FUG758). Here is his first solo recital for Alpha. The young Canadian violinist’s career began at the age of thirteen when he won the New Talent Award at the 2010 Menuhin Competition in Oslo. In 2018 he was named artist-in-residence with the Orchestre Metropolitain de Montreal, conducted by Yannick Nezet- Seguin. An associate musician at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, under the mentorship of Augustin Dumay, he has already performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Verbier Festival and Wigmore Hall. The Quebec newspaper Le Devoir, which has followed him since the start of his career, speaks of ‘the purity of intonation, the brilliance of the high notes, the power of the sound... Kerson Leong has remained as brilliant as ever, but he has added a new patina and, deep down inside himself, a new class.’ He plays a superb Guarneri del Gesu of 1741, on loan from a Canadian patron. Here he tackles a monument of the violin repertory, the Sonatas for solo violin of Eugene Ysaye: ‘These sonatas are of course a big test . . . The music is highly emotional, pervasive and in some ways also very sombre, which makes it extremely powerful’, says Leong of these six sonatas, which he frequently plays in their entirety in a single concert.

As the symbiosis between the art of the poet and that of the composer, the French melodie became the jewel of the salons of the ‘Belle epoque’. By placing a string quartet and a piano around the singer, Chausson’s Chanson perpetuelle, Lekeu’s Nocturne and Faure’s La Bonne Chanson oscillate between chamber musical intimacy and orchestral ambition. Alongside these famous pioneering pieces, this programme devised by the Palazzetto Bru Zane champions a return to the art of transcription, so popular in the nineteenth century, with the aim of expanding the repertory for voice, strings and piano in order to unearth some forgotten treasures. Hence Hahn, Berlioz, Saint-Saens, Massenet, La Tombelle, Ropartz, Louiguy and Messager all appear in a programme whose guiding thread is the emotions of nocturnal abandonment: the charms of twilight, the trajectory of dreams, the terror of nightmare or the exhilaration of festive occasions. Alexandre Dratwicki has made these arrangements in the style of the nineteenth century. Appropriately enough, the programme ends with La Vie en rose, for this music offers a kaleidoscope of all the colors of human feeling. The texture of solo strings and piano sets Veronique Gens’s incomparable storytelling artistry in a new light.

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REVIEWS:

Soprano Véronique Gens’ last four solo albums have been for the Alpha Classics label, a collaboration which is undoubtedly bearing luscious fruit. Now with ‘Nuits’ (Nights), her new album for Alpha, Gens revisits the genre of French mélodies. Here the fourteen-work programme focuses on eleven mélodies for voice with piano and string quartet accompaniment, played by chamber ensemble I Giardini. Three mélodies have been written by the respective composers’ own hands and eight are transcriptions prepared by Alexandre Dratwicki (Palazzetto Bru Zane). Serving as interludes, the three remaining works are purely instrumental works by Liszt, La Tombelle and Widor. Essentially, the programme is designed not only to suit the qualities of Gen’s voice but to widen the mélodie repertoire with voice accompanied by chamber forces and to present well-known examples together with some rarely heard.

Created by Bru Zane, Gen’s programme has at its cornerstone the theme of ‘Nuits’ (Nights) exploring the different ways poets have described nightfall and dreams. The eleven mélodies have been categorised under four descriptive French headings which Dratwicki helpfully describes as ‘the charms of twilight’ (Lekeu, Fauré, Berlioz); ‘the path of dreams’ (Massenet, Saint-Saëns); the terror of nightmares’ (Chausson, Ropartz, Fauré) and ‘the dizziness of rejoicing’ (Louiguy/Piaf, Messager, Hahn).

Singing in her native French, Orléans-born Gens demonstrates compelling form in such frequently beguiling repertoire. Given her impeccable diction, one feels that the soprano is affording each word of the mélodie special attention. Standing out, too, are Gens’ steadfast vocal lines and purity of tone, enriched by her instinctive talent for style, composure and sincerity.

New to me is Ropartz’s exquisite Ceux qui, parmi les morts d’amour (Those who Died from Love). This is Ropartz’s setting of his own French translation prepared in collaboration with Pierre-René Hirsch after Heinrich Heine’s original German text. There is an affecting sincerity as Gens expresses the lovesick protagonist identifying with the ultimate price paid by suicide victims. Memorable, too, is Après un rêve (After a Dream) Faure’s setting of a Romain Bussine poem. Gens provides a satisfying generosity of expression in this exquisite mélodie, a portrayal infused with tenderness. By some distance, the best-known work on this collection is La Vie en rose with a melody by Louis Guglielmi (Louiguy) to a text by legendary French singer Édith Piaf who made the song world-famous. Clearly enjoying it, Gens sings admirably but I find hers and the other cover versions unable to match the individuality of Piaf’s own recordings and her unique relationship to her signature song.

