In 1906, Komitas gave a concert and lecture in Paris. Debussy came on stage after the concert and knelt before the Armenian composer (who was also a priest, a singer and a pioneer of ethnomusicology), exclaiming: ‘I bow before your genius, Reverend Father.’

'Komitas is the voice of the land of Armenia, of its churches and its stones which remained silent for many centuries', the violinist David Haroutunian tells us. Along with the mezzo-soprano Eva Zaïcik, who is passionate about these songs, and the pianist Xénia Maliarevitch, he pays tribute to this great musician and to the French-Armenian composer Garbis Aprikian, now ninety-six years old. This heir to Komitas, a student of Olivier Messiaen, has made a major contribution to the dissemination of Armenian music, both classical and popular, in France and beyond. The album opens with his Lamento, a beautiful evocation of and touching homage to Komitas.

CONTENTS:

• Aprikian: Lamento
• Komitas: Qeler-tsoler
• Komitas: Shogher Jan
• Komitas: Shushiki of Vagharshapat
• Ganatchian: Lullaby
• Komitas: Tsirani tsar
• Komitas: Hoi Nazan Im
• Komitas: Lullaby
• Komitas: Krunk (la grue)
• Komitas: Antuni
• Hakob Aghabab: Jan, ay loosin! (Loosin yelav)
• Komitas: Yerangi
• Aprikian: Lullaby (Arr. for Violin and Piano by David Haroutunian)
• Komitas: Akh Maral Jan
• Komitas: Garoun a (printemps)
• Komitas: Chinar Es
• Komitas: Kaqavik
• Komitas: Yergink Ambel e
• Komitas: Qele, Qele
• Komitas: Dances: No. 5, Het-Araj
• Aprikian: Little Nuptial Suite
• Aprikian: Petite suite nuptial - IV. Scherzo. Réjouissances

REVIEW:

The album opens with Aprikian’s ‘Lamento’, a solemn and moving homage to Komitas, and continues with 5 other pieces by Aprikian and one each by Ganatchian and Achabab. The other 16 pieces are by Komitas. Songs of grief and sadness, separation from loved ones and rejoicing over times of reunion, lullabies, hardship, and homelessness alternate with instrumental pieces. Many reflect the Armenian folk tradition. A lullaby by Aprikian is especially lovely.

The performances are superb. Eva Zaicik, who impressed me greatly in her recent Nisi Dominus album for Alpha, is once again outstanding in a different style. She adapts easily to the vocal demands of this music, with silky singing in a quiet low register and smooth warmth in her higher brighter voice. In a similar way, David Haroutunian draws viola tones from his lower register and high-pitched almost ghostly effects, perhaps from playing sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge). Xenia Maliarevitch is a wonderfully attentive pianist.

When this arrived I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be a most welcome arrival that has appreciably broadened my musical horizon. Each time I listen I find something new to appreciate.

Notes, texts and translations incuded.

-- American Record Guide

Venice was surely the capital of music and the arts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and one of the most coveted positions in the city was that of maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s Basilica. A few lucky chosen candidates succeeded one another in bringing to life the musical splendour of the basilica, all of them fabulous musicians and composers prolonging the legacy of the great Claudio Monteverdi. For its third recording on Alpha, the ensemble Les Surprises has chosen to sail towards Venetian waters and mix with these geniuses of affect, word-setting and theatre, exploring music that ranges from grandiose double choruses to intimate duets or trios combining sacred and profane.

Ever since the foundation of his ensemble in 2009, Damien Guillon has been forging ahead in the (re)discovery of J. S. Bach’s cantatas. ‘Trinitatis’ is devoted to three cantatas for the season after Trinity, for which Le Banquet Celeste has assembled its most seasoned members. Three very different works in which Bach expresses in various ways the emotion that the subject of the prescribed Gospel for the day stirred in him.

‘London, April 1604. With the freshly printed partbooks of his Lachrimae under his arm, John Dowland walks from the printing house to his home in Fetter Lane. He should have been back in Denmark long ago, but for the moment all his thoughts are on the new publication he is carrying, his latest and most ambitious work to date: a complete cycle of instrumental music, twenty-one dances, honourably dedicated to Anne of Denmark, Queen of England.’ For Dowland has just completed one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance music. He had left England to enter the service of the Danish court, disappointed at not being appointed court composer to Elizabeth I, but he seems to have made the best of all his setbacks to compose this magnificent collection of purely instrumental works, much of it bathed in the melancholy typical of late sixteenth-century England.

