"Echos de la Terre," the first album with Cypres by the highly promising Trio O3, is intended as an aural journey into the immensity and immeasurability of the world around us. Each composition resonates with one of the fundamental elements present in nature. However, the element earth, mentioned in the title of the CD, is not directly linked to any of the four pieces. Rather, it is light (Fiorini) that appears as a crucial element alongside air (Kõrvits), fire (Saariaho), and water (Crumb).

Interpreting these complex works as if they were their mother tongue, Lydie Thonnard, Eugénie Defraigne, and Lena Kollmeier, thanks to their mastery of unconventional playing techniques, bring them to life and fuse their distinct instrumental voices into a harmonious whole, lavishing the listener with unexpected pleasures and profound emotions.

Amorosa, a multicultural musical band based in Brussels, is driven by the voice of Stéphanie Scultore who sings about love in French and Portuguese, drawing us into her poetry between the warmth of Brazilian rhythms and the elegance of jazz harmonies. Amorosa's music is generous. Sometimes voluble, sometimes calm. At once intimate and universal, it draws its uniqueness and its modernity from the way it mixes genres, textures and registers while drawing on popular traditions.
Petit Soleil is an album full of love and humor. Stéphanie drew her inspiration from both the birth of her son and the death of her mother a few months later. The music is a tribute to those who are leaving and those who are coming: the people who live within us, the people who are dear to us and accompany us at every moment in a cycle that renews itself endlessly. Each song pays tribute to a place or a person and evokes something of the sky in the form of dialogue, contemplation, poem, prayer, reverie or legend, telling a story that is both intimate and collective, forming a patchwork of a great landscape.
The time of an album, a day or a lifetime, we sit down facing the sea and the sky to rediscover stories and listen to songs, to remember where we come from…

Apolline. From the Greek ""apellos"", which arouses, inspires creation!

We are delighted to present the first monographic recording dedicated to a young Belgian composer whom we are following closely: Apolline Jesupret. Lueurs is a mirror of our society. Drawing inspiration from both nature and the tragic upheavals of history, her often surprising music questions our place as human beings in a world that is accelerating and sometimes overtaking us.

These fascinating compositions are made up of vibrations and oscillations at multiple speeds, like myriad breaths, each with its own virtue. Like tender glances at the things of life, this music is bursting with innovation and optimism! The musicians of Musiques Nouvelles and the Ensemble Hopper made no mistake and brilliantly defend the music of a composer who has not finished making us hear it!

For the fourth solo album by pianist Élodie Vignon on Cypres, we have long been dreaming of a recording with orchestra! And so begins this fruitful collaboration with Eric Lederhandler, head of the Czech Virtuosi ensemble, of which he has been guest conductor for the past twenty years. Just as Élodie Vignon's first three albums which weave links between music and poetry, this one presents a unique programme, designed by Élodie and Eric to give pride of place to both orchestra and piano.

Manuel de Falla's Nuits dans les jardins d’Espagne quickly established itself as a masterpiece, combining finesse with the need to translate popular Spanish folklore with wit. They are an evocation of Andalusia, and more particularly of gypsy music. Gabriel Fauré's Ballade pour piano et orchestra adds a touch of French Romanticism to this programme.

Leader of the Finnish national school, Jean Sibelius appears here in two different guises through symphonic pieces, ranging from the most exalted Retour de Lemminkäinen to the most intimate of The Bard.

The C#1 project (duo for organ and electronics, Cypres CYP0613), conducted with Cindy Castillo, saw us spend a lot of time in the special world of churches. We played the piece on exceptional organs such as the Thomaskirche in Kassel (Germany) and Brussels Cathedral, often in breathtaking acoustics. At the same time, we wanted to find a way for our duo to exist outside churches without abandoning the instrument around which we work: the organ. Cindy acquired a tiny medieval organetto, barely two octaves long. This type of portable hand-bellowed organ, typically played by angel musicians in religious iconography, was very popular in the Middle Ages before disappearing after the Renaissance.

This instrument is, in fact, the very opposite of a great organ, and that's what makes it so beautiful. Its timbre is fragile and malleable, its sound intimate and full of "impurities" that give it a warmth to which no symphonic organ can aspire. I immediately appreciated its playfulness. In addition to its small, toy-like size, it's a sonic playground on which to achieve some very surprising, almost electronic results. The pressure applied to the bellows has a strong impact on pitch and timbre, making this instrument as organic as it is difficult to master. While I was composing C#2, a duo for organetto and electronics, my second son was born, followed a few months later by Cindy's daughter. Naturally, I wanted to create music steeped in childhood and dreams.

For this reason, C#2 is full of metallic timbres, strange music boxes and vaguely 8-bit sounds remotely reminiscent of old video games. C#2 is also a kind of huge Frère Jacques arrangement (without the irony of Mahler's first symphony). The mountains on the cover are the Dolomites photographed from the Cadore Valley in Italy. The mountains of my childhood vacations. Their majesty and power have always impressed me deeply. Now I realize that they are as fragile as a child. Pierre Slinckx

Soundfulness, the new collection of the Cypres label, is an invitation to plenitude through sounds, frequencies, vibrations and breath. Soundfulness creates a space for dialogue between musical cultures, at the crossroads of traditional, sacred and meditative music. Immediately accessible and sensitive, this music is like an inner journey: it opens our horizon, inspires us and connects us to our deepest roots. To listen to Soundfulness is to offer oneself a time filled with healing sounds, to salute the spirit and the force of nature and to open up to the meditative powers of sounds. Trust in the integrity of the musicians chosen to bring you into new sound rituals. Based on Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (ca. 1151), an electro-medieval oratorio combining Gregorian chant, samplers, synthesizers and cello! Ad Lucem is an intimate and meditative contemporary oratorio for voice, cello and electronics, which takes us into the high spiritual spheres of the soul and invites us to immerse ourselves in an experience of transcendence. Of dramatic and liturgical essence, the original work takes up the story of a human Soul in the grip of doubt and the temptation of Evil, which invokes the divine Virtues to help it fight the Devil. These allegorical characters will take the floor in turn, detailing what makes them strong, and unite in a heavenly army. Jean-Paul Dessy and Romain Dayez bring to light the monodies and Latin texts through their own musical language.

