The violin competition of 1971 marked a first in the history of the competition, as it was a woman who won the First Prize, the Israeli Myriam Fried, who led the way for many other female laureates. That year, the public discovered a young woman from Ghent, timid and outstandingly gifted: Edith Volckaert. She had already won several international competitions, and, with her amazing gifts, had been following since the age of six the classes of one who would be her only teacher: the pedagogue and soloist Carlo Van Neste. She came fifth in the competition, ending her performance of Shostakovich's First Concerto in a state of exhaustion before the man who first performed it and now jury member: David Oistrakh. On this album she can also be heard in the laureates' concert where, now rested, she produced a magnificent performance of Bartok's Second Concerto. The career of Edith Volckaert was shattered 20 years later by an illness that came far too early. She recorded little, and this album enables us to pay homage to her art and to bring back to life what remains one of the finest moments in the history of Belgian laureates at the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

In 2012 a great virtuoso, the Russian violinist Andrey Baranov, won the Queen Elisabeth Competition of Belgium. Although a soloist of the first rank, he is also passionately fond of chamber music; first violin of the David Oistrakh Quartet he founded in 2012, he also plays with his sister, the pianist Maria Baranova. Together they explore in this first album a broad, cosmopolitan repertory from several centuries, in which the virtuosity of the language of the violin is amplified by the technical evolution that blossomed in the late 18th century and by the emotion that different composers sought to put into music. The Russian repertory predominates in this recording with the famous Vocalise of Rachmaninov as well as three works of Tchaikovsky, all composed within three years of each other. In the French repertory, two composers with quite similar musical styles and ideas are on the programme: Maurice Ravel with his highly daunting concert rhapsody Tzigane and Claude Debussy with his tender Clair de Lune. The programme, however, begins in Italy with two emblematic representatives of the virtuoso violin, Tartini and Paganini. Baranov shows himself to be inspired in all these works that constitute the zenith of the virtuoso repertory and his irreproachable technique is always at the service of a violin that sings and will stir every listener.

In 1660 the Restoration put an end to a period of artistic austerity and saw a rebirth of musical life in England, encouraged by a powerful need to be entertained. Many works for harpsichord were published by famous composers, yet also by others who are today quite forgotten. Caroline Huynh Van Xuan presents an original and hitherto unrecorded programme of "grounds" that enables one to rediscover the repertory and the vitality of the English music scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. After her music studies at the Lyons Regional Conservatory in harpsichord, piano, chamber music, and teaching, Caroline Huynh Van Xuan joined the harpsichord class of Francoise Lengelle at the main Lyons Conservatory where she worked with Dirk Borner, Jaky Piscione, Pablo Kornfelt, and others. She currently teaches at the Marselles Regional Conservatory.

If there is one ‘chansonnier’ who has no difficulty in travelling through time it is certainly the French artist Georges Brassens, with on the one hand his extraordinary repertory of more than 200 songs and, on the other hand, his highly particular, original, simple and gravelly art of song. Brassens is above all a voice: an original voice, the voice of a storyteller, of a poet who lyrically relates stories that astonish. There is also the guitar that seems to be a mere accompaniment and yet the harmonies it offers are both effective and subtle, perfectly placed to bring out the power of the words. Yet Brassens is first and foremost this great ‘chansonnier’, in the purest tradition of his elders, going back several centuries: bards and minstrels, singers of texts and poems, admirers of Villon, Ronsard, Hugo, Nerval, Béranger, Vadé and Rousseau, who understood that the French language was so beautiful when it was sung. These text songs, ballades and complaints, chants and romances come from those practices of the troubadours, where the poet declaimed in music his literary diversions, and Monsieur Brassens is the transmitter of this vast, inexhaustible, indomitable encyclopedia that was the French ‘chanson’ for over a thousand years. With this ‘singing tour’ of the musical world of Georges Brassens, Arnaud Marzorati and La Clique des Lunaisiens, specialists in the historic patrimony of the French song, create an original and recent chapter of what was the favorite repertory of the French between 1960 and 1980. To be true, Brassens is the guiding thread of this programme, yet Arnaud Marzorati covers almost five centuries of songs to offer a programme that is original and colorful. The choice of unusual instruments to accompany the voice – tin whistle, bassoon, viola da gamba and archlute – recreate a musical atmosphere that is totally acoustic and baroque in order to increase the astonishment and wonderment arising from this extraordinary vocal repertory.

