2021/22, a cultural season unlike any other, brings the 30th anniversary of Cypres. Musical renewal and reinvention is of the essence for any record label in today’s environment. An enterprising spirit; a constant quest for newly composed works; firm roots in the local musical landscape; representation of prestigious names and advocacy of young talent: all these are elements that constitute our particular creative formula. Now that we are 30 years old we can confidently take pleasure in sharing our musical philosophy with you. This fifth album in our anniversary series offers a real Christmas odyssey, a journey through time in search of our childhood memories: Tino Rossi for some, Jingle Bells for others. Composer and arranger Aldo D. Platteau has carefully selected the most beautiful existing Christmas carols and assembled them into a fresco of Seven popular and traditional Christmas scenes for choir, soloists and instrumental ensemble. These musical pictures allow us to reconnect with our traditions and give us the intimate conviction that there is a magical dimension to life - the magic of Christmas!

What can sound better than a cello? Eight cellos! This instrument, the closest to the human voice, is one of the few which carries being multiplied. When played together with others, the beauties of this instrument add up, giving birth to a unique, full and exceptional sound. Eight solo cellists, all chamber musicians and concert artists, combine their energies and dreams in order to create an audacious and astonishing program, full of warmth and sensuality in the southern sun. Each arrangement is for them a challenge and a pleasure. Flamenco spirit, impressionist poetry or epicurean appetite, gentle grace and sentimental melody, melancholic tango or festive mambo… this album is a burning invitation to travel.

Death and the Maiden, a masterpiece of the romantic repertory for string quartet, this album associates the gentle melancholy that impregnates Schubert’s lieder as arranged and reappropriated by Jean-Luc Fafchamps : here is an atypical cycle of melodies as a kind of progressive contamination of the Viennese master’s music by sounds taken from the Belgian composer! From harmonic modifications to the addition here and there of some twentieth-century instrumental techniques we are starting a conversation with Franz Schubert- a desire for melancholy and a tender sorrow. The Alfama Quartet is entirely open to these new encounters, inviting Albane Carrere’s pure and touching voice to join.

M#1 for string quartet and electronics, integrates electronics into the intimate world of chamber music that requires the presence and mutual listening of each musician. The Belgian composer Pierre Slinckx thus forms an unexpected quintet with the MP4 Quartet, playing from a custom-made portable computer with two small MIDI controllers. This unusual instrument has been designed through the process of composition in a very organic way, in order to blend to the sound of the quartet. Pierre Slinckx studied composition and in-depth writing at ARTS2, especially with Claude Ledoux, Jean-Pierre Deleuze, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Gilles Gobert and Denis Pousseur. He today teaches there in-depth writing. As a composer, he is regularly solicited by ensembles that commission him instrumental and mixed works. Winner of the 2013 Henri Pousseur Prize and the 2015 André Souris Prize, which reward promising young composers, he is a member of the LAPS ensemble as a composer and laptop performer. Cypres label offers him a double carte blanche and invites you to discover his sound universe by simultaneously releasing his first two albums: C#1 for grand organ and electronics and M#1 for string quartet and electronics.

The miniatures of Komitas have the merit of being able to condense in a few minutes all aspects of Armenian musical culture. Each of them is an invitation to travel, allowing us to discover the soul of a country through its music, both joyful and nostalgic. Thanks to his arrangements for string quartet, Serguey Aslamazyan gives these miniatures their nobility and amplifies their emotional impact without distorting the message they convey. This message of peace and hope is also the one that Eugénie Alécian wishes to transmit to us with Un quatuor arménien, a powerful work narrating a country that never stops dancing and singing despite the intense pain.

Here is a perfect opportunity to celebrate a double anniversary, firstly the 60th birthday of composer Claude Ledoux, and secondly the 30th anniversary of Cypres! This album offers us a selection of works composed between 1994 and 2017 and chosen from a large catalogue of piano pieces. The Japanese e-mails, which give this release its title, are a message of resistance to the watchword that is ours today: e-mail. Resistance to this fast, frenetic communication, always with the hope of a reply within minutes. These meticulously crafted pieces propose to rediscover the slowness of the written letter, designed to dilate our time as hurried men.

“A perfect alchemical fusion of poetry and music.” (Guido Morini) Cypres has grouped within its collection Cypressentiel three indispensable albums of Italian vocal music from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century, three compilations out of stock since their appearance in 2005, 2006, and 2007: Frottole, Recitar cantando, and Il settecento Napolitano. More than ten years later, far from having gained a single wrinkle, they are regularly in demand, iconic examples of the highly demanding work of Accordone, founded by Marco Beasley and Guido Morini in 1984, both fascinated by the musicological approach to performance at this period. This is a collection of musical miniatures that sing of human passion.

2021/22, a cultural season unlike any other, brings the 30th anniversary of Cypres. Musical renewal and reinvention is of the essence for any record label in today’s environment. An enterprising spirit; a constant quest for newly composed works; firm roots in the local musical landscape; representation of prestigious names and advocacy of young talent: all these are elements that constitute our particular creative formula. Now that we are 30 years old we can confidently take pleasure in sharing our musical philosophy with you. For her third album, Élodie Vignon chooses the voice of romanticism. Like her first two albums, which presented mirrors between music and poetry, then between two French aesthetics, she proposes here a cross between the intimate Franz Liszt and the young Isaac Albéniz. Although the two romantic composers were of different origins, the two aesthetes were united by their taste for travel and their affinity with France, its language and culture. Liszt and Albéniz both met Debussy, who remains the epicenter of the recording work in which Elodie wishes to engage. "Dans l'air du soir" proposes the exploration of a period that finds its direct lineage in the piano of the beginning of the French 21st century. We first discover Albéniz's Suite espagnole, which paints a sensory and olfactory portrait of traditional Spain. Mirroring this fresco, the Liszt of the three sonnets appears sensual and spiritual at the same time, revealing a virtuosity never devoid of poetry in the three concert studies.

