A pupil of the famous Nicolas Lebegue, Nicolas de Grigny quickly dazzled his peers with the daring complexity of his writing. His compositions, veritable Baroque gems, captivated even Johann Sebastian Bach, who meticulously copied his entire organ book. The singular work of the former organist of Reims Cathedral is restored in all it's splendour by Michel Bouvard and Francois Espinasse on the keyboards of the Great Organ of the Chapelle Royale.

Francisco Coll is one of the leading composers in today musical landscape. The only pupil of Thomas Ades, his music has been already performed by most important orchestras and such soloists as Kirill Gerstein and Patricia Kopatchinskaja.�This portrait includes works composed along fourteen years, from 2009 to 2023. His brittle, explosive style is indebted to the surreal atmosphere and wild humour of Spanish modernism and further enriched by Spanish folk influences.

This album presents Rune Glerup's (b. 1981) String Quartet No. 2, crafted for and dedicated to Quatuor Diotima, alongside his Clarinet Quintet featuring Jonas Frolund. Glerup's quartet, steeped in Beckettian echoes, captures the absurd beauty of life's endless loops, from park strolls to barroom reveries. The Clarinet Quintet, a labyrinth of musical nods - from Boulez to Brahms - fuses past and present in a tribute to the voices that shaped Glerup's own, creating a sound world both familiar and intriguingly new.

Her intensive frequentation of the works of Liszt has nurtured her sense of narrative and her talent as a colourist. Beatrice Berrut knows how to turn her piano into a veritable orchestra, to mould the sound material, to create profoundly poetic atmospheres and transport us into a dreamlike world. For this musician, who grew up surrounded by nature, has kept her childlike soul and developed an imaginary universe populated by fantastical characters straight out of fairytale, though she does not hesitate to shake up it's codes. Deftly handling the arts of transcription and composition, she tells us these stories in her own way, embracing sensuous delight, frissons and chaos. The magic of fairy tales mingles with the stuff of dreams in this programme, by turns flamboyant and poetic, it's colours alternating between glitter and gentleness. While it begins with excerpts from the great ballet repertoire, it ends with well-known themes from the movie classics The Sword in the Stone and Harry Potter.

This recording sets Ravel's String Quartet in F major, a work that is known and much loved alongside three lesser-known quartets by the French composers Louis Durey (1888-1979), Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) and Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), three of the composers from Les Nouveaux Jeunes who later became Les Six. The friends met and lived in Montparnasse, Paris and composed their quartets around 16 years after Ravel completed his. Ravel's innovative and progressive style as demonstrated in his quartet marked the beginnings of a transitionary period in quartet writing and one that was continued by Durey, Tailleferre and Milhaud with these young composers heralding modernism and signalling a break with the past and the search for new forms of expression. By placing these works alongside one another, this albums gives a fresh and interesting context for the listener and hopefully fosters an interest in the music of this fascinating period of history.

By 2014 eric Montalbetti had amassed 20 years of experience as Artistic Director of the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, all the while he had also been composing, something he had been engaged in since childhood: an activity he did not publicly reveal until 2015. Conscious of the heritage of Debussy and Messiaen ('my very first heroes') as well as skilled in the serialism of Boulez - whose teaching courses he attended at the College de France - and fascinated by the sonic nuances of spectral music, eric Montalbetti seeks a point of convergence, a possible synthesis enabling him to blend modality and serialism, without rejecting the harmonic contours of composers such as Murail. This new album dedicated to Montalbetti's work includes a Flute Concerto, whose commission was encouraged by Emmanuel Pahud: it's telling title is Memento vivere (Remember that you must live).

Paul Huang and Helen Huang have been exploring the repertoire for violin and piano for now a decade. As a way of celebrating their fruitful and enriching collaboration, they have devised this album as an ingenious game of mirroring. The title of this second album for na�ve is not accidental, as the two musicians offer highly diverse perspectives. This new recording focuses first on two sonatas composed by Francis Poulenc (1942-1943) and Sergei Prokofiev (1938-1946) during the second world war of the 20th century, respectively at the opening and closing of this album. Between these two pieces, Spiegel i'm Spiegel by Arvo Part (1978), a page with ethereal lines, a moment of introspection and calm that becomes a space for contemplation and reflection necessary in this otherwise dense and angular programme.

