After her triumph with the album Offenbach Colorature (ALPHA437), Jodie Devos has chosen to follow in the footsteps of one of her compatriots, the Belgian coloratura soprano Marie Cabel (1827-85), who at the age of twenty-six scored a phenomenal success in Adolphe Adam’s opéra-comique Le Bijou perdu, which she premiered in Paris. She then took on a more dramatic role in Halévy’s Jaguarita l’Indienne, whose great Invocation with chorus (‘À moi ma cohorte!’) again hit the bullseye in a run of 124 performances over just a few months. Cabel enjoyed one hit after another, in Auber’s Manon Lescaut and La Part du diable, Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du Nord and Le Pardon de Ploërmel, Victor Massé’s Galathée, and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été by Ambroise Thomas, who in 1866 gave her the biggest role of her career: Philine in Mignon, based on Goethe. In partnership with the musicologists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, who have resurrected and edited all these unjustly forgotten rarities, and Pierre Bleuse conducting the Brussels Philharmonic and the Flemish Radio Choir, Jodie Devos pays tribute to this star of the nineteenth century, whose audacity and sense of mischief she undoubtedly shares!

The famous Marquise de Pompadour, favorite of King Louis XV for nearly twenty years, reigned over the arts at court. Rameau, whom she particularly admired, was omnipresent. He received a specific commission for the Théâtre des Petits Appartements, where the Marquise herself sang in the midst of a troupe of amateurs and professionals: the result was Les Surprises de l’Amour, from which the ensemble Les Surprises takes its name. Under the expert direction of Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas, the group presents here the very first recording of this ballet in its original 1748 version, including the prologue entitled Le Retour d’Astrée, and couples it with another commission for one of the court’s annual residences at Fontainebleau: Les Sybarites (1753), an acte de ballet whose principal couple is reminiscent of the King himself and his favorite. A first-rate vocal line-up brings these two works back to life: Marie Perbost, Eugénie Lefebvre, Jehanne Amzal, Clément Debieuvre, David Witczak, Philippe Estèphe.

Julien Chauvin meets up with one of the great harpsichordists and fortepianists of our time, Andreas Staier, who is a leading interpreter of the Mozart concertos. He presents us with his vision of the Piano Concerto no.23 and its famous Adagio, ‘one of the most heart-rending slow movements ever written by Mozart. Performers often tend to take it too slowly, certainly thinking that this will accentuate the tragic side, but Julien Chauvin and I spontaneously agreed on a slightly faster tempo, which respects the basic pulse of this movement in Siciliana rhythm. When you start with the right tempo, it’s amazing how the whole discourse comes together perfectly, in a very logical and simple manner’, says Staier, who plays a magnificent instrument by Christoph Kern after a 1790 fortepiano by Anton Walter, the great maker of Mozart’s time. Also on the program is the Symphony no.40, in which, says Julien Chauvin, ‘Mozart explores types of writing that he pushes to their most extreme limits. This is the case in the finale, where we find a succession of dissonant disjunct intervals at the opening of the development which, on closer inspection, present us with the full chromatic scale (except for G natural, the symphony’s tonic). And so the twelve-note series was born!’

After Franck, Debussy and Strauss, Mikko Franck and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France here continue their collaboration with Alpha Classics, this time with the spotlight on Igor Stravinsky. The program begins with two pieces from his so-called ‘neo-classic’ period: his Capriccio and Octet. In the first, in which Stravinsky sets up a dialogue between piano and orchestra, the soloist is one of the great stars of the new generation, the French pianist Nathalia Milstein. Then the mood darkens, with the primitive rhythms and ferocious chordal attack of The Rite of Spring, a work that Mikko Franck has long since wanted to immortalize on album: a major masterpiece of the 20th century and an essential milestone for every orchestra. Every single player seems to be on fire in this recording, which puts the seal on seven years of collaboration and achievement with its Finnish Music Director.

Following the phenomenal success of the first Mozart y Mambo album, Sarah Willis returns to Cuba not only to record two more Mozart horn concertos but also to create a landmark original work that takes its place in Cuban music history. In Mozart y Mambo - Cuban Dances, Sarah commissions the very first Cuban horn concerto – calling on six young talented Cuban composers to each write an original dance for solo horn, strings, and percussion inspired by the most famous dance rhythms from across different regions of Cuba. Together with her beloved Havana Lyceum Orchestra conducted by José Antonio Méndez Padrón, Sarah takes us on a cross country musical road trip in this spectacular showcase of the roots and traditions of Cuba’s music and dance. Cuban Dances is Cuban music as it has never been heard before and a huge challenge for the horn player, not only technically but physically – “if you can’t dance it you can’t play it” she was told. So dance it she did! Mozart y Mambo - Cuban Dances is full of magic, energy, and passion, and Sarah’s love for Cuban music is evident in every track.

