Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge/Lachrymae/Two portraits/ Simple Symphony. This programme is largely devoted to striking works of a youthful Britten, the great British composer. The extremely talented European Camerata orchestra is conducted by violinist Laurent Qu nelle, and has only been recorded once before.

Jean-Luc Votano, principal clarinet of the Li�ge Royal Philharmonic (OPRL), here presents a work by a 'classic' figure of the twentieth century, the Kammerkonzert for clarinet, string quartet and string orchestra of Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1930), along with two compositions of the twenty-first: Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, of which Votano gave the Belgian premiere with the OPRL, and Fantasme - Cercles de Mana by Johan Farjot. The latter work, scored for clarinet, viola, cello and orchestra, here receives it's world premiere recording before being performed in front of a concert hall audience. This is an album that admirably reflects the virtuosity and musicality of one of the OPRL's principal soloists.

This fourth album by philharmonie zuidnederland includes works by Darius Milhaud, Charles Koechlin, Duncan Ward and Edward Elgar. Principal conductor Duncan Ward takes you on a symphonic journey with Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde for small orchestra, after which we fly to the stars in Charles Koechlin’s mysterious Vers la voûte étoilée — Koechlin had first intended to become an astronomer. We then travel further afield with Ward’s own Fumes; Ward had studied in India with sitar legend Ravi Shankar before joining him in California. The album ends with Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Elgar portrayed fourteen of his closest friends in this enigmatic, humorous and moving work.

Marius Constant, who had an intimate knowledge of DeBussy's Pell�as et M�lisande, published Impressions de Pell�as, published in 1992 an abridged version for six singers and two pianists. In an intense flow of music, he telescopes the five acts with great finesse, removing a few scenes and making a fair number of cuts and a few minimal adjustments to the musical material. For the scenography, he suggested, "We are in an early twentieth-century salon." This reflects the fact that during the genesis of Pell�as, DeBussy regularly played fragments of it for his circle of friends. In this version, both listeners and performers are involuntarily swept towards the origin and essence of DeBussy's masterpiece: a "music of the soul" in which we can all recognize our own M�lisande, Pell�as, Arkel, Genevi�ve, Yniold and Golaud. This chamber version of the opera is completed by the Pr�lude � l'apr�s-midi d'un faune in DeBussy's own transcription for two pianos and the suite en blanc et noir. The two pianos used are the new straight-strung instruments built in Belgium by Chris Maene at the request of Daniel Barenboim.

Under the title 'Origins', this album brings together works by composers of the first half of the twentieth century who frequently found inspiration in the musical traditions of their country. This musical journey travels across Europe from France to the borders of Asia. If B�la Bart�k's role in this field of the integration of popular traditions into classical language is indisputable, the personalities of the other composers assembled here deserve to be discovered. The Jewish composer Erwin Schulhoff was one of those whose works were relegated by the Nazi regime to this category of 'degenerate music'. The Azerbaijani Fikret Amirov and the Armenian Arno Babajanian were victims of the constraints of the Soviet regime. And although Charles Koechlin produced an imposing catalogue of works, he suffered throughout his life from the fact that his career as a composer was eclipsed by his reputation as a theorist. All these works inspired by national music are contemporary with the political turbulence that agitated Europe between the two world wars, but also with the numerous movements that caused major upheavals in every artistic field during the same period.

The fusion between the string quartet, the perfect expression of the European 'classical' tradition, and the bandoneon, the musical embodiment of Argentina, is presented here in two quite different works. The Five Tango Sensations were originally written for Lutz Mommartz's experimental film Tango durch Deutschland. In 1989, Piazzolla resurrected five of the original seven pieces in response to a commission from the Kronos Quartet, renaming them Five Tango Sensations. This work occupies a special place in the ocean of Astor Piazzolla's music for two reasons: it is his only suite for bandoneon and string quartet, and it departs from the standard Piazzollian framework in both form and language. The suite Les Hommes de Piaf was originally a series of arrangements for string quartet and bandoneon based on tunes from the repertoire of Edith Piaf. But the composer's pen trumped the arranger's, imposing a texture in which the songs no longer play the leading role. Neither descriptive nor abstract, the suite Les Hommes de Piaf is merely a fantasised expression of states in which love can be by turns paradoxical, destructive, idealised, impossible or sensory, through a kaleidoscopic 'Piaf filter'.

Rachmaninoff's Third and Second Symphonies are distanced from each other not only by thirty years but also by the turning point in history that bisected the destiny of the Russian intelligentsia. Rachmaninoff was full of creative energy and aspirations while writing the Second Symphony, in 1906-1907, even though he sought solitude in Dresden to feel the breath of his Motherland from a distance and to relate his own destiny to it. He was already a different person by the mid-1930s, struggling with the aftermath of his fate as an exile and summing up his life. He wrote this new work about Russia and himself - which was to become the Third Symphony - at villa Senar in Switzerland. The geographical distance was aggravated by the distance in time: a gravitation towards the cherished past, to which it was impossible to return. The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Liss has repeatedly performed the Third Symphony in both Russia and abroad; they also performed it in La Folle Journee festival in Nantes in 2018. The orchestra's interpretation of Ravel's La Valse is similarly iconic; this gained particular recognition from European critics and opened the doors to the world's leading stages.