Gens is deftly accompanied by I Giardini, a chamber ensemble founded in 2012 by Pauline Buet (cello) and David Violi (piano) its joint artistic directors. Set up here as a string quartet with piano, I Giardini is impressive with its sparkling contribution, communicating compassion when needed. Violi’s playing on a lovely toned Steinway is striking throughout and in Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondole (The Funeral Gondola) Buet excels, displays a wistful, yet delightful, cello line.

Sound engineer Olivier Rosset achieves satisfying a quality, with clarity and impressive balance. Alpha Classics is to be commended for ensuring that the French sung texts with English translations are provided in the booklet. There are a couple of helpful essays too: ‘Four Variations of the Soul’ written by Alexandre Dratwicki and the other ‘Love of the Night, Love of the Exotic’ by Hélène Cao.

This new album makes a captivating prospect and one difficult to ignore.

– MusicWeb International (Michael Cookson)

It is hard to imagine a voice better suited to this repertoire. Evenness of tone between registers and seamless legato are as apparent as ever, as is careful attention to diction and a sensitivity to the changing sentiments of the poetry. Full texts and translations are provided. This is a first-class production in every way and should be heard by every lover of the French mélodie.

– The Classic Review

Beethoven’s output for cello and piano is fascinating because it covers every period of his career, from early to late, with references to Bach in op.69 and op.102 no.2 and an especially innovative and amazingly modern musical language. For this complete set, which includes the variations on themes from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus and Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, Nicolas Altstaedt was keen to record on an instrument with gut strings, a Guadagnini from Piacenza dated 1749, and using a Classical bow. Alexander Lonquich, his faithful recital partner – they been inseparable companions since the day Altstaedt replaced his teacher Boris Pergamenschikow at the last minute for a concert of Beethoven sonatas with Lonquich at the Beethovenfest in Bonn in 2004 – here plays a Graf fortepiano of 1826. The combination of these instruments produces a finely balanced sound and exceptional tone colors. This recording is Nicolas Altstaedt’s first for Alpha as a soloist. Others will follow, in very different genres, for eclecticism is the hallmark of this musician, among the most promising of the new generation.

Harmonieuses Dissonances: that is the title of the string quartet that closes this second album of music by Eric Montalbetti, but above all it is a statement of the very subject of the works assembled here: they start out from heterogeneous elements, like the diversity of the people we know, or of our moods and thoughts, and aim – through encounters, comparisons, organization or a search for common ground – to find the meaning of a life that we hope will, in the end, be harmonious. Since the first album of his music, Solos, appeared in 2016, Eric Montalbetti has been fortunate enough to hear seventeen of his scores come to life thanks to some wonderful musicians in France, Germany, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Japan and Korea. Two duos (including a Hommage a Matisse), a piano trio and a string quartet, were premiered and have now been recorded by Christian Tetzlaff and Alexandre Vorontsov, Delphine Haidan and Pierre Genisson, the soloists of the Ensemble intercontemporain and the Quatuor Les Dissonances.

Beethoven’s piano concertos are a precious source for understanding the history of the practice of this instrument, which, in the early nineteenth century, permanently replaced the harpsichord in the hearts of composers. Thus one can still hear the gallant influence of Mozart in the First Concerto (1795-1800), whereas the Fourth (1805-06) reveals the introspective personality, at once vigorous and generous, of a Beethoven at the height of his artistic maturity. In the second installment of his recording of the complete concertos, the German pianist Martin Helmchen performs these two contrasting works with Andrew Manze and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

Jan Van Hoecke presents these transcriptions for recorder and harpsichord, or fortepiano on this new release of J.S. Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ, including BWV 525 and 527-530. With extreme precision and lyricism, Van Hoecke and Jovanka Marville serve Bach's music masterfully. They invite listeners on a capitvating journey, shedding new light on these classics.

Is the imitation of rolling thunder, howling winds and bleating sheep a form of musical composition worthy of the name? Can we take seriously a composer who boasts of being able to 'set a restaurant menu to music, if need be'? These were the kinds of questions that Richard Strauss, one of the most virtuosic composers of the so-called 'programme music', had to ask himself. His answer: 'I am a musician from head to toe; for me, all "programmes" are merely incentives to invent new forms, nothing else.' The NDR Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Urbanski, has chosen to devote it's sixth Alpha Classics recording to three of Richard Strauss's most famous symphonic poems: Also sprach Zarathustra op. 30, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche op. 28 and Don Juan op. 20.