In this 1720 score, Johann Sebastian Bach laid the foundation that would shape the future of the violin in Western music. While building on the contributions of earlier composers, his meticulous craftsmanship-a true compendium of the instrument's virtues-and his vision in terms of musical conception and performance render these Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin a cornerstone. No self-respecting violinist can ignore them, as they serve both as a fundamental study and a lofty aspiration. There is no separation between the performer and the music; their expressive power and technical demands require a lifelong dedication. This is exactly what the excellent violinist Gisella Curtolo tells us: In Spanish, grabar means to leave a mark on a surface, on stone... on a CD. It is something lasting, like a "sculpture of sounds." It is a way to communicate the culmination of our journey, akin to scaling a mountain and reaching the summit, achieving something "epic" that we have been carefully preparing and envisioning year after year. There comes a moment in musicians' life when they feel like the right time to "record" what they have been playing, teaching, and perfecting for many years. This is how I felt as I approached the recording of this immense masterpiece, one of the pillars of the repertoire for violinists of the past, present, and surely the future.

The composer of the chamber music presented here belongs to the large group of musical talents who left the Bohemian groves and meadows to find a place for themselves in the German-speaking world. Georg Druschetzky (1745-1819) chose a military career, became a well-known timpani virtuoso and soon came to the attention of the Hungarian nobility, who appreciated his virtuoso and administrative skills as much as his original creativity. Especially in the field of chamber music for wind instruments, this contemporary of Haydn and Mozart was an inexhaustible source of pleasure. Without rebelling against the great classical forms, Druschetzky knows how to constantly surprise his audience with a subtle refinement that is virtually written on the historical instruments of the Grundmann Quartet around oboist Eduard Wesly. As on the first album, the four of them are completely in their element.

Only few connoisseurs can say without hesitation who preceded Heinrich Schutz as Dresden's Court Conductor. The man's name was Rogier Michael who was born in Mons (Belgium) and was one of the last representatives of the Franco-Flemish school of vocal polyphony, that was sought after throughout Europe. In the meantime, Italy was setting the tone and older composers had to rethink their ways. Michaels succeeded in doing so. Among other things, his catalogue of works, which is not exactly huge, includes an innovative Weihnachtshistorie (1602), which was performed at the Dresden court for 50 (!) years - an all the more astonishing occurrence, as this music is by no means ostentatious. Combining the devotional purity with appropriate contemporary vocal and instrumental movements, a clear simplicity emerges. And so the Christmas Vespers of 1624, which the Ensemble Polyharmonique presents here, is still enchanting today.

In her own words, Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) had been gifted by nature with a "small, invisible engine" that allowed her to do in ten minutes what others needed an hour for. This inner drive can be demonstrated in all areas of this Polish artist's life. She was an excellent violinist from an early age, had success as a writer and wrote her first compositions as a teenager - all at a dizzying pace and yet the quality of her works are not superficial in the least. This new release by cpo is the second in a series of her complete symphonic works. After presenting her Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4, works from the early 1950s, Lukasz Borowicz and the WDR Symphony Orchestra perform more examples of Bacewicz's wealth of expression. These include the neoclassical outbursts of the Overture (1943) and the Second Symphony (1951), the sophisticated, already strongly timbre-oriented Variations for Orchestra (1957) and the Tre movimenti, in which Grazyna Bacewicz had achieved her "late" style - the so-called "sonorism", in which the colour of sound plays an essential structural role. After these "three movements", the "small engine" ran for almost another four years - this phenomenal musician had completed everything faster than the others. Her invisible drive can still be heard here today.

