Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Each culture and civilization has it's own phantoms and intangible myths. Inspired by the Argentine imaginary world of Julio Cortazar, this release is a musical digression into the absurd. A hypnotic and poetic journey. A member of INA GRM (Music Research Group) and in charge of the digitization of GRM's original work, Diego Losa is also a sound manager and technical assistant to guest composers at INA. A Sound Engineering professor at Sorbonne (Paris I) and EICAR Film School, Diego also teaches electroacoustic music at St-Etienne Conservatoire a` rayonnement re�gional. Diego has created music for cinema, radio, the circus and dance performances. Diego performs his own pieces for traditional South American music concerts and in jazz bands. His pieces have been played in France, the U.S, Germany, Norway, Brazil, China, England, Poland and more.

Composer and improviser, Xavier Garcia has produced around thirty electro-acoustic creations at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, at the Groupe des Musiques Vivantes in Lyons, and in his own studio. A member of the ARFI since 1987, he has performed sound sampling and sound treatment in collaboration with musicians like Brian Eno, Heiner Goebbels, Chris Cutler, and Lorenzo Recio. Lionel Marchetti is a composer of acousmatic and concrete music and an experimental improviser with diverse electronic instruments. His musical compositions are considered to be cinema for the ears. Whether in acousmatic music, sound treatment or concrete music, the approach of these researchers is more hands-on than scientific. Their sounds are more forged than treated, the better to twist them, to mold them, like alloys. Goldsmiths in sound, they chisel raw materials, numerically for one, analogically for the other.

The universe of Charles-Eric Charrier and Laurent Komlanvi Bel is composed of textures and structures which transform listening into a form of contemplation. Contemplation of the soundscapes themselves, and contemplation of the moment. Charles-Eric Charrier is far from being a simple instrumentalist: the highly varied, digressive, uncertain and daring itinerary of his evolution defies description... Even though bass is the instrument he prefers, his playing, undemonstrative and to the point, is simply the reflection of research into improvisation and precise writing. Ever since his musical beginnings, he has always been exploring new horizons, enlarging his perspective, going behind the decor and questioning his own music-making in order to draw up the map of his own inner world. Music has always accompanied Laurent Konlanvi Bel throughout his life; for him it is a medium, a poetic language, perceptible yet also untranslatable. The meeting of these two artists charts, in complex simplicity, the map of an incredible sound world, playing with chiaroscuro effects and assertive shadows, like so many shifting approaches to listening.

After graduating from Yale University and earning an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Hugh Levick set off for Paris to write a novel. Eventually, he returned to his musical beginnings and the saxophone, studying and playing with Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and the Chicago Art Ensemble. Later, he studied classical composition at Julliard with Stanley Wolfe and David Diamond, and privately with John Cage and Vinko Globokar. This recording features three of Levick's works for string quartet, played by the Quatuor Diotima.

An opera for radio by Jean-Louis Marchand for big band, slam narrator and sound creation, based on the novel The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy. New Year's Eve 1950: jazz band brass sections blaring from the entrances to each club in the City of Angels. Sin City, Crime Boulevard, Los Angeles wailing with cop sirens at every intersection. Strings of investigating detectives on every corner, in raincoats and sunglasses, puffing cigarettes. The stage is set. Welcome to The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy, integral part of the Los Angeles Quartet, four noir fiction cult novels by the American author. Clarinetist Jean-Louis Marchand's Franco-Belgian big band espouses the twists and turns, the rhythm, and perfectly recaptures the steamy atmosphere, rendered even more effective by incorporating live urban sounds. Slammer Eli Finberg incarnates Malcolm Considine, Dudley Smith, Buzz Meeks, Danny Upshaw, the flamboyant characters of Ellroy's novel. Carrying their voices with power and confounding realism, he becomes a remarkable narrator of a mythical epoch and city, still far from having revealed all it's secrets.

This release serves as a birth certificate of the Ensemble 1529: like a historic date for a music that is constructed as a memory of the eternal present, delving into ancient music and it's spiritual dimension, but also into a quest for a modernity of unfathomable space. With this recorded opus, Renaud-Gabriel Pion explores new sound territories where the providential accident is paramount. Renaud Gabriel Pion is a composer, clarinetist and improvisational musician who divides his time between Paris and Berlin. Classically trained but also largely self-taught, he is currently studying the baroque bassoon in the crr de Paris. He plays augmented instruments (bass & contrabass clarinets, Turkish clarinet, saxophones, bass flute, English horn, nyckelharpa, e.w.i and piano, using real-time electronics).

The music of Philippe Fenelon (born 1952) is in constant dialogue with the history of the arts and literature. Revisiting genres inherited from the past (madrigal, concerto, string quartet), his catalogue contains over a hundred works, both instrumental and vocal. The seven pieces on CD 1 (composed between 1980 and 1994) all make reference to travel -multiple walks through literature, the visual arts or cities, which renew the musical proposals: mythology (Les Combats nocturnes), astronomy (Halley), music (Stockhausen in Epilogue, Bach in the Two Epigrams), ethnography (Zabak), a fresco by Tiepolo (Omaggio) and poetry (Notti)... These various sources of inspiration were to nourish the works to come. The two pieces on CD 2 (Still Dream, composed between 2012 and 2022, and Paleomusique in 2014) are part of this same wandering path through the arts and, more broadly, through a world that has never ceased to show it's diversity and wide-ranging mix of aesthetics and genres.

The Signature label having developed into Radio France's preferred means of expression for multiple form of music, it is now broadening it's space for creation with Radiophonie, an entire collection devoted to illustration in sound. Welcoming today's composers with a curiosity for this purely radiophonic object, one filled with relatively brief forms that are explicit as regards the themes developed or resolved, and sensitive to the sounds of the contemporary world, whether electronic, electro-acoustic or acoustic, this new collection Radiophonie has the vocation of being the place where experimentation meets functionality. It's a meeting place that makes note of the fact that, if the distinction between the different destinations of works of music has faded on it's own, the radiophonic form remains rich in perspectives, images, colors and emotions.

On this new recording, an exceptional duo of musicians from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Hélène Collerette (1st violin) and Anne Le Bozec perform a program of three sonatas. The three works - spanning barely forty-three years, Florent Schmitt's op. 68 (1918-19), Albert Roussel's op. 28 (1924-25) and an early work of André Prévost form 1960-61, conceived when this Ontario-born composer of old Quebec descent was attending classes in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux - epitomize a vibrant period for French chamber music and its sphere of influence. Rhythmic energy galvanizes this Franco-Canadian programme from start to finish, innervating passages of expressive intimacy with the same intensity as wilder pages bristling with vigor.

Classical Music

Classical Music