2021/22, a cultural season unlike any other, brings the 30th anniversary of Cypres. Musical renewal and reinvention is the essence for any record label in today’s environment. An enterprising spirit; a constant quest for newly composed works; firm roots in the local musical landscape; representation of prestigious names and advocacy of young talent: all these are elements that constitute our particular creative formula. Now that we are 30 years old we can confidently take pleasure in sharing our musical philosophy with you. This first recording of our anniversary season provides a showcase for two gifted sisters who go back a long way with Cypres. Their joy in performing together is palpable as they present a program that is original in its conception, intimate and deeply touching. This album contains a number of pieces that evoke memories – the musical equivalent of photos in a box in the attic. Some are original compositions for this instruments set, others have been arranged by the two sisters for the occasion. What would Frédéric Chopin have thought when he heard this arrangement of his Etude n°7 op. 25 sounding like a dialogue between cello and harp? This music is the very essence of life: a subtle sway of memories, flashes of light, tears, death and smiles.

Many opera composers wanted to give the clarinet an importance equal to that of the voice. This album features hits from the Italian romantic opera from, among others, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Cavalleria Rusticana, and adapted for a clarinet choir. If these operas have inspired many adaptations and arrangements, it is to meet the need, once the curtain down, to relive at home the thrills of the operatic scene, when the record did not exist yet. IMEP's Clarinet Choir was founded by Jean-Luc Votano. This clarinetist, established at the age of just 23 at the time of the Cypres recording of Concertos for Clarinet in 2006, is today also a renowned teacher. Lyrical and festive, the Clarinetti all’Opera programme inaugurates the Cypres-Imep collection, which will be guided by the desire to offer an essential experience to young musicians, in the company of professional soloists, in the conception, recording and dissemination of unique programmes.

"Fin de nuit" invites you to a profusion of notes intended for the orchestra by the magician of sound Philippe Boesmans. The three pieces on this album (Concerto for violin, Capriccio for two pianos and orchestra and Fin de nuit for piano and orchestra that gives its title to this album) – commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège – underline the solidity of the bond between the composer and the orchestra. This album is released on the occasion of Gergely Madaras taking up his position as musical director of the orchestra, as if a new day were beginning. Born in Belgium Philippe Boesmans studied piano at Conservatoire de Liege before choosing a composing career. Initially influenced by serialism, he soon felt it necessary to break beyond its constraints and exclusions. Never dismissing this heritage, he has nonetheless developed a profoundly personal musical language, at the very center of which lays meaningful communication with the audience.

For this portrait album, which inaugurates their collaboration with Cypres, the Fractales ensemble has chosen to bring together four key pieces from their repertoire, four quintets in which the alchemy between the ensemble's sound and the work of the composers is revealed, the fruit of numerous exchanges between musicians and creators. Saturated textures, erased melodies, extra-western inspirations and games of temporality are among other things on the program of this adventure. Fractales symbolically evokes the vision that the ensemble has of today's musical composition: a scene that is infinitely fragmented, irregular and plural, but in which each creation illustrates a common and shared search for the individualization of musical languages. Their artistic work aims to highlight this diversity, while bringing together these writings in a spirit of sound exploration.

Cypres is celebrating its 30th anniversary in this 2021/2022 season, which is so special for culture. This second volume of the Cypres_Imep collection has offered students of the Royal Institute of Music and Pedagogy in Namur the opportunity to experience the founding of a recording. This new program offers the students and teachers of the IMEP the opportunity to pay tribute to a musician and composer who was one of the eleven founding members of their Institute in 1970: Maurice Guillaume. Indeed, this tribute to Maurice Guillaume (1899-1983), a discreet musician of the 20th century, is the result of the will of several actors of the musical and associative world: first of all, the Maurice Guillaume association, which since 1996 has set itself the priority goal of promoting the national and international recognition of the composer's work. In 2015, it transferred its documents to the IMEP where the important Maurice Guillaume Fund was created. This recording offers you a wonderful journey through his work.

For its second recording for Cypres, Kheops immerses us in works that give pride of place to the clarinet, an instrument whose expressive possibilities fascinated the most original creators in the Habsburg capital at the turn of the 20th century. Brahms's Trio op. 114, dominated by autumnal colors, is an end-of-life work, imbued with a form of renunciation and resignation. The early Four Pieces op. 5 exude a striking expressiveness, the kind of expressiveness that Alban Berg preserved across styles and compositional techniques. And in his Trio op. 3, Alexander von Zemlinsky, who makes no secret of his admiration for the Brahms piece, develops an intense and tumultuous harmonic universe that marks the generational leap between them Kheops, a variable-geometry group combining winds and strings under the sign of individual virtuosity at the service of the collective, radiates maturity and carries chamber music high in Belgium.

The recording of this Chanson du vent is a celebration of Adolphe Biarent. This greatly neglected composer emerged from the shadows thanks to three album releases by Cypres. The cycle of Huit mélodiesfor mezzo-soprano completes this process aiming as it does to highlight an exceptional musical personality through world premiere recordings. Such an action can only work when based upon the total dedication of thoroughly committed performers who enhance a program inspired by the musical Orientalism, or artistic fascination with Middle Eastern, North African, and Turkish cultures, in vogue at that time.