Musicall Humors – a collective of the finest gambists of their generation – performs the complete set of pavans, galliards and ‘almands’, grouped into suites, each with its own character. A character inspired by the music, but reinforced here by the changing composition of the consort and the players taking turns to perform the ‘top line’, so that each musician’s personal playing style gives each piece a specific colour.

REVIEWS:

Dunford immerses the five-person gamba ensemble led by Julien Léonard and Lucile Boulanger in a rich and often extremely fragile-seeming web of voices and moods with a composure and sovereignty that moves and inspires. Everything breathes in the most wonderfully sonorous interplay, nothing groaning excessively. And when they dance, they maintain their posture and dignity like a dream.

-- ConcertoNet

We are faced with an absolutely referential recording, of intense and unprecedented beauty. Musicall Humors offers us the complete collection, but in a sequence of pavans followed by galliards, which refreshes our ears with the contrast, compared to the usual arrangement.

-- Scherzo

Mozart’s Requiem was not performed in Paris until 1804, in a version slightly different from the composer’s original score. The press reported a triumph. That same year also saw the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte – who had brought back a pronounced taste for Italian music from his Mediterranean conquests. He appointed the Neapolitan Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) as his maître de chapelle and commissioned him to write the music for his coronation: a Solemn Mass in B flat major. The Palazzetto Bru Zane has produced the modern edition of the work that is recorded here.

Aside from the sumptuous events of 1804, the other year that links Napoleon to Mozart is 1841, when the Requiem was heard once more, this time at Les Invalides as Napoleon’s remains entered the building for their final burial. Sandrine Piau, Chantal Santon, Eléonore Pancrazi, Mathias Vidal and Thomas Dolié are the soloists in this programme, with Julien Chauvin conducting his ensemble Le Concert de la Loge and the Namur Chamber Choir.

The troupe of the Comédie-Française pays tribute to Serge Gainsbourg in a musical show that has enjoyed great success. Six actors, singers and musicians from the company perform songs and excerpts from interviews: ‘We have focused on the amorous, sensual side of Gainsbourg. On the one hand, there’s the music, on the other, the man himself, with his repartee, his irreverent, subversive spirit … We have given pride of place to all his emblematic songs, which the younger generation doesn’t necessarily know.’ Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux (the duo who adapted the words and music), Benjamin Lavernhe, Noam Morgensztern, Rebecca Marder and Yoann Gasiorowski ‘reinvent thirteen classics by the maestro, and it’s quite simply stunning’, wrote Le Figaro, which ranked the show as one of the must-sees of 2022. And here is the original cast album!

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann (Concerto Polonois) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.

Under the artistic direction of Nicolas Altstaedt, this multi-award winning series in collaboration with the Lockenhaus Festival continues to bring to light great works of chamber music by composers who are already well known or still awaiting discovery. Schoenberg was in his early seventies when he composed his String Trio op. 45 in 1946, completing it after suffering a terrible heart attack. He told Thomas Mann that the trio reflected his physical and psychological condition of that period. The composer Constantin Regamey, born in Kiev in 1907, is little known. A Swiss of Polish descent, he was also a pianist, music critic and writer, who was appointed lecturer in Indian philology at Warsaw University in 1936. He joined the Polish Resistance in 1942 and it was at this time that he wrote his Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano.

The 'Dissonance' Quartet is probably the best-known of the set of six Mozart wrote between 1782 and 1785 as a tribute to Haydn. It owes its nickname to the strange clashes of the slow introduction in C minor. Almost a century later, the thirty-year-old Tchaikovsky wrote his Quartet no.1, op.11, whose second movement, which moved Tolstoy to tears, was inspired by a folk tune that the composer heard a housepainter whistling. The musicians of the Esmé Quartet chose these two pieces because they love their respective Andante cantabile movements. The four young women also decided to put the spotlight on one of their compatriots, the South Korean composer Soo Yeon Lyuh, who in 2016 wrote Yessori, 'sound of the past', for the Kronos Quartet. She explains: 'I first got used to playing the piano and the violin. So, later, when I encountered Korean traditional music, its relative pitch relationships and fluid rhythmic cycles felt completely new.'