The evening and nightfall are universal themes conducive to writing, to music, to painting; they pass through us and inspire in us contrasting feelings between beauty and darkness, light and shadow, sleep and dreams. The movement towards twilight is a mix of sweetness and warmth, yet also melancholy, for it takes each of us back to our solitude. For some, sleep is synonymous with peacefulness whereas for others it gives rise to worry; everyone hopes, however, that the night will do away with all torment. This programme brings together songs, lieder and opera arias; if the songs written to the poems of Verlaine or Éluard see their texts take on capital importance, the others are calm, like simple lullabies, the text moving into the background. Some of these works have cradled our childhoods and are very well known, but, nonetheless, this album also includes many discoveries. All these pieces are beautiful, they touch and appease us, for in the end what do we need to sleep peacefully? A ritual, reassuring habits, a cuddle, a lullaby. This project is above all the gift of a mother to her children, with the special feature that this mother is an opera singer of international standing: the soprano Eugénie Warnier. Accompanied by the pianist Marine Thoreau La Salle and the quartet Les Heures du Jour for the delicate arrangements of certain works, she shares with you, with sincerity and passion, the intimacy of bedtime with her own children.

Franz Schubert’s output for violin and piano consists of only six opus numbers, even though he was well able to play this instrument, having learned it during his childhood and regularly playing it in chamber music. The three sonatas in this recording date from the spring of 1816. Their modest dimensions, “for pianoforte with accompaniment of violin” - an old-fashioned formulation evoking the eighteenth century - led to their being published as ‘sonatinas’, even though their facility is only apparent and in no way reflects their nature, nor Schubert’s intentions. They correspond to a fertile period for the composer and are contemporary with his Fourth Symphony, his Stabat Mater, the composition of his opera Die Bürgschaft, much chamber music and, of course, lieder – the final draft of Marguerite at the Spinning Wheel and the Erlkönig date from March 1816. Schubert also experienced great personal changes, and with the support of a circle of acquaintances that expanded in the direction of an artistic, intellectual and liberal elite that was betting on his talent, he took it upon himself fully to become a composer. These sonatas are the work of a composer aged 19 who, in admiration of Mozart, drew close to the worlds of Weber and Beethoven. Indeed, the spirit of Mozart runs right through these three sonatas, he who represents the crucial reference at this time, and certainly was such for Schubert. Yet without imitating the master, Schubert rewrites the ‘Mozartian’ sonata, romanticizes it, opens it out to the new century. Two muso artistes, both with long experience as chamber musicians, have got together to play these magnificent pieces: the excellent violinist Stéphanie Paulet and the pianist Daniel Isoir, who for the occasion plays an outstandingly beautiful Schott piano of 1835.

Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition 1991: Braley, Frank

From the middle of the sixteenth century the reputation for excellence of the composers of Northern Germany was well established. Given dynamism by commercial exchanges thanks to the bustling activity of the port of Hamburg notably, the cities of the Hanseatic League welcomed many foreign workers, their customs inspiring the artistes of the Germanic tradition. At the end of the seventeenth century, Hamburg was a free city sheltered from war, a refuge for artistes and for great fortunes. It was then the most cosmopolitan city in Germany and its population included a great number of merchants, bankers, diplomats and senators, so many men who were rich and who had the time necessary for enjoying music and for encouraging this flourishing art. As close friends, Johann Adam Reinken, Dietrich Buxtehude – both admired by Bach – and Johann Theile belonged to the circle of contrapuntists of Northern Germany, finding inspiration, however, in the monodic stile nuovo of Italy, championing the idea that music should be at the service of the drama. This musical circle, both professional and friendly, met frequently at Abendmusiken, or musical evenings, created in 1646 in Lübeck by Franz Tunder, organist of the Marienkirche who was to be succeeded by Buxtehude. Organists, great improvisors, the music of the four composers of this programme often comprises suites of short movements in each of which occur identical or related harmonic and melodic elements, characteristics of improvisation and peculiar to the stylus phantasticus, a musical movement dear to composers of this period. For their second album for muso, the Ensemble Stravaganza returns to its favorite repertory to offer a release that is virtuosic, lyrical, richly sonorous and colorful, and is performed with astonishing naturalness.