REVIEW:

Two years ago, Sarah Willis, a member of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2001 and the orchestra’s first female brass player, teamed up with musicians in Havana. The result was their joyful collaboration, Mozart y Mambo, in which she and the band played Mozart alongside traditional Cuban music. Now a second disc is out: Mozart y Mambo: Cuban Dances, with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra and conductor José Antonio Méndez Padrón.

Willis is the first-class soloist in Mozart’s Horn Concerto No 1 in D and No 2 in E flat. A seven-strong ensemble, enchantingly called Sarahbanda, perform Pa Pa Pa by Edgar Olivero, inspired by the Papageno/Papagena duet from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The fizzing Havana Lyceum Orchestra plays traditional Cuban dances, for solo horn, strings and percussion, with a difference: all have been commissioned by Willis, from six young Cuban composers. Enrique Lazaga (güiro), a member of the original Buena Vista Social Club, makes a guest appearance. With a suave rumba (with chirping cricket), bolero and cha-cha-cha – Sarahchá – this is perfect hot weather music.

This star player is put through her hornist paces and comes out dancing.

-- The Guardian

This recording presents one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of john Adams to emerge, well, in a long while.

In this program, Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich celebrate a composer of our time with works from different periods and citing a wide range of references, whether autobiographical or typically American. John Adams has assimilated numerous musical influences, and his personal style cannot be reduced to one of them: he is neither Minimalist, nor post-Minimalist, nor neo-Romantic. Some of his works can of course be said to belong to one or other of these movements, but he does not consider himself to be the representative of any particular tendency. If he refers to musical tradition in his works, it is always in a critical way and at the same time open to the influences of pop music, rock, and jazz.

REVIEW:

Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich mightn’t be the first pairing one associates with the music of John Adams. But, as their new album – simply titled John Adams – attests, they’ve pretty much got the iconic American composer’s style down pat.

Rhythmically, the Swiss band really digs into the proceedings here. That’s especially true of their account of Lollapalooza, a whimsical 1995 curtain-raiser dedicated to Simon Rattle. Järvi’s tempo is notably slower than either Kent Nagano’s or Michael Tilson Thomas’s, yet, if the reading is less overtly edgy, it’s perhaps jazzier than its forebears. And it certainly doesn’t want for energy or textural clarity.

Similar qualities mark Slonimsky’s Earbox, another mid-‘90s effort. It’s brilliantly energetic, yes, but Järvi’s command of its structure is the real story: this is as coherent a Slonimsky as has been played, clearly drawing on all the threads of Adams’ style up to about 1996 while also suggesting what was to come in pieces like Naïve and Sentimental Music and Son of Chamber Symphony.

Also, My Father Knew Charles Ives, Adams’ semi-autobiographical 2003 tone poem that, last year, was the highlight of a disc from the Nashville Symphony. Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester are, generally, a bit more relaxed in their tempos than their counterparts in Tennessee, especially in the first movement. But the performance never slogs; rather, it overflows with atmosphere and color.

Rounding things out is a carefully-balanced account of Adams’ 1986 fanfare Tromba lontana. Perhaps less familiar than its more vigorous companion piece, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Tromba lontana, with its delicately dancing textures, potently complements My Father Knew Charles Ives.

The end result is one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of Adams to emerge, well, in a long while. As such, it’s an excellent way to mark the composer’s 75th birthday this year – or just his general contributions to contemporary music, which, as this disc reminds, have been anything but commonplace or predictable.

-- The Arts Fuse (Jonathan Blumhofer)

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560) stormed onto the Parisian literary scene with the resounding avant-garde manifesto Défense et illustration de la langue française. Ronsard and Du Bellay are the great French poets of the sixteenth century, but while the former has been set to music hundreds of times, Du Bellay inspired only about thirty compositions. Denis Raisin Dadre and his ensemble Doulce Mémoire celebrate the Angevin poet on the occasion of his 500th anniversary with works by the leading composers of the period, among them Arcadelt (who set nine chansons to his texts, including Je ne puis dissimuler a year before Du Bellay’s death), Lassus, Chardavoine and Verdonck. It was also established practice at the time to declaim poems accompanied by a musician who improvised on the lyre, an instrument and usage imported from Italy (recitare a la lira). Denis Raisin Dadre has decided to pay tribute to these sixteenth-century ‘slam poets’ by asking a modern equivalent, Kwal, to ‘slam’ some of Du Bellay's sonnets, including the famous "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse."