During the Carnival of Venice in 1637, a play ‘rappresentata in musica’ was opened to the public for the first time – a success. Opera was born and spread like wildfire. Venice had the largest number of theaters in the world. In 1677, the Teatro Sant’Angelo opened its doors on the campo of the same name. Tiny, chaotic, cheap and extremely productive, it was renowned for its musicians and its sets. This effervescence owes much to the figure of Vivaldi who, from 1705 onwards, regularly premiered his operas there and acted (with his father) as impresario. His own Arsilda, L’incoronazione di Dario and La verità in cimento triumphed there, but he also invited composers such as the young Fortunato Chelleri and Giovanni Alberto Ristori. The mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet and her partners in Le Consort pay tribute to all these composers with a flamboyant program that mixes famous arias and world premieres – no fewer than twelve of them!

REVIEW:

Venice’s Sant’Angelo Theatre opened its doors to the public in 1677. Though never the grandest of the Serenissima’s opera houses, it nonetheless attracted important names, including Antonio Vivaldi. Alongside a selection of Vivaldi arias, this album includes a dozen first recordings unveiling other composers who trod the theater’s boards. Spanning the gamut of Baroque affects, the program contrasts frothy arias with tragic outpourings and displays of vocal fireworks.

Adèle Charvet dispatches the showpieces with agility and bravura, but her velvety voice is particularly well suited to the pathos arias which are eloquently articulated; just occasionally her vibrato wavers a little intrusively. She’s superbly supported by Ensemble Le Consort who, under the brilliant young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, perform with fire, passion and breathtaking virtuosity.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja are both well known for their taste for eclecticism, experimentation and adventure. As they are also are friends, it was only to be expected that one day they would devise and record a programme together, and here it is: Maria Mater Meretrix … What is the relationship between Hildegard von Bingen and Gustav Holst, Antonio Caldara and Lili Boulanger? The two musicians and their partners in Camerata Bern explore the image of woman through ten centuries of music: the figure of the Virgin Mary – among other works, the triptych Magnificat - Ave Maria - Stabat Mater (1967/68) by Frank Martin, an unclassifiable composer whom both artists venerate – but also Mary Magdalene, in pieces by Caldara and Kurtág. The Saint, the Mother, the Whore … The expression of two women musicians of today, a journey full of meaning and a sensory exploration featuring solos, duets, quartets and works for large orchestra.

REVIEWS:

Here’s a fun proposition. A program comprising works depicting either the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene through time, conceived of and executed with flair by the soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Both are thoughtful, entirely game musicians, and their passion for the concept and material is evident.

Taking as their theme the archetypes of saint, mother, and whore, Prohaska and Kopatchinskaja traverse many periods and styles in their exploration of the two Marys: Holst, Eisler, von Bingen, Kurtág, and Haydn are just some of the composers jostling for your attention. Undoubtedly the risk for some listeners will be an experience that verges on the musical patchwork, and for some Maria Mater Meretrix is easily dismissed as just another concept album. For this reviewer, the particular alchemy of Prohaska and Kopatchinskaja override any such reservations, and some of the works gathered here are given truly revelatory readings.

Take Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments for one, selections of which are threaded through the track list. They pack a punch despite – or is it because of? – their lengths (the Berceuse lasts all of 59 seconds) and leave you wanting more: more of the composer’s spectral, exquisitely simple settings of Kafka’s diaries and letters, and more of the musicians’ seemingly inherent way with the music.

The spine of the recording is Frank Martin’s Maria-Triptychon, which is similarly taken apart and studded throughout the album. This is another move that won’t agree with some listeners, and the contrast between a selection and its preceding or succeeding piece is sometimes a little too jarring to be entirely fruitful. However, there’s no faulting the commitment of the performers – Prohaska bends and wields her darkly-coloured, rich soprano with feline ease, and Kopatchinskaja matches her with her own glowing, sinuous phrasing. Together they bring to life an emotional world alternating between moments of extreme desperation and rapture, reaching such a pitch of intensity that the more tranquil offerings on the album actually serve as much needed and effective moments of respite.

