Constellations, the excellent new album of the Canadian National Brass Project, is a remarkable musical achievement. The repertoire for this album consists of known works by composers such as Wagner, Holst and Tchaikovsky which are magnificently re-arranged for a brass ensemble of 25 musicians. The Canadian National Brass Project was founded in 2015 by James Sommerville and Sasha Johnson and consists of Canadian brass players and percussionists from 15 major orchestras across Canada and the US.

This new album by Charles Richard-Hamelin presents two important sides of Frederic Chopin’s work as a composer and confirms the place of this young musician in the high spheres of the piano universe. About Richard-Hamelin, the reputed BBC Music Magazine has written that he is “fluent, multifaceted and tonally seductive… a technician of exceptional elegance and sophistication” Very free in form, the four Chopin ballads present a similar journey, in which tension will increase to a fiery coda. The four impromptus show Chopin’s affection for miniatures and salon pieces and reveal another facet of his work, putting us in touch with his talent as an improviser. An essential album!

This new album by Charles Richard-Hamelin presents two important works from Frederic Chopin’s repertoire, 24 Preludes, Op. 28 and Andante spianato & Grande polonaise brillante, Op. 22, and confirms that he is one of the world's elite pianists. Writing about Richard-Hamelin, BBC Music Magazine characterized his playing as “fluent, multifaceted and tonally seductive… a technician of exceptional elegance and sophistication.” Qualities that are made evident on this brilliant new album. Charles Richard-Hamelin is well known on the international music scene as a “highly sensitive” pianist (Gramophone), driven by “a great depth of feeling without the slightest pretense” (Le Devoir). He is recognized as “fluent, multifaceted and tonally seductive… a technician of exceptional elegance and sophistication” (BBC Music Magazine).

Buzz Brass inspired dreams with this new opus, Christmas. The quintet takes the listener out of the familiar with this majestic, elegant and refined arrangements to highlight the holiday season. The male vocal quartet Quartom joins as guest artists in ‘Noël canadien’ and ‘The 12 days of Christmas.’ The ensemble's latest volume, Inspirations, has been hailed as proof of their "testament to the ensemble’s sensational embouchure" by the prestigious Gramophone magazine. Since 2002, Buzz Brass quintet has been travelling all over the globe to captivate classical music lovers. Whether its concerts consist of brass quintet alone or together with guest musicians, the original artistic propositions it presents leave nobody cold. With over 1,600 appearances to its credit, the ensemble has reached more than 350,000 music lovers throughout North America, Europe and China. The numerous awards and distinctions that Buzz Brass has earned over the years (Opus, ADISQ, and Trille Or) attest to both the quality and the relevance of its musical performances.

Stunning contemporary music from the French-Canadian violinist – a ClassicFM Album of the Week

After a fight against cancer, the French-Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau has produced an album of beautiful contemporary pieces that are linked by their common evocation of light and peace - all works that she says have personally helped her through her illness.

The album consists of 14 pieces from 12 different composers including international movie maestros - Ennio Morricone, Joe Hisaishi and Ryuichi Sakamato - and such varied genres as jazz and folk, as exemplified by the music of Dave Brubeck and Cat Stevens.

Angèle Dubeau is a sensational violinist and the selection here is serene and heartfelt. She is ably accompanied by her all-female string ensemble La Pietà, who turn "Morning Has Broken" into a rolling, pastoral rhapsody.

– classicfm.com

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"Blanc like purity, serenity. Blanc for light music which, by their size and their evocative power, can bring inner peace. Of emotions on skin that reflect this strange loneliness qu'amène disease. After months of struggle against cancer, music has help me stay on track, music brought me comfort, tranquility and often Escape necessary. These songs, which are those of Brubeck, Dompierre, Golijov, Hisaishi, Morricone, Mozetich, Munsey, O'Connor, Phillips, Sakamoto, Schyman and Stevens. Musical moments without artifice, true and hopeful. This album tells a story, my story, that of a woman who, like so many others had to fight against the disease, and serenely grown spring." – Angele Dubeau

Classical Music

Ofra Harnoy has established herself as one of the greatest cellists on the world’s concert stage. She has won many awards and distinctions for her recordings, including 5 JUNO Awards, including Instrumental Artist of the Year and Best Classical Album of the Year in Canada. After taking a career hiatus to raise her children and then deal with a near career-ending shoulder injury, Ofra Harnoy started performing again in 2018. This album presents a number of tried and true Baroque favourites on the cello, like Bach’s “Air" from Orchestral Suite #3, “Bist Du Bei Mir”, as well as some slightly lesser known gems. An amazing recording and an inspiring comeback.