The performances are a sheer delight

Johannes Mattheson’s writings on musical taste and fashion are universally quoted by historians of the Baroque, yet his own music is very little known and even less recorded. The 12 sonatas of Der brauchbare Virtuoso are an ear-opener. They’re advertised as for flute or violin, a common sales technique. Most are in four movements – slow-fast-slow-fast – and they are very good indeed. Mattheson ardently advocated the primacy of melody, and his slow movements float beguilingly past the ear, sometimes delaying moments of repose with Corellian skill, elsewhere shaping phrases like the singing of a human voice. Fast movements are driven by impeccable harmonic logic. The performances are a sheer delight. Diana Baroni and Pablo Valetti create a remarkable range of colours. They play to the limits of expressiveness, yet with great persuasion – the ‘honest virtuosi’ of the title. Their sparkling ornaments decorate but never distort, lyrical lines while fast movements have an élan, even nonchalance, which only absolute technical mastery can deliver. Börner and Skalka complete the picture with a remarkable range of continuo colours and textures. The inventiveness of the playing spills over into imaginative editing – improvisatory introductions, and an added obbligato and flute-violin dialogue to allow everyone to join in the final sonata. Commended unreservedly.

Performance: *****
Sound: *****

-- BBC Music Magazine

Le Balcon, founded in 2008, is an artistic collective that has made a name for itself with highly original creations (Eötvös, Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.) combining sonic and visual innovations. In this, the very first disc made by Le Balcon and its conductor Maxime Pascal, who recently won the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award, the masterpiece of Berlioz is recomposed – or decomposed – by the young composer Arthur Lavandier and recorded in 3D sound!

Le Balcon takes a keen interest in technological issues related to sound reproduction, and here offers an original approach by superimposing three recording processes (transaural, binaural, 5.1), each dedicated to a specific medium: physical disc, web, video. The recording was made at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in Paris, in the very hall where the Symphonie fantastique was premiered in 1830. For the ‘March to the Scaffold’, Le Balcon, which has a very open-minded attitude to amateur music making, collaborated with a street band from Carcassonne, ‘Tonton à faim’! A final point worth noting: the bronze bells used in the "Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath" (300 and 600 kg) were cast specially for the recording by the Festival Berlioz at La Côte Saint-André.

This is the first release in a series that inaugurates a new type of partnership initiated by Alpha, which presents highly creative musical ensembles like Le Balcon while leaving them in total control of their project from A to Z, from production through to communication.

Classical Music

Myth, Sallust tells us, is the relation of ‘things that never happened, but always are’. Ever since the fourteenth century, music has drunk deep from the source of myths. When composers were not dealing with sacred history, with the great morality tales of Christ, they turned to myth as to a great art and a matchless repertory of exemplary stories.

Metamorfosi Trecento is a musical exploration of myths and of the polyphony of the late Middle Ages. The ancient myths, foremost among them Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and their medieval transpositions are extremely present in the repertory of the Ars Nova: Narcissus lost on a fatal voyage, the stories of Daphne’s dream, Philomela, the myth of Orpheus, Callisto . . . The lutenist Michele Pasotti and the singers and instrumentalists (fiddle, recorder, clavicymbalum, Gothic harp etc.) of the ensemble he founded in 2005, La Fonte Musica, bring these wondrous tales back to life with beauty and artistry.

The event known as 'Les grandes eaux Musicales de Versailles 2012', when all the fountains are working, accompanied by music, is presented by the Palace of Versailles in collaboration with Alpha. The music consists of a selection of absolute masterpieces of French Baroque music, from seventeenth- and eighteenth- century songs to great classics of the operatic repertoire, performed by some of the label's leading artists, including the ensemble Pygmalion, Le Poème Harmonique, Café Zimmermann and others.

The winner of the very first Queen Elisabeth Competition for cellists in Brussels in 2017, Victor Julien-Laferri�re also received the Victoire de la Musique Classique in 2018 in the category 'Soloist of the Year'. His chamber recordings with the pianist Adam Laloum have won numerous awards, including a Diapason d'Or of the Year in 2016. Victor Julien-Laferri�re now joins Alpha Classics for several recordings. The French cellist, who studied successively with Roland Pidoux, Heinrich Schiff and Clemens Hagen, has decided to record two peaks of his instrument's repertory, the sonatas of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, alongside the pianist Jonas Vitaud, with whom he enjoys a close rapport. They have given this programme in concert together on many occasions. A rare piece by Russian composer Edison Denisov completes the album: the Variations on a Theme by Schubert, composed in 1986.

After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imbert’s album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release. As with the first series, the artists have been asked to contribute to the booklets, in which, with a few years’ hindsight, they talk about their conception of the works and how they went about recording them. The photographers of the Magnum agency illustrate the covers of the series with their work; this time the common design element is the colour yellow.In addition to the 13 titles shown below, the album FIRENZE 161 by LE POEME HARMONIQUE, VINCENT DUMESTRE, will also be reissued.