Hildegard von Bingen’s O Rubor Sanguinis is one such example, drawing the listener into a richly imagistic world of great beauty. The closing “Per il mar del pianto mio” is another such example, taken from a Caldara oratorio that deals directly with Mary Magdalene – Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo. Prohaska is simply gorgeous here, unfurling seemingly endless long lines of deeply felt sorrow and hard-won faith. Her unstinting dramatic instincts have never seemed so in tune with her musical gifts, and she brings something like Eisler’s sly, cabaret-tinged “Lied der Kupplerin” to bold, brilliant life.

Directing the sensitive and dramatically attuned Camerata Bern, Kopatchinskaja thrills in electrifying selections from Haydn’s Seven Last Words and the God-Music movement of George Crumb’s spine-tingling Black Angels string quartet. The violinist’s own improvisatory Felino is a playful nod to the prominent role of cats in Marian imagery.

This recording comes highly recommended.

-- Limelight

Camille El Bacha is a pianist, composer and improviser. His father is the pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha, and they often perform together as a duo, but Camille charts his own path between classical, film and electronic music, with his group Leone Jadis. He launches our ‘Piano Stories’ series with a programme entitled ‘Lumen’, which he presents as a ‘constellation of preludes and improvisations’. His own compositions resonate with the preludes of Bach and Chopin, taken from the two books of The Well-tempered Clavier and the Twenty-four Preludes op. 28 respectively. Camille El Bacha invites us on a journey where styles and periods merge into a single artistic impulse: ‘At the piano, I move almost unconsciously from interpretation to composition or improvisation. A Chopin prelude can inspire me to improvise, which can then lead to a new written piece.’

This album contains a selection of key a cappella choral works by Erkki-Sven Tüür. For the Estonian composer born in 1959, words and music are intimately linked. The number of syllables in a word, the position of the tonic accent, and the word as a cultural phenomenon with a definite meaning are of essential importance. This can be heard in the Kyrie of his Missa Brevis (2013) where, like a spiral, the polyphony of the voices is transformed into a chordal texture at the beginning of the ‘Christe eleison’, and then dissolves into individual voices at the second ‘Kyrie eleison’.

Canticum Canticorum Caritatis (2020) is inspired by St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. Tüür dedicated this work to Endrik Üksvärav and Collegium Musicale, the performers on this album. The multidimensional Omnia Mutantur (2020) possesses an extremely clear structure, interweaving the famous thoughts of Ovid and Virgil about the transient nature of all things. Triglosson Trishagion (2008), indebted to the Orthodox tradition and sung in Estonian, Russian and Greek, and Wanderer’s Evening Song (2001) complete this program, which is characterized by a meditative, interiorized approach to the composer.

REVIEW:

Erkki-Sven Tüür is one of the most important Estonian composers of the 20th/21st century, and this album pays outstanding tribute to him with an insight into his work for a cappella choir.

The Collegium Musicale under Endrik Üksvärä succeeds again and again in disentangling the dense sound textures of Tüür’s music, transforming them into a floating sound of delicate intimacy, which now and then can also be very expressive and decisive – for example in the Credo of the Missa Brevis.

The album bears the title of the most recent work on this recording – Canticum canticorum caritatis from 2020 – in which the central concept of caritas is the musical and interpretive focus.

The last work on the recording – Rändaja õhtulaul/Wanderer’s Nightsong – is no less expressive, with recourse to Gregorian chant. Here, too, the Collegium Musicale hits the mood right on the nose time and again: the trembling dreams, the calls from eternity, wrapped in mystically suggestive interpretations.

-- Pizzicato

Leader of the Orchestre National de France for the past two decades, chamber musician, high-flying soloist, Sarah Nemtanu is one of the most dynamic musical figures on today’s French scene. With her partner Romain Descharmes, she presents here a very personal journey, in the form of a tribute to her dual Romanian and French roots: George Enescu’s Impressions d'enfance, his whirlwind Impromptu concertant, and the famous sonatas of Ravel and Debussy make up the programme, rounded out with the magical harmonies of Ysaÿe’s Rêve d’enfant and, to end with, Nino Rota’s Improvviso ‘Un diavolo sentimentale’, which evokes ‘a dream of constructing a big top to enfold all the mischiefs, joys, fears, dreams and naïve memories, in short, the most beautiful impressions of our childhoods … .’

