Third album of the Akhtamar Quartet with Cypres, Origins combines classical and folk heritage with contemporary creation, inviting everyone to explore shared stories and universal emotions. Since it's creation, the Akhtamar Quartet has enjoyed intertwining classical and folk music and exploring different cultures. This approach is evident on each of it's albums, while promoting a contemporary composer (Eugenie Alecian for Legende armenienne, Cypres - CYP1681, and Judith Adler de Oliveira for Enluminures, Cypres - CYP1684). From Antonin Dvorak to Jelena Dabic, a Serbian composer born in 1982, the music becomes eternal poetry and transports us through the ages. This is an essential recording for chamber music lovers. It celebrates both the romantic heritage, embodied by Dvorak's mature style, and the opening up to a new generation of female composers. With Anzhamanak by Jelena Dabic, this contemporary piece offers a unique sound experience with original timbres and reveals the full expressive power of the Akhtamar Quartet.

Jean-Paul Dessy's music occupies a singular place in the contemporary landscape: it does not submit to any school or current, but traces a ridge, stretched between interiority and expansion, between spirituality and sound matter. Each work is a journey, a ritual of sound that calls on the listener to listen with the utmost acuity, where time seems suspended, as if returned to it's original density. This album is the result of this mutual loyalty, of this long-term exploration. It is also the testimony of a unique, living work that continues to move us, to question us, and to draw, in the infinity of the sound spectrum, a profoundly human imprint.

For her first project at Cypres, young Belgian pianist Cassandre Marfin thinks big and has come up with Jusqu'a la nuit, a triptych devoted to chromesthesia, one of the many forms of synesthesia known to date. Synesthesia refers to the general alliance of two senses within the brain of an individual. Chromesthesia, on the other hand, refers specifically to the association between colours and sounds. Each volume of this trilogy is dedicated to a primary colour: blue, yellow and red. This first volume focuses on blue, which is undoubtedly the colour most present in music and the one most appreciated in the Western world. According to Cassandre Marfin, it evokes the world of night and dreams, something intangible and indefinite. It is a source of multiple representations in our imaginations. Through a skilfully conceived programme, the pianist associates this colour with ideas, metaphors and compositional systems that allow us to form our own personal impression of blue.

A selection of animal sounds was collected and sampled as if they were notes on an orchestral score. This 'animal music' was then reproduced and human instrumentalists played their classical score in dialogue with it. In this way, the animals become musicians and a fusional dialogue is created with the human musicians. The Bat's song used the bats' ultrasounds and slows them down extremely to bring those within the range audible to humans. These 'songs of the inaudible' are then combined to create a real choir, blending with the discreet voice of the cello. Fable Ineffable features the songs of whales, dolphins and wolves, accompanied by a string orchestra. This work explores the spiritual connection between humans and animals. Rest Forest is an ode to our mammal brothers and uses their voices to create a peaceful atmosphere. It includes sounds of bears, jackals, elephants and lynx, among others. The Prey's Prayer is an imaginary aviary made up of sampled songs and incognito flutes. The piece is akin to a bird's meditation on the human condition. Or the other way round

Following the critical acclaim of her first album, Lueurs, released just a year ago by Cypres, the young Belgian composer Apolline Jesupret is back with a second monographic CD entitled Bleu Ardent. This time, the idea originated in the mind of Maya Levy, the night following the creation of the violin concerto Ardeurs Intimes, where the violinist dreamed with the tenacious conviction of the unconscious of an album performed by the two of them. She tirelessly worked on it, developing ideas and proposals, and performs half of the pieces on the record. This concerto is inspired by the inner state one can feel in a love relationship with another. Throughout the work, the contrasting energies that cross the soul find their echo in the music. Bleue, Apolline's first symphonic work, is the color of our planet, of the ocean, and of the rolling wave: we hear strength and fragility, caress and slap, the energy of life and the threat of death - the surprising end, like a corkscrew, like a scorpion's tail. Dans l'air du soir, for solo violin, evokes, from Apolline's admiration for Claude Debussy, seven sharp scents with poetically evocative titles. Inspired by the paintings of painter and composer Julie Theriault, de Glace and de Lave are part of a cycle of sound studies for the piano. The first explores the cold, immutable, and crystalline texture of an iceberg, while the second aims to trace the different states of lava in a magmatic energy and in the force of a volcanic eruption.

Does the passport reflect cultural identity or nationality? Belgian by birth, but raised in Seattle in the United States, the question of identity has been a constant in the life of young cellist Pierre Fontenelle. He dedicates his first solo recording to the 21st century America in which he grew up, paying tribute to the diversity of this society. These works reflect the many waves of immigration that have forged this multiculturalism celebrated by the musical environment, a synthesis of European classical music, blues, jazz, rock and, more recently, world music. The album is essentially dedicated to three female composers with whom Pierre has had the opportunity to work: Caroline Shaw, Reena Esmail and Andrea Casarrubios. A forthcoming second volume will be devoted to his native Belgium.