The Elias Quartet has already recorded a complete cycle of Beethoven quartets at Wigmore Hall that was extremely well received by the critics. Now Sara Bitlloch, Donald Grant, Martin Saving and Marie Bitlloch present on Alpha an album devoted to Schumann: ‘We have always had a special affection for Robert Schumann’s Third Quartet. It’s one of the first works we played together. Since then we have often come back to it, as if to a splendid and familiar region that we think we know thoroughly, but which yields up new secrets with each visit. The Second Quartet, on the other hand, was a much later and more complicated discovery for us. The writing is so personal, so unidiomatic for the instruments, so full of nuances, that to begin with we found it hard to come up with a unanimous voice for this work. The enthusiasm of the first movement can easily turn into anxiety if you push it a bit too far. In the slow movement, the texture is sometimes so bare that to convey its tenderness you have to sustain it with great fervour. The capricious Scherzo is bristling with rhythmic pitfalls and requires a diabolical mastery of the instruments, while the Finale is an endless explosion of joy!’

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REVIEWS:

The Elias Quartet, whose penetration of Beethoven’s works is second to none, take Schumann’s anxiety fully into account, without in any way trying to make these later works comparable. A pity they couldn’t record all three.

– BBC Music Magazine

It’s not that their performances are so much leisurely as they are elastic. The music breathes in their hands; and even when they stretch a phrase as if to feel its emotional weight, it still sounds natural and right. The A major Quartet is, to my ears, the jewel of the set, and the Elias play it with profound tenderness.

– Gramophone

The life of Stradella, murdered on a Genoese piazza at the age of forty-two on the orders of a jealous rival in love, has achieved mythical status and inspired several novels and operas featuring Stradella the adventurer, the rebel and above all Stradella the Don Juan, whose amorous escapades, from abducting a novice from a convent in Florence to a flight across Italy with the high-born fiancee of a senator, were never a hindrance to his flourishing musical career. It is easy to imagine that Stradella’s hectic life provided the inspiration for the captivating female figures who abound in his output, exalted by technically redoubtable vocal writing, as exuberant and virtuosic as it can sometimes be sober and ethereal, and supported by remarkably skilled recitatives, a genuine verbal theatre that offers the singer infinite scope for expression. From the demonic Salome to Ariadne, the model wife turned into a Fury by despair; from Pelagia, the repentant sinner who ends her days living in a cave disguised as a man, to Susanna, the very image of innocence and purity, this programme presents a series of portraits of women whom Chantal Santon embodies in their turn with all her artistry, her intimate knowledge of this repertory and her sense of theatre.

Like many of his contemporaries, Guillaume Dufay was greatly devoted to the Virgin Mary. His Marian works comprise liturgical pieces sung during the Mass or the Office, but also religious motets written to new poems. It was probably during his first period in the chapel of the dukes of Savoy that Dufay produced a complete cycle of polyphonic hymns for the Office of Vespers of the principal feasts. Their interpretation obeys the principle of alternatim chant, that is to say alternation between monophonic odd-numbered verses, sung in plainchant, and even-numbered polyphonic verses. Dufay employs here the techniques of composition already in use in the fourteenth century. The liturgical melody is sung in the highest voice but appears transformed according to the principles of paraphrase: the composer's inventive contribution, in this context, resides in the flexibility of the mensuration (often ternary) and the grace of his ornamentation. The other two, lower voices accompany it in a virtually homophonic style. The influence of the improvisatory practice known as 'fauxbourdon' is manifest. In it's simple form, the melody of the cantus is doubled by the tenor and the contratenor, respectively a sixth and a fourth lower. The result is a succession of highly characteristic chords, interrupted only for the cadences.

Classical Music

On the Belceas’ disc, the [Berg] Lyric Suite fidgets at the centre of a Second Viennese School primer. The [Webern] Langsamer Satz is slow only according to the clock, nervous and more dissonant than usual, in expressive terms – there are no wrong notes – with an acute sense of timing as, at the movement’s halfway stage (4'40"), Webern looks back on himself and this voluptuous dream of C major with mingled nostalgia and regret. In the Five Movements, Op 5, the Belceas’ muted, breathless approach is no less effective than the extrovert technical accomplishment and timbral extremes of the LaSalle Quartet, and in the slow second and fourth movements, when they contrive to play on the very edge of audibility, more to the point. Their [Schoenberg] Verklärte Nacht bucks the trend of recent slow and solemn performances – the Achilles heel of the orchestration being that it draws the piece closer to Metamorphosen than Erwartung – and is fitted closely to Dehmel’s lascivious storyline. - Gramophone