Bruno Helstroffer writes of his new release: "It's a logbook, the one I've never really kept. My years of blues/rock and early music mingle here; the thousands of kilometers travelled with that theorbo of mine, the cities and the countryside, the railways, the skies, the scents, the lights; but above all, the music of the people. 'Partite variate sopra quest'aria francese detta l'alemana' is a tablature by Piccinini of an aria also called La Monica. In North America in the late nineteenth century, railroad hoboes carved their vagabond pseudonym along the tracks, which they called their 'moniker'... 'Corrente VI sopra l'alemana,' by the same composer, is the energetic counterpart to the noble and meditative allemande. 'Like a Belfry' is taken from a dream... Rosemary Standley has set her words to the melody and sings them. J. H. Kapsberger's 'Toccata nona' is associated here with Perivoli Blue. Perivoli is a village in the south of the island of Corfu. 'Thanks Toumani' expresses my fascination with Mandingo music. Bellerofonte Castaldi's 'Arpeggiata a mio modo' was one of my first challenges on the theorbo. Erik Satie's 'Gnossienne no.1' arrived under my fingers without warning and made a place for itself here by fitting in so naturally that I couldn't say no to it. This is the piece chosen by my photographer friend Richard Dumas to make the video clip of the album. With Kapsberger's 'Bergamasca,' a dance from Bergamo in Italy, the theorbo becomes a festive and agile instrument. 'A Tea with Bach' is an arrangement of the Minuet from Bach's Cello Suite no.1. The 'Toccata Undicesima' serves as the introduction to an improvisation: Vos luths. And invokes India."

The original score of El Prometeo (Prometheus) is held in the Leopoldine Library in Vienna. It dates from 1669 and was written by Antonio Draghi, a composer who was also a singer, notably in the operas of Cavalli. For the first time in history, an Italian set a text in Spanish. The last act of El Prometeo has disappeared. But since the libretto of this act has survived, Leonardo Garc�a Alarc�n decided to rewrite all the music for it. 'I immersed myself in Draghi's music in order to understand his style, his favorite intervals, the type of melody he composed and the type of basso continuo he was fond of, so as to try to produce a score that is worthy of him. So I hope that this third act will measure up to his music, his intentions and his creativity!' says the Argentinian conductor. Directing a brilliant cast (Fabio Tr�mpy, Mariana Flores, Giuseppina Bridelli, Scott Conner, Borja Quisa, Zachary Wilder, Ana Quintans), Leonardo Garc�a Alarc�n brings this Baroque opera to life in Spanish, an opportunity to show his love for his mother tongue, 'a supremely musical language'!

Who was Louis Gaulard Dumesny? Dumesny was not the first haute-contre historically speaking, but he was the first to have become famous in his lifetime. Sources agree that he was a cook when Lully discovered him. He made his debut in 1677 and everyone was amazed by his acting, the power of his voice and also his ability to learn everything by ear, since he could not read music. A few centuries later, Reinoud Van Mechelen, star tenor of the international Baroque scene, has decided, with his ensemble A Nocte Temporis, to pay tribute to this 'haute-contre' register, a high tenor voice (not to be confused with the countertenor!), by devoting three recordings to it, paying tribute in turn to Lully, Rameau and Gluck. The first part of this trilogy therefore contains the finest operatic airs and suites by Lully, featuring excerpts from Isis, Pers�e, Armide, Amadis, Acis et Galat�e and Achille et Polyx�ne, but also pieces by Marin Marais (Alcide), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (M�d�e), �lisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (C�phale et Procris), Henry Desmarets, Pascal Colasse, Charles-Hubert Gervais and Andr� Cardinal Destouches.

Classical Music

After the success of the Red, Yellow, Blue and Pink collections (a total of 56 reissues), which brought the pearls from the Baroque catalogues of the house labels back into the spotlight, here are fourteen new titles offering a chance to rediscover more Baroque treasures and rarities. Like the last series, this fifth installment also opens up to the Classical (Mozart) or Renaissance (Dufay) repertories - recordings that are an integral part of Alpha's identity and history. This series' reissues are performed by the finest musicians in the field; most of these recordings received one or more awards on their first release. The albums come with proper booklets, including notes in three languages (French, English, German). Photographers from many different backgrounds illustrate the covers of the series with their works: this time the main theme is the color white. The present album features WA Mozart's Quintet for clarinet K 581 and Quartets K 380 and K 378 performed by Florent Heau and the Manfred Quartet.