During the Queen Elisabeth Competition 2016, a young Italian pianist aged 19 garnered a lot of attention. Alberto Ferro, already a laureate of many prizes, won the Audience Prize before winning one year later First Prize and Audience Prize at the International Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn. Especially limpid playing, both analytical and sensitive, served by faultless technique, this is what was so promising and it is confirmed with his first recording, one the young Sicilian devoted to Rachmaninov, one of his favorite composers. When writing his Etudes-Tableaux, Rachmaninov was already the composer of a consequential catalogue for solo piano; the writing for ‘his’ instrument had thus attained a very high level of sophistication and subtlety adding to an incomparable understanding of the instrument’s powers of expression. The Russian master let slip very few indications concerning his sources of inspiration for these 17 miniatures, leaving it to the listener to work on his imagination! The virtuosity required for these albums is far from being an end in itself, it being rather the means of expression for the feelings to be expressed. These two albums are marked by the dazzling liveliness of this music: at times virile and imperious, at times subtle and discreet, yet always at the service of an astonishingly broad palette of emotions.

Born in L�dz (Poland) Grazyna Bacewicz is the most eminent inheritor of the 19th century violinist-composers in the lineage of her compatriot and predecessor Henryk Wieniawski. She was one of the most important composers of the mid-20th century, a remarkable concert artiste who left a catalogue of over 200 works, including five Sonatas and a Partita for violin and piano as well as two solo violin sonatas that feature in this boxset commemorating the 50th anniversary of her death. Her style is close to the French neoclassicism of the interwar period, though she increases it's vitality and clarity while infusing it with a blend of delicacy and highly individual rigor. All her works reveal rhythmic sophistication and a characteristic approach to metre, a juxtaposition of exuberance and lyricism. In short, music that is vivacious, sensitive and mischievous; the composer excelled in her treatment of a stringed instrument while in parallel drawing out the lines of a piano part bristling with life. The French violinist Annabelle Berthom�-Reynolds loves rare, powerful scores. She has imbued herself with this music and with her partner the Bulgarian pianist Ivan Donchev, they both fill this music with vitality and poetry to make this boxset a real discovery and already a classic interpretation.

The intimacy, the proximity of the song stems from this special dialogue between voice and piano in which poetry can be found as much in the text as in it's musical transcription, with a refinement of elocution and musical form. The French art of the song ('la m�lodie') was born in the early years of the nineteenth century, and the greatest composers excelled in it, from Gabriel Faur� to Claude Debussy, not forgetting Reynaldo Hahn and others less celebrated but no less fascinating, such as D�odat de S�verac. The programme of this release revisits songs originally conceived for voice and piano, here transcribed for guitar. The delicacy of the plucked strings reinforces this proximity between the two languages, poetic and musical, as if the spider-like touch of the guitar was better suited than the paradoxically heavier finesse of the piano. This project, however, is above all the outcome of long years of work from the Duo Varnerin, a knowledgeable blend of a beautiful family story and a delicate musical encounter. After having followed an individual path with their own experiences before, sister and brother joined forces to unite their knowledge, their techniques and their musical affinities in the service of an uncommonly rare programme, with all the tenderness and refinement that these gems of French song deserve.