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REVIEW:

The well-chosen selections here include some material previously recorded by Harnoy from her 40-plus albums, as well as favourites such as Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 and Bist du bei mir, with the addition of more obscure, but stirring repertoire from Corelli and Allegri. This recording is a triumph, and a must-have for any serious collector.

– The Whole Note (CAN)

I hope that Anton Kuerti's 2003 remakes of Beethoven's last three sonatas will spur him on to re-record the other 29, for these new versions are infinitely superior to his 1974/75 recordings. The pianist remains thoroughly devoted to microscopic detail and grand clarification, but his compulsive drive and raspy surface style have considerably mellowed, while his soft playing has gained body and luminescence. To sample Kuerti's newly found serenity and flow in this music, listen to his spacious parsing of Op. 109's rhapsodic introductory movement and to his patiently unfolding trills in that sonata's third movement variations and in Op. 111's Arietta, and notice how he builds Op. 110's long-lined Adagio ma non troppo from the bottom up. His rubatos in the latter sonata's Fugue no longer seem artificially tacked on but rather are organically integrated into the music's visionary path. His basic measured tempos for Op. 111, once static and fussy, now emerge as all of one piece. It goes without saying that these works are amply served via recordings from Schnabel to Serkin and Kempff to Kempf, with Hungerford, Goode, Pollini, and Richter for good measure. To this august roster we easily can add the veteran Kuerti. [4/6/2004] --Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Angèle Dubeau's favourite pieces from some of the most unforgettable movies, performed with her ensemble La Pietà.

To celebrate his long and fruitful partnership with the Analekta recording label, the great harpsichordist and organist Luc Beausejour delves into his recordings from the past 25 years and proposes three excellent programs. 1 – THE HARPSICHORD Works by Couperin, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Rameau, and Bach organ music on pedal harpsichord. 2 – THE VOICE Featuring Julie Boulianne, Karina Gauvin, Philippe Sly, Shannon Mercer, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux in excerpts from operas, cantatas, and sacred works with Clavecin en concert. 3 – CHAMBER AND ORGAN MUSIC Bach with James Ehnes, Couperin and Rameau with Clavecin en concert, and organ works.

An excellent disc on all levels.

Summa was originally based on the text of the credo, and Pärt collectors may know it as sung by the Hilliard Ensemble on ECM 1325, the ‘Arbos’ album. It goes to show how many different arrangements and versions there are of Pärt’s earlier ‘tintinnabulum’ style pieces that it appears here for string orchestra, and also the ease with which such a work passes between such seemingly disparate media. This arrangement was made in 1991, and the serene flow of the piece is conveyed nicely on this recording. While inevitably losing some of its liturgical character, the concerto-grosso contrast of ‘solo’ string lines and the massed group with bass easily conjures the call and response structure of a choral prayer.

Three of the pieces on this disc also appear on another classic Pärt album, ECM 1275, ‘Tabula Rasa’. This was the Pärt recording in the 1980s and one of the principal artefacts for bringing his name to the popular attention of the wider world beyond Estonia and the rather specialist European contemporary music scene. Cantus was written in response to the death of Benjamin Britten on 4 December 1976 and can be described as a ‘personal threnody’. The music is little more than a descending scale in differing speeds with the chiming of a tubular bell at its tonal centre. It doesn’t sound like much, but its technique is a powerful tool in Pärt’s language. The La Pietà orchestra takes a more intensely sustained view on the music than the Staatsorchester Stuttgart under Dennis Russell Davies on the ECM album, which times at 5:00 rather than 7:10 here. La Pietà’s powerful performance is truly excellent, though the hushed atmosphere at the beginning of the ECM recording has also always been something rather special. It is easy to be dewy-eyed about the qualities of an elderly classic recording one has known and loved for many years, but there is a spiritual aspect to the ECM CD which still makes it an Pärt must-have. With this new recording the bell is a little more prominent in the balance which is a good thing. The opening strings take an early-music non-vibrato approach which is a tad cooler and more remote in feeling than with the Stuttgart players.

Tabula Rasa holds a special place in Arvo Pärt’s oeuvre. The haunting sparseness of the musical material and the breathtaking nuances of the prepared piano are all elements which have to be heard, and once heard, will never be forgotten; or at least, they weren’t in my case. It has always been irritating that the two sections of the piece are on one track with the ECM CD, but the team of Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Gridenko on violins and Alfred Schnittke playing the prepared piano is very special indeed. The ECM recording is a live one with a few interesting extra noises here and there, but is ultimately my desert-island choice and probably always will be. There is an element of ‘first heard here is best’ when it comes to this piece, and the prepared piano is destined to sound uniquely different at each performance no matter what anyone does. My objective reasons for preferring the ECM recording in purely musical terms is that the piano sounds seem to relate more to the rest of the music in terms of pitch. The piano also appears more forward in the balance in the older recording, which means its impact is greater, with all of those bass notes chiming through like a grand but distant cathedral bell. ECM album’s Silentium movement starts at 9:36, and I’m guaranteed, at that point, either to shed a tear or just listen with a sense of aching awe. The piano ‘riff’ is something truly magical. The combination of this repeating motif and the slowly shifting harmonies and phrases of the strings and the violin soloists is something which cannot really be described in words. With this Analekta album my nose twitched a little when I saw that Tabula Rasa had been put in the middle of the programme. The experience of Silentium is surely something which can’t be followed by anything else? Whatever, this is a very fine recording and performance. The singing solo lines move with soaring elegance over the rest of the strings, and the sound of the prepared piano, while rather recessed in the recorded balance, hangs in the air like the sound of lightly struck suspended metal plates in the first Ludus section. To deviate for a moment, this spatial effect and quality of sound reminded me of another ECM album, ‘The Music of Stones’ (ECM 1384) by Stephan Micus, and if you like the meditative sonority of Pärt then you will probably very much like that too.

Later on in the Ludus movement all hell breaks loose, and it is with this newer recording that we have a huge advantage. The greater definition and clarity means that the impact of the music is far greater, the confusion of noise in the elderly ECM recording being more like a furious band of raging strings in a fight with a Balkan cimbalom player. Here the music is superbly preserved, the greater detail meaning we can follow all of the lines and the passionate logic of its form and structure. There is one impressively strange moment in this section at 8:45 which sounds like a single doom-laden note from an electric bass guitar. This might be the side-effect of an edit removing the attack from a note, but to me has a heroic quality – a player waiting patiently through the entire piece for their one moment of post-modern cross-over magnificence, played to perfection. The Silentium movement is also jaw-droppingly wonderful on this CD, but I am troubled by that prepared piano. This is rich with fine sonorities, but is too recessed to really make the skin tingle, and the actual pitches don’t connect to the rest of the music in the way one would hope. Yes, I am pre-programmed by the ECM recording, so it is hard to be truly objective, but this doesn’t quite do it for me. The strings are wonderful, and if you are hearing the piece for the first time you will probably be ‘well stunned’, as they used to say in youthful parlance. If you are affected by this piece, do yourself a favour, and buy ECM 1275 as well: you may, all of a sudden, find a chasm has opened in your musical foundations and swallowed you whole.

With the emotional crisis of Tabula Rasa not being quite as powerful as in my previous experience, following it with the Pilgrim’s Song is less of a wrench, and in fact works very well. Collectors may have this piece on ECM 1795, ‘Orient Occident’ with Swedish forces under the magnificent Toñu Kaljuste. This alternative is more symphonic than with La Pietà, but I like the closer balance of the strings in their recording, the sinister interjections of the lower strings being communicated with more heft and presence. The choir is also very good, and with a shimmering elegiac quality to the orchestra this is one of the highlights of this disc. Mozart-Adagio is the most recent piece on this CD, and employing collage techniques to create an antique-style piece which puts me in mind of some of Schnittke’s explorations of this conjoining of genres and styles. The Mozart work treated to a modern version is the slow movement of the K280 piano sonata, with the tragic elements of the music spot-lit and emphasised with the addition of a violin and cello. Fascinating music, and beautifully played, this is a surprising but entirely suitable addition to the Pärt catalogue.