REVIEW:

Impressions d’enfance, Enescu’s musical memoir of his village childhood, is beautifully done, with Nemtanu secure yet unshowy in the exacting cadenza (depicting a village fiddle player) with which it opens, and Descharmes deploying careful gradations of colour and dynamics in Enescu’s evocations of the sad figure of the local beggar and the brook that flows through the family’s garden.

-- Gramophone

The idea for the program, confides Sarah Nemtanu in the liner notes, came from the discovery of Enescu's Impressions d'enfance – which introduces an Impromptu concertante dating from her years of Parisian studies. Impressions from Debussy and Ravel, of course, [appear on the track list as well]. She added, by way of transitions, two delicate “music boxes” filled with dreams, one dedicated by Ysaÿe to his son Antoine, the other written by Rota alongside the soundtrack of Fellini’s Satyricon.

First violinist of the Orchestre National de France for twenty years, Nemtanu lacks neither confidence in his speech nor imagination in his phrasing. This is evidenced by Debussy's Interlude, with winged fantasy and a finale with lively, slender lines, both tender and passionate. The Blues from Ravel's sonata is drawn with finesse[.] Enescu’s Childhood Impressions are rendered with great tenderness. Published in 1954 by a sixty-year-old composer, these memories of the Romanian countryside in which he grew up are poetic and colorful images...some arousing great emotion in the little boy...others charged with nocturnal terrors. A version closer to that of Leonidas Kavakos (with Peter Nagy, ECM) than to that of Gidon Kremer (with Oleg Maisenberg, Teldec)[.]

-- Diapason

Hervé Niquet resurrects Ariane et Bacchus (1696), using for the first time the exact performing forces and layout of the Paris Opéra orchestra in 1700 and thus giving us a historically informed version of this tragédie en musique by Marin Marais. The latter became a viol player at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1676, just as his mentor Lully's Atys triumphed there. Lully subsequently initiated him into the skills of operatic composition, and Ariane et Bacchus was premiered nine years after the older man's death. This production, made possible by the support of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, was performed in concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to great acclaim in 2022, when Diapason wrote that the work was 'deservedly rescued from oblivion' and was 'magnified by a sober and telling interpretation from Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, in perfect consonance with a remarkable cast', featuring such luminaries as Judith van Wanroij, Véronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, Hélène Carpentier, Marie Perbost, Matthieu Lécroart, David Witczak, Tomislav Lavoie and Philippe Estèphe.

REVIEW:

The singers are largely splendid. I have praised Judith Van Wanroij, Veronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, and Matthieu Lecroart on previous occasions, in wildly varying repertory (by such composers as Gretry, Felicien David, Gounod, and Saint-Saens). Here they offer exemplary renderings, never allowing concern for the music to interfere with their attention to text or vice-versa. Some of the low-voiced males are a little thin at the bottom end, but that’s not unusual these days in the opera world.

Some of the singers take more than one role (there’s a long prologue, with entirely different roles than the rest of the opera), so you’ll want to follow the libretto, which is given in the booklet in French and good English. If you don’t follow the libretto, you might easily be misled when a singer keeps mentioning the name of a character: s/he is actually often speaking of her/himself. Juno, for one, loves to describe her feelings in the third person. The effect, in her case, strikes me as properly haughty. Fortunately, the various singers have distinctive enough voices and interpretive manners that I gradually learned to tell them apart without recourse to the libretto. Actually, one of the wonderful things about French Baroque opera is that the musical numbers are constantly attractive, with a dance or march or pantomime scene always around the corner. And the phrase structure is often unpredictable, unlike the foursquareness of much music of the late 1700s and early 1800s. So you could, I suppose, listen to Marais’s opera without looking at the libretto at all (or even thinking about the rather episodic plot) and still have a fine time and enjoy many surprises.

Still, the experience is that much richer if you know what Junon or Adraste (to use their French names) is up to at a given moment.

Wow, there’s a whole ‘nother side to Marais that I knew nothing about!

-- American Record Guide