"After Hours" is the new concept album by the Faure Quartett. The world famous piano quartet consists of the same for members since íts founding in 1995. They present an album full of encores from composers such as Debussy, Strauss and Dvorak. These pieces are lined by original compositions dedicated to the ensemble by composer friends such as Jarkko Riihimaki. Two other friends, clarinettist Matthias Schorn and soprano Annette Dasch, make appearences as soloists. Encores defy the convention and have the potential to be surprising and engage the listeners in a special way and exactly that is what this album does.

With Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Monologues, the piano duo Vincent and Sophie Neeb place a rarely performed masterpiece at the centre of their debut recording. The composer describes his work, first performed in 1965, as "dialogues across the ages of dreamers, lovers, sufferers and praying people", which offers a journey through music history with sophisticated collages.
Following this inspiration, the programme is completed with a contrasting selection of compositions quoted there: Works by Bach and Debussy, creatively arranged for two pianos and percussion by Johannes Xaver Schachtner, and a Mozart arrangement by the piano duo Neeb enter into a unique dialogue via this inner context?

Together with percussionists Christian Benning and Patrick Stapleton, the piano duo Neeb explores surreal dream worlds - playfully light and enigmatically profound at the same time.

The French violinist Hugues Borsarello draws this programme of miniatures from the repertory of his instrument and from the great operatic arias, transcribed for violin and orchestra: ‘My idea was to relate a French history of music over the course of three centuries, in the form of short pieces.’ Lully’s Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs rubs shoulders with arias by Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Offenbach, Satie’s Gymnopédie no.3 and Gounod’s Ave Maria. All these universally known pieces ‘are perfectly suited to the soul of the violin’, says Borsarello, who is joined by prestigious guests: cellist Gautier Capuçon for Vieuxtemps’s Duo Brillant, guitarist Thomas Dutronc for Django Reinhardt’s celebrated Nuages, pianist Frank Braley.

And this programme doesn’t neglect the classics of the violin, including Ysaÿe’s magnificent Berceuse de l'enfant pauvre. Vieuxtemps’s famous set of variations on Yankee Doodle is here performed for the first time in its version with orchestra.

This selection of transcriptions celebrates childhood in a variety of ways, featuring popular works – Schubert’s Erlkönig, Granados’s atmospheric Tales of Youth, Mozart’s elegant Sonata facile, Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood and Debussy’s Children’s Corner – presented in a totally natural and idiomatic manner within the guitar’s distinctly expressive soundworld.

Works for Cello and Piano by composers Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, and Claude Debussy, performed by Norwegian artists cellist Amalie Stalheim and pianist Christian Ihle Hadland.

Debussy’s song cycle Ariettes oubliées of 1888 set six poems from Paul Verlaine’s collection Romances sans paroles, beginning with C’est l’extase and Il pleure dans mon cœur – penetratingly poetic images of love’s ecstasy and rainlike tears of despair. The six Ariettes are the departure point for the arrangement realized in 2012 by British composer Robin Holloway in response to a request from the San Francisco Symphony. Holloway has altered their order while adding a further four Debussy songs, binding the whole work together with brief orchestral links and a feverish epilogue, ‘con moto agitato’. This world first recording is given by French soprano Vannina Santoni, with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under the baton of Mikko Franck. The Finnish conductor, a great admirer of Debussy, here also presents the master’s bewitching masterpiece La mer, first heard in Paris in 1905.

On her 8th GENUIN CD, the Japanese flutist Atsuko Koga once again proves her incredible musicality and versatility. This time, she presents works for flute, violin, and cello with the internationally award-winning violinist Riyo Uemura and the world-renowned cellist Georgiy Lomakov. The high-caliber trio performs music from the past four centuries, ranging from examples of Classical works by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven to Claude Debussy's delicate flourishes, Heitor Villa-Lobos' and Eugène Bozza's moderate modernism, and Yassen Vodenitcharov's miniatures inspired by Classical Antiquity in a world premiere recording.

The French pianist Jean-Paul Gasparian has chosen Debussy for his first album with naïve, an album full of sensitivity and colour, including the first ever recording of the transcription of the Rondes de printemps. With this album devoted solely to Debussy, Jean-Paul Gasparian invites listeners to integrate the atmospheres, colours and timbres that make up Debussy’s world. ‘The piano, here,’ he says, ‘is a tool that lets your imagination wander, a machine that creates perceptions. Like a sort of stationary journey.’ It is also an opportunity for Jean-Paul Gasparian to show us another facet of his temperament, already seen in Rachmaninoff and the Romantic repertoire, and return to his beginnings.