In order to celebrate the centenary of Boris Vian’s birth, Arnaud Marzorati gives an account of the relationship between the furious creators of the late 19th century and this artiste intoxicated with liberty, mad keen on jazz whom it would take a long time to be considered one of the most inventive of the 20th century. Vian is the art of the absurd, a regenerating libertarian, a schoolboy man of letters with an agile laugh who writes simple stories to enrage serious people, seeking to annoy the middle class and conventions. A writer, composer and author of 450 chansons, he had a brief career as a singer. After his death at the age of 39 in 1959, it would take time to construct the legend of him as a genius emerging too early, a precursor of the rebel values of the sixties, of post May 1968 hedonism or of the individualism of the 1980s… For this homage album, Les Lunaisiens have chosen to feature Vian’s fetish instrument: the trumpet. Surrounding this, a double bass, accordion, bandoneon and ukulele rejoice and revisit some at times forgotten standards. Agathe Peyrat is the warm, lyrical voice, complementing that of Arnaud Marzorati, masculine and male. This Highway Code completes the unique history of the ‘French chanson’ that Les Lunaisiens have for years been retracing.

The Golden Violin, Andrey Baranov’s first solo album, received an excellent welcome and was hailed by the press for “his flamboyant virtuosity, his imagination, his sense of drama, limitless instrumental mastery, a sensitivity that can reach the state of grace.” The Russian violinist today launches the first part of an exploration of the solo violin repertory, tackling some of the greatest and most beautiful pieces of three composers who, in the course of three successive centuries, became masters of violin writing: Bach, Paganini and Ysaÿe. Composed in 1720, the Sonatas and Partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach are fundamental works that push back the boundaries of the instrument; Bach opened up the violin to hitherto unsuspected possibilities and composed a summit of the repertory that is revolutionary in its dramatic impact. These six works seem indeed to show the composer’s suffering and solitude, yet they also convey hope and the vital force. It was after having heard the Sonatas and Partitas of Bach that Eugène Ysaÿe embarked on the composition of his own Sonatas for solo violin during the summer of 1923. They portray the evolution of violin techniques and certain important characteristics of early twentieth-century music, giving new credentials of nobility to solo violin music. Between the two, Niccolò Paganini undoubtedly pushed the virtuosity of his instrument to extreme limits. His 24 Caprices for solo violin, published in 1820, are gems of virtuosity and character and form so many brilliant concertos as much as transcendental studies. As with Bach and Ysaÿe, they also manifest magnificent poetry and an extraordinarily adventurous imagination, as much melodically as harmonically. Andrey Baranov has chosen to record seven of these Caprices, concluding his programme with the staggering No. 24, the culmination of all the techniques used in the previous caprices.

Arnaud Marzorati and his Lunaisiens are indefatigable explorers of the French chanson in all it's guises, all it's periods, and in all it's very different styles. With Sainte-H�l�ne, Les Lunaisiens turn a new page of History in chansons. On 5 May 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte passed away. It was the end of the extraordinary epic of a little corporal who became emperor of the French. Idolised, detested, no matter: he was omnipresent, and particularly in the world of the chanson. It is his history that Arnaud Marzorati is singing in this album. Backed by a trio of leading singers, Les Lunaisiens are accompanied this time by Les Cuivres Romantiques; these latter enable us to listen to the original pieces as played by the wind band of the Garde Consulaire, later Imp�riale. The world of Napoleonic music, however, is not just illustrated on the battle front and this album casts light onto other sectors of the music in the time of the Emperor. First of all, the street, where the popular singer would assail the crowds, be they veterans or conspirators. Secondly, there is the salon with the romance as performed here by Sabine Devieilhe, witness to an art of elegance and refinement '� la fran�aise' that played a leading role in the sacralisation of the figure of the Emperor. With this vivid, varied album, with a surprising range of sounds, Arnaud Marzorati and Les Lunaisiens offer us a masterful sound track of the life of Napoleon.

75 Years Ysaÿe & Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition