This recording was made under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw in December 2019, two months before his death. A few weeks before that, he had called Thomas Dieltjens, artistic director of Het Collectief, to tell him: ‘Since our concert in mid-July 2019, ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ has constantly been on my mind. I am totally fascinated by it and discover new things in it every day. It would be a dream if we could record this music with the exceptional cast of musicians and soloist singers of the Saintes festival, and preferably the sooner the better.” Words failed, as can be gathered from the many concert reviews they received. Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ is already so much more than just music, it encompasses life as a whole, from early birth till death. Reinbert de Leeuw made of this masterpiece an exceptionally refined arrangement for 15 instrumentalists and 2 soloists. How Reinbert manages to render the full force of Mahler’s original score in his arrangement is unparalleled. There is the addition of the harp, some percussion, a contrabassoon and a bass clarinet. With the harmonium as an essential link between cords, winds, percussion and piano. One lacks ears to feel the richness of Reinbert’s arrangement. This is pure musical delight.

Alexandre Bloch, who has been Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lille since 2016, has chosen to devote a whole season of concerts to Mahler’s symphonies. The Seventh (1904-05) is the most rarely recorded of the cycle – unjustly, because this work later nicknamed ‘Song of the Night’ testifies as clearly as its companions to the metaphysical grandiloquence that haunted Mahler during its gestation. From the gloomy Adagio of the first movement to the thundering Rondo that concludes the work, Alexandre Bloch and his orchestra lead us from the anguish of twilight to the ecstasies of dawn.

An emblematic figure of her time, Nadia Boulanger taught and inspired several generations of musicians, from Igor Stravinsky to Quincy Jones. Her musical and pedagogical philosophy, demanding yet highly stimulating, influenced the entire twentieth century. Astrig Siranossian, a rising star of the cello who now joins Alpha for several recordings, is fascinated by this musical personality whom everyone respectfully called ‘Mademoiselle.’ She met some of her most illustrious students, including the late Michel Legrand, and Daniel Barenboim who has agreed to accompany her in a piece on the album. With the pianist Nathanael Gouin, she has devised a very eclectic programme, including the three pieces for cello and piano written by Nadia Boulanger in 1915, three years before the death of her sister Lili. A wide-ranging album, featuring Igor Stravinsky’s Suite italienne, Elliott Carter’s Cello Sonata, Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango, Tissue No. 7 by Philip Glass, Soul Bossa Nova by Quincy Jones, and music by Michel Legrand and others. Merci, Dear Mademoiselle!

Until the late 1680s, Henry Purcell composed almost exclusively for the royal court. But when the monarchy decided to reduce its expenditure on music in 1690, he joined the United Company, a London theatre company, and devoted himself to composing for its productions. These took varied forms, with operas such as King Arthur (1691), The Fairy Queen (1692) and The Indian Queen (1695) but also spoken plays with music, such as The Virtuous Wife (1695). It is excerpts from these works that are presented in Tyrannic Love. Compositions by Purcell’s colleagues or followers John Blow, John Eccles, Jeremiah Clarke and Daniel Purcell complete the programme. This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between Alpha and the ensemble Les Surprises, founded in 2010, which takes its name from Les Surprises de l’Amour by Rameau, the group’s emblematic composer. Under the artistic direction of Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas, who is also an organist and harpsichordist, the ensemble presents innovative interpretations and explores the rich orchestral sonorities made possible by the use of Baroque instruments.

REVIEW:

Usually to be found exploring the less familiar names of the French Baroque, the period group have crossed the Channel for this exhilarating, no-holds barred romp through vocal and instrumental music by Purcell, Blow, Eccles and Jeremiah Clarke. The theme is love, but there’s nothing coy or sugary about either music or performances that embrace extremes of emotion and expression. There’s delight after delight here, both in repertoire – which includes plenty of lesser-known treasures – and performances.