In the seventeenth century, the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice took in young orphan girls who received advanced musical instruction. The concerts given there attracted visitors from all over the world, curious to hear these divine voices which remained invisible, since the girls performed hidden behind the grilles of the chapel gallery. Vivaldi became Maestro de’ Concerti of the Pietà in 1714, and it was his pupils who performed his famous Nisi Dominus. Today they are succeeded by the mezzo-soprano Eva Zaïcik, who brings out the full poignancy of the aria ‘Cum dederit’. Another motet by Vivaldi, Invicti bellate, also composed for the Pietà, features in this program planned and conducted by Vincent Dumestre. He invites us on a musical journey centered on the figure of woman and on divine praise, with composers awaiting discovery such as Serafino Razzi (1534-1619) and Soto de Langa (1531-1611).

Ravel and the Basque Country have always been one and the same. His Concerto in G major is the central work of this album and is presented here in an original arrangement for piano and small ensemble. Pianist Aurèle Marthan also pays homage to his splendid hometown, Guéthary, where he founded the festival Classic à Guéthary. All of the works recorded here illustrate the richness of a region that has been cherished by so many artists: Stravinsky arranged his Petrouchka in Biarritz, Pablo de Sarasate chose to reside there and Isaac Albéniz opted to spend his last days there. Another Basque celebrity, although on the Spanish side, is Alberto Iglesias, director Pedro Almodóvar’s house composer. The Basque coast is often compared to California because of its excellent beaches for surfing; Aurèle Marthan evokes the Eagles as well as his passion for the American minimalists (Glass) and for cinema, with music from the films Amen and Waltz with Bashir; he also provides a piano version of the Biarritz-based rock band La Femme’s hit "Sur la planche." This album covers more than three centuries of music and includes music by Rameau and Couperin — the composer of La Basque! Guéthary was written especially for this recording by composer David Chalmin, who also produced the recording in his studio in the Basque Country.

‘Well, what a surprise – a divine surprise! I have delighted in immersing myself in the world of Handel for more than forty years now. But I must admit that I experienced yet another lesson in strength and joy when I toured and recorded the Dettingen Te Deum and the Coronation Anthems’, says Hervé Niquet. As a lover of large orchestral formations, he has assembled a number of instrumentalists and singers close to the (gigantic) forces used at the premiere, with a large band of oboes, bassoons and trumpets, and assigned the solo arias to the entire ‘chapel’. Niquet speaks of ‘the glittering power of this ceremonial music concocted by a Handel conscious of placing the best of his genius at the service of the crown and of history’, and he in turn invests all his enthusiasm and expressiveness in these works combining ‘grace and strength’. Fans of Champions League football will recognize in "Zadok the Priest" the theme of that competition’s anthem!

REVIEW:

Niquet’s fluid lines heighten the drama by drawing out crucial words in long, upswelling crescendos, punctuated at climaxes by pungent brass and woodwinds. His performers apply dynamics with authority and precision, fashioning an intricate fabric.

-- BBC Music Magazine

 

The great Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk makes a triumphal return to chamber music with his regular piano partner Håvard Gimse. The program features two English composers, Benjamin Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge, whose Cello Sonata was written during the First World War and is tinged with despair and searing emotional force. Britten composed his Cello Sonata in 1961, following his meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom he dedicated the work. Another person traumatized by the Great War was Debussy, who wrote: ‘It was cowardly to think only of the horrors being committed, without trying to react by rebuilding, insofar as my strength allowed, a little of that beauty which is currently under attack.’ His Cello Sonata (1915) was the first of a series of six sonatas for various instruments that he planned to compose, only managing to write three before his death. As a determined Moravian nationalist, Janácek did not entitle his three-movement work of 1910 ‘sonata’; he called it Pohádka (Fairy tale) and based it on a poem by Vasily Zhukovsky.

REVIEW:

What one notices from the very start of the Bridge sonata, with which the disc begins, is Mørk’s fulsome tone. He is partnered very well throughout by Gimse and the recorded sound is really present, upfront, so much so that it is best to lower the volume for a realistic perspective. That said, I have found much to like in these accounts.

This is an excellently programmed disc, admirably performed and well recorded. It should provide plenty of pleasure. Alpha are also to be commended for their cardboard product with sleeves for inserting both CD and booklet.

-- MusicWeb International

Four of the 20th century’s greatest works for cello and piano: three of them famously recorded back in the 1960s by Rostropovich and Britten – a hard act to follow. Yet the Norwegian duo, Truls Mørk and Håvard Gimse, rise fully to the challenge in close yet lucid recorded sound that achieves an exemplary balance between cello and piano. Marginally less juicy of tone and idiosyncratic of phrasing than Rostropovich, Mørk brings a classical poise and eloquence to his phrasing and a marvellous sensitivity to detail, while Gimse is fully alive to the very different styles of piano writing in these four works.