Olga Pashchenko is in the process of creating a unique place for herself in the world of the keyboard: she moves with astounding ease and skill from the harpsichord to the fortepiano, the organ, and the modern piano. After a recording of Beethoven's variations in 2015, the young pianist has now gone to the legendary Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, a venue she knows well since she regularly gives concerts within it's walls, to record three monuments of the pianistic literature - the Appassionata, Les Adieux and Waldstein sonatas - on the original Conrad Graf piano of 1824 conserved there. She utilizes all the sonic possibilities and the full palette of colors of this instrument made around fifteen years after the composition of these sonatas, three of the finest in the corpus of thirty-two that Hans von Bulow called 'the New Testament of every pianist'.

Classical Music

Edouard Ferlet has already explored intriguing byways for the Alpha label: in 2015 he and Violaine Cochard recorded ‘Plucked Unplucked’, an album associating piano and harpsichord – a successful venture that will soon see a follow-up. The bassist Stephane Kerecki has already made several recordings for Outhere, including ‘Nouvelle Vague’, a prizewinner at the Victoires de la Musique. The career of the trumpet player Airelle Besson has been on a high since 2015, when she won both the Prix Django Reinhardt of the Academie du Jazz and the ‘Revelation’ Award at the Victoires du Jazz. These three jazz musicians met and decided to form a trio in order to combine their universes and their ambitions. Here is the fruit of their first year of companionship, a programme presenting compositions by each of them, an album wearing the colours of jazz but featuring several tracks directly inspired by great standards of the classical repertoire, including ‘Es ist vollbracht’ from Bach’s St John Passion, the Pavanes of Ravel and Faure, the Valse sentimentale of Tchaikovsky, and Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance, which can be recognised behind the ‘Stances du sabre’. The refinement of the compositions and the playing and the musicians’ capacity for listening to each other are a source of endless pleasure and fulfilment.

The percussionist Vivi Vassileva is one of the most fascinating classical soloists of her generation, and she now releases her debut album, entitled "singin' rhythm", on the alpha classics label. Born in 1994 to a Bulgarian family of musicians – her mother is a pianist, her father and brother are violinists, her sister plays violin too and she herself learned the instrument – Vivi was captivated by music at an early age especially when she heard some hand drummers playing on a remote, unspoiled beach at the black sea where her parents own a house. It was then that she decided to change from violin to percussion. With her dynamic, infectious way of making music, Vivi exudes a sense of enjoyment that is in no way limited to the elaboration of rhythms or the igniting of a display of tonal pyrotechnics. Her main aim is to touch people, to tell stories expressed in terms of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. Vivi is motivated and inspired by the diversity of tonal colors and the opportunities they offer, and that is why she is so convinced that percussion is the instrument of the 21st century. However, since the repertoire for percussion is limited, Vivi Vassileva not only commissions new compositions; she arranges and composes herself, constantly on the lookout for new formations and heading up various chamber music groups. As a result, this new album features works by Guillo Espel, Eric Sammut, Oriol Cruixent and Keiko Abe, most of them premiere recordings, alongside some rarely heard or premiere arrangements and compositions by Vivi Vassileva herself.