For their first album in the Cypres Open collection, the duo formed by Julien De Borman and Sebastien Willemyns unveils their sound universe full of dreamy and softly electronic sounds.

Flygmaskin, literally flying machine. One can read in it the breath of the wind, the journey that ignores what the visible hides. One can hear the sensitive call of wandering. The machine is the sound, precise and fluid. The fuel? This singular mixture of keyboards, the essential dialogues between the accordionist, the keyboardist and the silence. A subtle invitation to breathe, to take time to get away.

This first monographic CD by Belgian composer Adrien Tsilogiannis is dedicated to his music for ensemble, which is largely dominant in his work. These compositions draw on poetic sources as ecstatic as they are abundant: Eugene Guillevic, Serge Venturini, Jean Moreas, to name but a few.

Here, everything participates in the meeting of sound and atmosphere, the ensembles convened for each piece all seem to share a single breath, a breath at the service of emotion in its universality.

Thomas Van Haeperen and Ensemble Sturm und Klang bring this music to life by giving it a crazy energy, a dimension and a striking relief!

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.

This recording brings to its conclusion the 30th anniversary season of the Cypres label. In an allusion to Confidentes, the first release in this collection, featuring a duet of talented sisters - Marie and Sophie Hallynck - who have had a long history with our label, there is also a sisterly reference here with Tatiana and Anna Sam(o)uil who realise their dream of recording together. They invite us into their world of enchantment, Il Mondo Felice, with a programme that brings together voice, violin and chamber orchestra around the exceptional artiste Maria Malibran.

A desire to transmit in music the history of the glamorous couple Maria Malibran and Charles de Bériot, its intensity and the exceptional quality of their art. The lesser-known repertoire that Maria Malibran sang, such as the masters of past centuries like Johann Sebastian Bach or Henry Purcell, is performed alongside Italian opera, which is represented on this recording by the Ave Maria from Mascagni and Verdi, which, although later, were chosen for their homage to Marie, in whose honour the singer was baptised. Mendelssohn composed his concert aria Infelice for the musical lovers. They conclude this CD with Morgen by Strauss.

This Temps d’Arménie is the musical result of close collaborations initiated by the pianist Laurence Mekhitarian with the three Belgian composers Jean-Pierre Deleuze, Jean-Luc Fafchamps and Claude Ledoux. The unpublished works on this disc are the result of a musical and cultural journey experienced by their authors during multiple trips to Armenia. Laurence Mekhitarian wished to put this musical present Time in resonance with the past Time of traditional music, represented by melodies harmonized by Komitas (transcribed for piano by the Armenian pianist Villy Sargsyan), and with a Monodie written by Jean-Luc Fafchamps for duduk, emblematic instrument of Armenian music. These new musical times are spaces of freedom and express a desire for continuity in the face of the turbulent history of this Armenian people.

After the success of their CD Still Schubert, the Alfama Quartet, in its new configuration, records a new album devoted to the exacerbated romanticism in the music of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. So Far so Close, this shout, this cry that ruptures sound-space. Far Fanny and Close Clara or the contrary. Two female names inseparable from the names of Mendelssohn and Schumann, united here in their melancholy hues and romantic exuberance like a long love letter highlighting the sorrow of separation. Patrick Leterme’s Quartet, solar, ethereal and choral, fuses the tessituras of the four members of the mysterious and subtle formation that is the string quartet. The programme of the Quatuor Alfama brings out the diversity of the relational ties, thereby revealing its own share of intimacy.

There have been in History examples of music that has had a practical, concrete role, a powerful rallying role, an essential role… Elsa de Lacera and Pierre Solot wanted to sublimate the memory of the music that has changed the world by gathering together eleven songs, airs, chansons. Ten Belgian and French composers were commissioned, young and not so young, men and women: they chose their song, their combat, and they were free to revive these memories and historic moments through new compositions. Eleven songs of struggle, of resistance, eleven raised fists in music among so many others in the history of the world, this history that must not be forgotten, its musical memories resonating still in the heart of these eleven creations of today, for change, for peace and for fraternity.

The publication of this anniversary box set celebrating 60 years of Musiques Nouvelles, a true collector's item, brings the 30-year collection of Cypres to a close in the most beautiful way. The 45 masterpieces recorded here reflect the beautiful aesthetic plurality of the creative music composed in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles during the decade 2012-2022. They are added to the 25 compositions of the previous box set released by Cypres in 2012 for the 50th anniversary of Musiques Nouvelles. These 12 albums constitute a shimmering and radiant sound showcase of musical creation through 70 composers whose works constitute an exceptional musical heritage testifying to the extraordinary vitality of creative music in French-speaking Belgium. Share our taste for exploration and let us invite you on a prodigious journey through 45 unique and hospitable soundscapes, 45 universes with subtle lights.

What better way to cross borders and prejudices than to follow in the footsteps of a nomadic and polymorphous music? How does the so-called classical repertoire echo our current geopolitical situation? Sarah Laulan and Élodie Vignon felt the need to bring together singular voices through rare works, too little known, whose commitment bears witness to a humanist and existential vision. The rarity of the contralto voice and the rhythmic energy of the piano contribute to giving this album the archaic character of a cry to abolish forms and restrictions. An invitation to redraw our cartographies with the red ink of dance and pulsations.