The qualities of the new recording are especially favourable to Frank Bridge’s big two-movement Sonata – composed athwart the outbreak of the First World War, which horrified him – where the old recording suffered from slightly cloudy piano sound. As Mørk soars through the fraught lyricism of its first half, one hears clearly how Bridge subtly inflected even the most seemingly conventional piano figuration with his own individuality. And if the new recording of Debussy’s war-time Sonata is less dark and rhapsodic than the Rostropovich-Britten, it exemplifies the more enduring characteristics of French culture he sought to uphold.

The fugitive flights of melody and figuration comprising the three whimsical movements of Janáček’s Pohádka (Fairy Tales) demand a glancing, mercurial response which they certainly receive here, while the Britten Sonata somehow emerges as a weightier, more substantial work than in the original recording by its dedicatee and composer – special though that will always remain.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Ever since its creation more than twenty-five years ago, the Accentus chamber choir has ardently championed the a cappella repertory: under its conductor and founder Laurence Equilbey, it has produced an impressive discography that sets the benchmark in this music. For this new recording, the first for Alpha, she hands over direction of the ensemble to Christophe Grapperon, its associate conductor since 2013: ‘It can never be said often enough: the a cappella repertory is a Holy Grail of vocal music! It is a sensory experience directly accessible to everyone, but demanding and often atypical for the listener.’ Hahn and Saint-Saëns are on the program of this album in superb choral works combining simplicity and expressive power, some of which have never been recorded before.

REVIEW:

The ever-shifting, rich harmonies of the title work, Hahn’s À la lumière, are testament that writing for amateurs meant a lack neither of challenge nor musical quality (how come this has never been recorded before?). Nonetheless, it is luxury casting to hear works that could grace many local choirs sung by Accentus under Christophe Grapperon and, a couple of minor imprecisions aside, the results are ravishing.

-- BBC Music Magazine

This is a program of pieces seldom heard. Neither Camille Saint-Saens nor Reynaldo Hahn is much known for secular a cappella choral pieces. The pieces here are all new to me, and two are recorded for the first time.

Four of the five works by Saint-Saens remind me of Victorian part-songs of Charles Wood or Robert Pearsall and others with their many suspended notes. Their lushly chromatic style creates a dreamy atmosphere. `Calme des Nuits’ (with text by the composer) sounds like he had been listening to Bruckner’s `Locus Iste’. The tenors and basses perform the fifth piece, the spirited `Saltarelle’, with agility and vivacity. Each of the five pieces is a delight.

The longest piece, from which the album takes its name, is Hahn’s A la Lumiere (10:19), a lushly chromatic piece with text by Anatole France in praise of the life-giving blessing of sunlight. The ensemble’s ability to stay on pitch through this chromatic labyrinth is impressive. It and `L’Obscurite’ are recoded here for the first time.

Eloise Bella Kohn offers nicely animated collaboration in 3 of the 8 Hahn selections. Passages for solo piano, a cappella chorus, and accompanied chorus alternate in two Rondels, `Le Jour’ and `La Nuit’. The final piece of the program, `Aubade Athenienne’, is sung by four-part sopranos and altos.

This marks the first time Laurence Aquilbey has surrendered the musical direction of an Accentus recording to Christophe Grapperon, its associate conductor, since 2013. The precision and clarity of the perfectly balanced and well blended singing is first rate. The performances are ravishingly lovely.

-- American Record Guide

In the course of his recordings for Alpha, Francois Lazarevitch has explored the music of the Baroque and of oral and popular traditions. After Scottish and Irish music, airs de cour and Baroqu esuites and sonatas, he stops off in Vivaldi's Italy. With him, of course, he has his cargo of rare instruments, including the musette de cour which he uses here to perform Spring from The Four Seasons, in an astonishing and very convincing version transcribed by the great virtuoso wind player of the reign of Louis XV, Nicolas Chedeville. Lazarevitch himself has arranged the other Seasons for the transverse flute, following a frequent eighteenth-century practice. A new angle on these evergreen masterpieces. As Francois Lazarevitch says: ''I want to explore all the early sources in depth in order to challenge my performance practice of today and enrich it with an understanding of the style and the naturalness of period theory and phrasing. When I tackle old Scottish and Irish music, it is with the aim of retracing this path.'' The rest of the programme is devoted to other favorite pieces by Vivaldi, this time originally written for flute.

This tremendous, heady disc is provocative stuff; its emotional - at times emotive - impact immeasurably heightened by very careful programming. Gens and Niquet throw themselves into all this with an engrossing mix of abandon and restraint. Her trademark of purity of utterance and smoky tone speaks volumes.

At 56 minutes, the disc is on the short side, but any more would, I suspect, feel like overkill.

It's a spectacular achievement; whatever you do, don't hold back.

– Gramophone

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.