Classical Music

The piano duo formed by Arthur Gold (1917–90) and Robert Fizdale (1920–95) enjoyed immense fame in the post-war years. Poulenc wrote a piece for them, as did Darius Milhaud, Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio and John Cage. They recorded with Leonard Bernstein. Nicknamed ‘The Boys’, they played all over the world and were praised for their ‘seamless perfection and an inimitable joie de vivre’ (New York Times). The Boys were also famed for their bestselling books and television programmes on cooking, their other passion! Duo Jatekok (játékok = ’games’ in Hungarian) was formed in 2007. Like The Boys and unlike most current piano duos, Adélaïde Panaget and Naïri Badal are not siblings, but childhood friends. ‘They have everything going for them: dynamic rigour and expressive energy, exuberant keyboard skills and multilingual touch, and more than anything else, a sort of jubilatory osmosis’, wrote Le Monde. For this first recording on Alpha, they have decided to pay tribute to The Boys with a programme of works written for them, Poulenc’s Sonata for two pianos and Élégie and a composition by a legend of jazz, the American pianist Dave Brubeck, Points of Jazz. Duo Jatekok also wanted to include music by one of their contemporaries: Baptiste Trotignon’s Trois Pièces (including one dedicated to Poulenc!) complete the programme.

Following his Alpha recording of sonatas by Prokofiev, Ravel and Strauss, the violinist Tobias Feldmann now turns to the concerto form, performing the two major works of the Finnish repertoire for the instrument: the violin concertos of Jean Sibelius and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Premiered in Helsinki in 1904, the Sibelius Concerto proved to be exceptionally difficult technically for the soloist. Sibelius revised his score, but subsequently composed for violin and orchestra only in shorter forms, the serenade and the humoresque. It was not until nearly seventy years later that a Finnish composer wrote another large-scale work for violin and orchestra, with the Concerto of Rautavaara, which in all respects equals the degree of virtuosity demanded by the earlier work.

A journey through countries, periods and styles on the theme of dance. The themes and melodies are borrowed from Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Italian, English, Hungarian and French composers, inspired by folk music and dances. �douard Ferlet has used this music to compose new pieces, arranged for harpsichord and piano. There are no direct quotations here, rather a thread which is woven between these well-known melodies and a new musical vocabulary. In each piece Violaine Cochard and Edouard Ferlet improvise freely, each with their individual 'temperament' and sensibility. They work on sonority, texture, the exploration of sound palettes, specialization, phrasing, distillation. The two artists seek to develop sonic possibilities, articulations, playing techniques and interaction between their musical personalities. A special feature is their work on pulse and tempo, with compound meters linked with the rhythms of folksongs and dances, which are often in compound time. Each piece is underpinned by an individual dramaturgy; the melodies are immediately appealing because they remind us of something while surprising us with jazz and contemporary arrangements.

In spite of the immense success he enjoyed in his lifetime, Sigismund Neukomm (born in Salzburg in 1778, died in Paris in 1858 at the age of eighty) is practically forgotten nowadays. Yet he left a catalogue of nearly two thousand works, including fifty masses and a number of oratorios and motets. Neukomm spent twenty years in the service of Prince Talleyrand, who commissioned him to write a requiem mass in memory of Louis XVI, guillotined in Paris on 21 January 1793. This was the second mass of the fifty he was eventually to compose, several of which were dedicated to monarchs. The Requiem was given at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on 21 January 1815 by more than three hundred singers divided into two choirs. Neukomm conducted one of them, while the other was directed by his friend Salieri. As part of their joint series of recordings, the Château de Versailles and Alpha continue their rediscovery of repertory that has marked the history of France and of music. Here Jean-Claude Malgoire conducts this unpublished Requiem. This is the first appearance in the Alpha catalogue of this pioneering figure from the golden age of the exploration of Baroque performing practice.

The first album of the quartet founded by Nicolas Van Kuijk, a programme of Mozart, was awarded a ‘Choc de Classica’ and ‘Diapason Decouverte’. Now they return to their roots with key works from the French repertory: the single quartets of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy and the Chanson perpetuelle of Ernest Chausson, in which they are accompanied by the mezzosoprano Kate Lindsey, who recently joined Alpha, and the pianist Alphonse Cemin, also well-known on the label. On this album The Quatuor Van Kuijk gives these works all their youthful impetuosity. The quartet is already a BBC New Generation Artist, having won First Prize and the Haydn and Beethoven Prizes at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, and First Prize and the Audience Prize at the Trondheim International String Quartet Competition. They have also recently joined the roster of ECHO Rising Star artists for the 2017-18 season.