For elodie Vignon, the decision to record Debussy's complete piano works in chronological order was born of what the Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune was in Debussy's day: a revelation! For her, playing this music is like entering a cocoon that belongs to you alone. This first volume (generous with 2CDs) of the three that will make up the complete works, naturally begins with Debussy's early works, pieces directly inspired by poems by Mallarme and Verlaine and which embrace the mysterious dimension of the sensory imagination. In the years that followed, he increasingly freed music from the polarisation exerted by the tonal note, keeping the sound space open and ultimately initiating spectral music. Debussy liked to draw inspiration from memories when composing, in order to maintain a distance between his own emotions and those he wished to arouse in the listener. Alfred Cortot spoke of evoking sensations rather than feelings, thus rejecting the late-Romantic aesthetic of emotional identification between composer and listener: an obligation that seemed too constraining to Debussy to be able to give rise to an open dialogue with the listeners of his work. Giving the impression of being invented as it is played, Debussy's music invites us to dream, to better understand the complexity of the world.

The programme presented here is particularly interesting from the point of view of Henri Vieuxtemps's Grande sonate concertante op.12, in four movements, a rare work written during the youth of the Verviers composer. Tatiana Samouil won the Grand Prix Vieuxtemps in Verviers in 1998, just after her arrival in Belgium. This prize marked the start of her major international career. She went on to win prizes at the Queen Elisabeth, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky competitions... Henri Vieuxtemps always held a special place in the heart of the violinist, who dreamt of giving the Vieuxtemps sonata a new lease of life in concert halls and on recordings. Her meeting with the brilliant Belgian pianist Johan Schmidt, winner of several major international competitions (Queen Elisabeth, Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky...) was to make her wish come true! Tatiana Samouil and Johan Schmidt started from the original manuscript to create a new version of the score that is more accessible and readable in terms of interpretation and sound. Louis Vierne's Sonata for violin and piano in G minor Op.23, another rare gem dedicated to Eugene Ysa�e, is considered to be his first major chamber music score and his first unanimously acknowledged masterpiece. It is a masterly work, full of strength, passion and tenderness. A CD between romanticism and modernity that illustrates the stylistic evolution of the French aesthetic with it's characteristics of clarity, balance and elegance.

The making of this CD is the result of several wishes. The organist and composer Benoit Mernier has been heavily involved since 2015 in the construction by Manufacture Thomas of this new instrument at Saint-Loup in Namur, one of the special features of which is to offer an original great organ inspired by two different styles (Central German and North German Baroque), in short the instrument that Bach undoubtedly dreamed of. The great organ of Saint-Loup thus provides an ideal opportunity to address the question of transmission by tracing the relationship between a master (Buxtehude) and two disciples, one very well known (Bach), the other less so (Bruhns). As well as celebrating the advent of this extraordinary new organ and revealing all it's facets, this recording also marks the performer's sixtieth birthday.

A singular composer, Marie Jaell (1846-1925) made the piano the perfect confidant of her inspiration. In her short pieces for piano four hands, she succeeded in capturing both the changing essence of Nature, with it's storms, perfumes and infinity, and the tremors and anxieties of the human heart in the face of love or the fragility of life. Her two teachers, admirers and faithful friends Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saens are of course present on this recording, as they were in life, alongside their spirited colleague. On their first album at Cypres, the Duo Orloff & Spinnler unveil a figure still too little known today. Marie Jaell's impact on piano teaching has been considerable. Her research into "awareness of movement and the development of sensitivity" led her to publish several groundbreaking books for the time.

Exploring the classical repertoire from Bach to Nino Rota, but also venturing into lands less usually frequented by the cello, O-Celli transcends the boundaries between classical music and cinema for it's third opus at Cypres. Each theme, each melody tells a story, creating an immersive experience that celebrates the very essence of the seventh art. O-Celli fait son cinema is much more than just a concert, it's a musical journey that will take listeners back to some of their greatest cinematic emotions.

Classical Music

Kiki of Montparnasse immortalised by Man Ray: the suggestive curves of a woman, her back with the two sound holes of a violin painted on the body itself, thus turning this feminine body into the most irresistible of musical instruments. Daughter of nothing who wants everything, a free woman unencumbered with conventions, Kiki is the epitome of feminine emancipation and is the inspiration for this discographic programme that illustrates the passage of song to chanson in the course of the twentieth century. The multiple facets of femininity, the audacity, the sensuality embodied by this natural, airy singing within this improbable trio should not deceive us. It is truly a genuine declaration of love that is sung on this recording.

Classical Music

Classical Music