Spiegel im Spiegel is another of Pärt’s pieces which exists in numerous versions, and if you want total Spiegel im Spiegel immersion there are three different and very fine performances on the ECM album ‘Alina’ (ECM 1591). The simplicity of this music has caused some to react with a deal of negativity, but if you know Pärt’s work previous to this alternative phase you might understand how this was a way out of a cul-de-sac of noisy complexity. The quote in the booklet notes says a great deal: “I was writing music in which there were many notes thrown down on the page ... I was not guarding these notes as treasures ... Each note is decisive, every note is telling.” In this way Pärt comes closer to Mozart than most contemporary composers, and just as with Mozart it is very easy to play this music – and even easier to play it very badly. This is most certainly not the case here, and Angèle Dubeau and pianist Louise-André Baril conclude this disc with Spiegel im Spiegel’s enigmatic majesty projected in potent poetic style.

This is a disc which can be recommended on all levels, recording, performance, presentation and programme. Ignore the over-used ‘Portrait’ title: it’s just great music played to perfection. My own heaving Arvo Pärt collection and an increasingly rich variety of current options might seem to preclude the need for further recordings of old favourites, but I have found these new recordings refreshing and a welcome addition to my perspective on all of these pieces. Yes, I will be keeping my ECM 1275, but I will also be tenaciously hanging on to the superb playing of Angèle Dubeau and La Pietà. So, stop hanging around here: go away, buy your own copy; go on, shoo ... allez, vite!

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

For the recording of Vienna 1840, Pascal Valois has set himself to rediscover this expressive way of interpreting music as it was played in the German-speaking world of the Romantic period. Committed to this quest for authenticity, Valois uses a replica of a Viennese guitar made by the luthier Johann Georg Stauffer (1778-1853) in 1830 to highlight the works of Emilia Giuliani-Guglielmi, Franz Schubert, Giulio Regondi and Johann Kaspar Mertz. Pascal Valois has received the most renowned bursaries in Canada for guitar performance (Canada Council for the Arts) as well as Musicology (FQRSC and SSHRC). He has also been awarded scholarships from the Desjardins Foundation, the Wilfrid-Pelletier Foundation, the Laval University Foundation, and the Université du Québec à Montréal Foundation. Pascal Valois recorded for the Centaur Records and Analekta labels.

Harpsichordist and organist Luc Beauséjour is never short of ideas when it comes to offering concert programs marked by refinement and authenticity. Beauséjour offers here a program of three famous sonatas (no. 11, K. 331, "alla Turca"; no. 13, K. 333; and no. 16, K. 545), all of which bear the mark of Mozart's genius. The fortepiano recorded here was made in 2019 by Rodney Regier and is a copy of an instrument by Viennese maker Anton Walter (1752-1826).

“The remarkable attention [Beauséjour] gives to proportions and to a singing quality have made him a one-of-a-kind artist.” -Le Devoir

With this debut album, cellist Julia MacLaine expresses both her roots in classical music and her enthusiasm for contemporary music by creating a dialogue between Bach's preludes and responses crafted by six Canadian composers with styles as diverse as they are rich: Airat Ichmouratov, Gabriel Dharmoo, Carmen Braden, Nicole Lizée, Cris Derksen and Roy Johnstone.

Assistant principal cello of the National Arts Centre Orchestra since 2014, Julia MacLaine performs worldwide as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician in music ranging from classical to contemporary and from “world” to her own arrangements and compositions. When not onstage with NACO, she performs regularly with her string quartet, Ironwood. Their programs combine classical warhorses (Beethoven, Ravel, Debussy) with very new music (works by Ana Sokolovic, Nicole Lizée, Bryce Dessner, Philip Glass, Esa‐Pekka Salonen) and occasionally veer off into their own arrangements of original songs and folk music.

How to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ensemble La Pietà? The answer came naturally to Angèle Dubeau: through music! For the occasion, she proposed an album entirely conceived, performed, and composed by women. The result is an album filled with the joy of exchanging through the medium of creation with the women composers gathered here. This album witnesses Angèle Dubeau's virtuosity and confirms her immense talent for creating programs that are off the beaten path, while being as innovative as they are accessible.

REVIEW:

This Canadian group, led by Dubeau, always delivers the goods, with accessible and wide-ranging programmes. Marking 25 years, Elle brings together works by women composers both familiar and unsung, from Hildegard to Isobel Waller-Bridge. Very fine playing.

-- BBC Music Magazine