Heinrich Laufenberg lived and worked between c. 1390 and 1460 in the Swiss canton of Argovia, southern Germany and Alsace. + He authored a vast body of works, comprising spiritual hymns, didactic epics and religious prose. + This program offers the joy of hearing several of his songs that had remained silent since the 15th c. + Between these lyrical and narrative songs are inserted instrumental pieces from the period. + Ensemble Dragma’s flexible configuration allows them to bring the repertoire of the high and late Middle Ages to life, in all its color and variety, for contemporary audiences.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

For this second recording devoted to French Baroque music for two solo transverse lutes, Marie-C�line Labb� and Marion Treupel-Franck perform the six suites by Pierre Danican Philidor (1681-1731), pieces taken from the three collections published by the composer in Paris in 1717 and 1718. Written in a highly original style in which one senses the spirit of freedom blowing over Versailles and France during the regency of the Duke dOrl�ans, these short suites, in addition to the principal dances in vogue at the court of Versailles in the early 18th century, each comprise a fugue. A few brunettes by Michel Pignolet de Mont�clair (1667-1737) round out the program. The brunette, a little rustic song with an evocative title, was a musical genre quite popular in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The selection proposed here will enable the listener to discover another facet of the work of Mont�clair, the composer who was the object of the two flautists first recording.

Classical Music

This recording explores some of the lesser-known music from 18th-century Vienna that combines solo voice with virtuoso trombones. Many of the arias presented on this CD are drawn from the large-scale oratorios performed in the Imperial Chapel. The music, much of it recorded here for the first time, is by established composers such as Caldara and Fux as well as lesser-known figures like Ziani, Porsile, Tuma and Casati. Alongside countertenor voice and trombones, the ensemble also includes bassoon, violins and continuo, thereby creating an attractive variation of color and timbre throughout the recording.

This well-known set of suites is rarely gone about by most harpsichordists because of it's distinctive virtuosity. It's popular title refers to only one manuscript-the one of J.C. Bach, who noted "fait pour les Anglois" on it. Dubreuil offers US his interpretation of these suites-an impressive reading of highest artistry.

Marin Marais, the most outstanding composer for viola da gamba, was a master in writing Pieces de Caractere, in which he called upon the most diverse subjects for inspiration: La Desolee(The Desolate), La Guitare, Feste Champetre (Country Fair), and Le Tableau de l'Operation de la Taille(A Description of a Gallstone Operation).

•Clavier-Übung III is considered Bach’s most important and most complete organ work, containing some of his most musically complex and technically demanding pieces. Léon Berben gives us his interpretation, a new and fresh view of this milestone in organ music, using the exceptional sound colours of an organ contemporary with Bach and largely preserved in its original state: the Christoph Treutmann organ in Grauhof (Germany).

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Parisian composer Jean Boyer's Recueil d'Airs a boire et danser from 1636 belongs to a genuinely French genre of drinking and dance songs, a more light-hearted offspring of the Air de cour. The latter, a courtly secular strophic song, became one of the most important vocal genres in the first third of the seventeenth century in France. Among the many collections of chansons a boire et a danser of the time, Boyer's are probably the most compelling, both rhythmically and harmonically, and the texts he chose to set to music are generally more refined than some of his contemporaries.' From the mere number of copies of most of these collections extant in many European libraries, we realize how well diffused and popular this type of repertoire was, while it has been left virtually untouched in the twenty-first century.