In the late 1960s, the composer Michael Nyman coined the term "minimalism" to describe a new musical aesthetic characterized by a certain simplicity and economy of means. One of the composers associated with this movement, La Monte Young, embraced the term with enthusiasm, while others like Steve Reich and Philip Glass nuanced it with terms such as "music without intention" or "music with a repetitive structure". The term "hypnotic music" might also be appropriate for some works by Simeon ten Holt or Arvo Part, provided we are attuned to the monotonous hum of rain, have a fondness for grey-the languid greys of overcast days-or appreciate a certain suspension of the world. Considered to be the most gifted and promising pianist of his generation in Poland, Szymon Nehring is the only Pole to have won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv (2017). He was also a finalist at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw with only 19 years of age. Szymon Nehring performes with orchestras such as Sinfonia Varsovia, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic, Israel Symphony Orchestra, Bamberger Symphoniker, Hamburger Symphoniker, Orchester philharmonique de Marseille and Orchestre Paseloup in France and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, collaborating with conductors such as John Axelrod, Lukas Borowicz, Sylvain Cambreling, Karina Canellakis, Pablo Heras-Casado, Marzena Diakun, Lawrence Foster, Giancarlo Guerrero, Jacek Kaspszyk, Grzegorz Nowak, Pawel Przytocki, George Tchitchinadze, David Zinman and Omer Meir Wellber. He also performed and recorded with the late Krzysztof Penderecki, among other works Mr. Penderecki�s piano concerto.

The music recorded on Arc I [FHR127] expresses foreboding from the brink of disaster. The music on Arc II [FHR128] was written by composers dealing with tragedy. At last, Arc III is a set of pieces born from the bright points of life. Peace, hope, love, ambition, optimism and the divine - the inspirations are myriad. These compositions spring from the million shades of happiness. Orion Weiss has performed internationally as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. This is his sixth album of solo piano music, his third for First Hand Records. Full biography available at orionweiss. Com

On Midsummer's Night, the real and fairy worlds collide. Four young lovers, faced with the prospect of unhappy marriage or worse, flee the court of Athens and stumble into an enchanted forest. Nearby, a group of amateur actors rehearse a play to celebrate an upcoming royal wedding. As these mere mortals cross paths with a warring fairy King and Queen, chaos reigns in the natural world. The lines between reality and illusion start to blur and no one but mischievous Puck knows what is true and what is magic. Let Shakespeare's captivating comedy transport you to the most magical of midsummer nights. Director Eleanor Rhode's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is both epic and intimate, and completely full of wonder

Storyville Records proudly presents the previously unreleased live double album, Michel Petrucciani Trio, Jazz Club Montmartre - CPH 1988, by the legendary French pianist Michel Petrucciani, due for release on November 15, 2024. Recorded during a memorable performance at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre on July 3rd, 1988, the album captures Petrucciani in the company of two jazz icons, Gary Peacock on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. While the trio only came together for a brief European tour in the summer of 1988, the chemistry they shared on stage was undeniable. The trio, propelled by a studio session the previous autumn, radiates synergy, as they explore six of Michel's original compositions with a sense of grace and spontaneity. On this recording, listeners will rediscover Petrucciani's unique lyrical universe, as well as his reverence for modern jazz icons, paying tribute to Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, and Paul Bley with special arrangements of classics like Someday My Prince Will Come, Mr. K.J. and Turnaround. From the explosive energy of She Did It Again to the introspective beauty of Autumn Leaves, Petrucciani's virtuosic playing reveals a rare sense of urgency, joy, and an unrelenting passion for life. As Gary Peacock and Roy Haynes were at the height of their careers-Haynes playing with Chick Corea and Peacock with Keith Jarrett-they were drawn to Petrucciani, recognizing the greatness of his artistry. Together, they formed a trio, bound by a shared intuition and respect for one another, and this performance at Montmartre is a testament to that fleeting moment of jazz brilliance. This concert took place at the midpoint of Petrucciani's meteoric career, 12 years after his Paris debut and 11 years before his untimely passing. Despite the physical challenges posed by glass bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta), Petrucciani's fierce determination, boundless love for music, and infectious laughter inspired all who knew him. Now, more than 35 years after that magical evening in Copenhagen, we invite listeners to close their eyes and step back in time. July 3rd, 1988... it could have been last night, or it could be tomorrow morning!