Now a staple of the repertoire, Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, nonetheless baffled Parisian audiences in its day. It takes us down the most unexpected harmonic paths, drawing on sounds as diverse as jazz, gamelan and Spanish folk music. Rich in colour and exotic tones, this majestic poetic work frees itself from the traditional musical rules of the West. Balancing between Belgium and France and its heart turned towards Armenia, the Akhtamar Quartet was immediately won over by this unique work, a real bridge between different cultures and traditions.

Just as the relationship between letter and illumination is constantly being revisited, Judith Adler de Oliveira has reworked age-old Armenian themes in a spirit that is sometimes faithful, sometimes at odds with tradition. The initial theme is always audible, and its anatomy will give the initial impetus to the composition, which moves insensitively, surreptitiously, from one musical language to another.

Some of the themes chosen already appear in the Komitas/Aslamazyan Miniatures, thus tracing a gateway to this essential work in the Akhtamar Quartet's repertoire.

One of the threads that runs through Debussy’s music is an expressive range that embraces the tragic to the grotesque. This is especially evident in his early piano music. The Suite bergamasque is the masterpiece of his pre-Raphaelite period, a compound of archaism, rich lyricism and decadence. Pour le piano also evokes a medieval atmosphere, while – in its Toccata finale – offering perpetual motion virtuosity. There is an oriental ethos in the Nocturne, the Rêverie is an alluring portrait, and Images oubliées – which was unpublished as a set until as late as 1977 – contains both rich portraiture and burlesque.

The Ensemble Trisonante was founded in 2015 and has since developed into an internationally sought-after and regularly performing piano trio. With their debut CD “Unfolding”, the three musicians Christina Leeb-Grill, piano, Cecilia Sipos, cello, and Luís Morais, violin, go into discovery mode in the early work of great composers. Franz Schubert composed the Sonatensatz in B flat major, D 28, in 1812, when he was just 15 years old; Nevertheless, it is not difficult to discover the composer’s very own tone. Claude Debussy wrote his first chamber music work, the Piano Trio in G major, at the age of 18; Like Schubert’s work, it was not published until almost 100 years after it was written.

Also at the age of 18, Sergei Rachmaninov composed the one-movement Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor, which formed the prerequisite for a much expanded piano trio only two years later. Dmitri Shostakovich’s first chamber music work is the Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8, which today is one of the most popular piano trios of the 20th century.

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

Life on the reef is beautiful. Lots of different creatures all live peacefully together here: parrotfish, swordfish, turtles, schools of sardines, an octopus, a seahorse, a mackerel, and an oyster. But then something terrible happens: a huge swarm of jellyfish starts drifting directly towards the reef! And jellyfish, as every fish knows, are dangerous! Fatal, in fact! At first, the four friends Mackerel, Seahorse, Oyster and Octopus don’t want to face up to the danger - but then it’s suddenly too late to escape! They’re trapped! Just as they run out of ideas, something quite unexpected happens … In this family concert, Rufus Beck and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Daniel tell a hilarious and highly colourful story about the power to rise above oneself. The text, to music by Claude Debussy and Alexander Scriabin, was written by Katharina Neuschaefer, with illustrations by Martin Fengel.

Clarinetist Andrzej Cieplinski and pianist Tymoteusz Bies present a new album of works by Debussy, Penderecki, Poulenc, and Weinberg.

Andrzej Ciepliński is a distinguished Polish clarinetist who has gained recognition from a wide audience, performing as a soloist with such orchestras as: Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice (NOSPR), Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Warsaw, Opole Philharmonic, Lviv Philharmonic, Slovak Sinfonietta, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Aukso. He has given concerts under the baton of Krzysztof Penderecki, Elim Chan, John Axelrod, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Marek Moś, Zsolt Hamar, Boon Hua Lien, Tung-Chieh Chuang, Yaron Traub, Christian Zacharias, Boian Videnoff.

Tymoteusz Bies is a twenty five year old pianist, graduate of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, where he studied under the guidance of Professor Zbigniew Raubo. He is a laureate of a number of prestigious piano competitions, including the National Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, Friuli Venezia Giulia Piano Competition, and Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition.

These are three of the greatest works for cello and piano, beautifully performed by Paul York, cello, and Dror Biran, piano. Recently hailed by The New York Times for his “warm-toned” performance of Lutosławski’s Grave (Metamorphoses), cellist Paul York is an accomplished soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. He currently serves on the string faculty at the University of Louisville, where he maintains an active teaching and performing schedule. Dror Biran is a professor of piano at the University of Louisville. He has developed a teaching philosophy that aims at student-centered mentoring, interactive approaches to interpretation and performance, the study of chamber music, and the creation of both short-term and long-term goals.