The interpretation of the complete melodic works of Duparc, this absolute summit in the art of the Lied in the 19th century, calls for a rare mix of youth, experience, interiority and expressivity, in addition to a rare tessitura: a middle range voice in which the extremes are as pleasing as the middle register. Coming from Quebec, Michèle Losier, hitherto applauded on numerous North-American opera stages, impressed the 2008 edition of the Reine Elisabeth Singing Competition by her bewitching art of the recital. This enabled her to meet Daniel Blumenthal, a dream accompanist, and to risk this thrilling adventure in the beautiful hall of the Concertgebouw in Bruges. The result has disconcerting beauty and the added merit of enabling us to admire the lesser known melodies of this great genius, next to his universally celebrated masterpieces. Duparc, who stopped writing at thirty-nine (1884) and painfully survived himself for half a century, offers us the heart and soul of French Romanticism in this interpretation.

HIEROS (in ancient Greek: sacred), performed by the vocal trio of Ensemble Céladon, opens up a musical reflection by alternating medieval music with contemporary composition. With this first album sung entirely a cappella, the ensemble, led by Paulin Bündgen, examines the definition of the ‘sacred’ and its evolution through the centuries. From the thirteenth-century conductus of the School of Notre-Dame to the six works of Jean-Philippe Goude, how has this sentiment, which inhabited and guided the artists of the Middle Ages, evolved? What meaning and place does our modern world give it? As is often the case, the answer becomes tangible when formulated in music.

This composition was commissioned from Bernard Foccroulle for the inauguration of the new organ of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The work’s text consists of fragments from Dante’s Purgatorio. At the beginning, the narrator and Virgil emerge from Hell and climb the mountain that leads to Paradise. The most sublime visions of the sky and nature are scattered throughout the text. The two travelers converse and meet many tormented shades who are awaiting their salvation. Exhausted, Dante falls asleep several times. Towards the end of their ascent, Virgil silently disappears at the very moment when Dante meets Beatrice. Their reunion forms an extremely dramatic scene: Beatrice reminds her friend of his past errors and the betrayals that followed her death. Her bitter reproaches plunge the poet into a state of prostration close to a swoon. But forgiveness comes: Matelda (a beautiful and mysterious lady we have encountered shortly before, who probably represents earthly happiness) comes to meet him, bathes him in the waters of Lethe and entrusts him to four beautiful women who dance and enfold him in their arms. The blazing sun is at its zenith. Regenerated like a young plant, Dante is ready to rise up to the stars.

João Barradas writes: "For my first classical album, I wanted to mix original works for my instrument with transcriptions of works by composers whose art had created and formed my love for Western classical music, and so I created a wide-ranging program. One choice was obvious: the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, then came Domenico Scarlatti and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. My first choices of music written specifically for accordion were works by Luciano Berio and Astor Piazzolla, a composer and a performer who gave the accordion a new musical language. The program is completed with the French composer Yann Robin, who composed his E[NI]GMA for me and made me its dedicatee."

The Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel and the Orchestre Symphonique Bienne Soleure have worked together for several years on producing concerts founded on the concept of apprenticeship, offering renowned artists and promising young musicians the possibility of a residency at the Music Chapel. This collaboration has given rise to the ambitious idea of programming Mozart’s double concertos, with the original feature of partnering a confirmed artist- such as Frank Braley or Louis Lortie- with an emerging talent. The conductor Kaspar Zender and the Orchestre Symphonique Bienne Soleure gave their full commitment to his project which combines the wisdom of experience and youthful ardor, centering on a concert. It was therefore decided to give priority to the experience of live performance in order to preserve the emotion of the artists and the palpable fervor of the audience.

David Chaillou writes of his new release: “The word ‘legend’ suggests to everyone a distant, wonderful story, which is reinvented every time it is told. There is no longer any present or past; we enter the borderless space of the imaginary and the timeless. In composing Légendes, I wanted to create on the piano the same idea of blurring the gap between past and present, and of freedom of the imagination. The eleven pieces on this album are presented as an inner journey, a listening itinerary that forms a kind of narrative thread without words. Illusions, mirages, distortions, echoes: all these effects on which Légendes plays were achieved through a form of intimacy with the piano. The play on contrasts (distance and proximity, emptiness and fullness) and the approach to harmonic texture attempt to create a new sound space that might be described as a spectra-tonal halo. The Finnish pianist Laura Mikkola, who recorded these works, has brought out all their resonances in masterly fashion.”

For Ferruccio Busoni, Bach’s music was the root and the foundation of piano playing. His many transcriptions confirm this point of view, whilst his monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica attempts to provide a conclusion to Bach’s unfinished Kunst der Fuge. Busoni received a great deal of criticism for this, to which he replied “the musical art-work exists both within and outside of Time… there is no Old or New. There is only Known or Unknown”. Today — one century and many fashions of “authentic” ways of performing Bach later — is possibly the time to rediscover the true voice of this great musician; for Bach, music was like “a divine child who did not touch the earth with his feet but floated on air”. Jan Michiels takes you into this divine air with an ‘old’ Bechstein from 1860 as well as with a brand new Straight Strung Grand Piano by Chris Maene.

During the years in which Bernard Foccroulle was successively director of the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, he never ceased to devote himself to his instrument, the organ, regularly making recordings, giving numerous concerts and several premieres. The compositions on this recording range over that thirty-year cycle, from the 1991 premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s Fantasia in Strasbourg to that of Betsy Jolas’s Musique d’autres jours, a piece combining organ with cello that was premiered in Paris in February 2021 during the Présences Festival. His collaboration with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton also resulted in a new composition by Bernard Foccroulle for this organ-cello duo!

Dhrupad is the oldest and purest genre within the North Indian classical music and can trace its origins to the recitation of Sanskrit texts in Hindu temples more than two thousand years ago. Dhrupad reached the Mughal courts in Rajasthan in the 16th century, where it developed into a classical art form. Dhrupad Fantasia is a meeting of the court music of Queen Elizabeth I of England with that of the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great; both monarchs reigned from about 1550 until 1600. Romina Lischka has created a wondrous fantasy in which the modality of Indian ragas is interwoven with the polyphony of Elizabeth I’s England. She, the Hathor Consort and dhrupad vocalist Uday Bhawalkar have created an imaginary world by combining improvisations based on modal ragas and polyphonic instrumental music, both of which originated in the art music of the aforementioned courts.

This project represents a starting point in gently opening up the possibilities of incorporating an element of improvisation into the oeuvre of Bach's chamber music. Given that both Toshi and Anthony are improvising musicians, able and willing to extemporize in a variety of genres (jazz, folk music, early music, etc.), but also being devotees of the repertoire and musical language of Bach, it seemed natural to use certain works of Bach’s as a basis for new invention. The result is a fresh approach to Bach, where improvisation is part of the overall soundscape, whether through ornamentation, basso continuo or entire passages opened up for ‘jamming’. The instrumentation for this program is also diverse, with Toshi and Anthony using two instruments each; broadening the timbral spectrum. This project is, for them, a crucial way in exploring just how we can be both faithful to the score and true to ourselves as creative musicians interested in mastering this musical language.