– Gramophone

Riga-born Ksenija Sidorova is today one of the most eminent global ambassadors of the classical accordion. She has proudly borne the colors of her instrument in appearances in the world’s leading halls and with the foremost orchestras. Here she pays homage to Piazzolla in her own way: ‘Piazzolla the revolutionary, the ground-breaker, a man thinking ahead of his time . . . Playing this repertoire gave me a sense of artistic freedom and ignited my belief in advocacy of my instrument. For this album, I wanted to celebrate Piazzolla the innovator by pairing some his masterworks with pieces written by other composers for classical accordion, the majority of which I have premiered in recent years. Being of Russian heritage, I couldn’t help noticing the similarity between the nostalgia of the tango and that of Russian composer Sergey Voitenko’s Revelation. French accordionist-composer Franck Angelis’s Fantasia is based on Piazzolla’s waltz-tango, and the programme is completed by the Nocturne of Italian accordionist-composer Pietro Roffi and a piece by Sergey Akhunov.’

Barthold Heinrich Brockes wrote a libretto on the Passion of Christ – based on the account in Matthew’s Gospel – which was set to music by many composers of his time, including Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philip Telemann and George Frideric Handel. It is Handel’s version of the latter that the period-instrument ensemble Arcangelo has chosen to present here. Under the direction of Jonathan Cohen, these specialists in the Baroque repertory are joined by the voices of Sandrine Piau, whose numerous Handel recordings are regarded as a benchmark, the tenor Stuart Jackson and the baritone Konstantin Krimmel, recently revealed in a debut recital for Alpha (Saga, ALPHA549). Together they resurrect the operatic splendor of a work that was first performed in 1719 and is thought to have influenced numerous passages of J. S. Bach’s St John Passion, written a few years later.

REVIEW:

Conductor Jonathan Cohen is working with excellent soloists. They're led by soprano Sandrine Piau, who has a crushing 14 arias and brings personality to each one. Tenor Stuart Jackson has a big, exciting voice, and baritone Konstantin Krimmel is splendid in his duet with Mary Bevan. The oratorio also has smaller solo roles, here taken by members of the choir, and all are well handled.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

“This cycle of Jewish Songs is born of my research on traditional Hebrew music, a deeply rooted ancient music which has accompanied the Jewish people throughout centuries of wandering. I listened to the liturgical melodies from different sources and was mostly inspired by the art of singing of the Jewish cantors or Hazzans, in particular by their very expressive, but contained, interior way of singing. It is music in which the sacred and popular intermingle. Whether lighthearted or sad, slow or fast, prayer, popular song or dance, it is always shared, always intimate. It felt also as though I had always known this music, even before I was born. It was a very strange sensation." Sonia Wieder-Atherton

Principal Conductor and Music Director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich since October 2019, Paavo Järvi continues his complete cycle of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, following a first volume devoted to Symphony no.5 and the symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini. This second volume features Symphonies nos. 2 and 4. The Fourth, composed in 1878 and nicknamed the ‘Fate’ Symphony because of its somber coloring, which may recall the neuroses attributed to Tchaikovsky, is one of his most frequently performed. The Second Symphony, composed in 1872 and much less frequently performed in concert, is known as the ‘Little Russian’ because Tchaikovsky drew on Ukrainian folk tunes. The very first movement begins with a solo horn version of the folksong ‘Down by Mother Volga’

Handel is best known to the wider public for his large-scale choral and orchestral works, but his organ music is equally precious. It was the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels who, diverting him from a career in the law, spotted his exceptional abilities on the instrument. By the age of seventeen, Handel was already the resident organist at the Domkirche in Halle, and he was later to defeat Domenico Scarlatti in a contest of virtuosity during his time in Rome. Martin Haselböck and the Orchester Wiener Akademie have recorded the Organ Concertos opp.4 and 7 in the prestigious Vienna Musikverein, world-famous for its acoustics. Haselböck plays on the hall’s imposing Rieger organ in what is one of its very first recordings. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the fourth organ in the Musikverein since the hall opened in 1870. With its considerable dimensions – much larger than the organs Handel used to play on – the instrument offers a tonal palette rich in contrasts.

REVIEW:

The performances, while undoubtedly in good Baroque style (the period Wiener Akademie are excellent), offer the latent thrill of a large instrument in a large hall. If for some this might not seem the stuff of a definitive recording, it is certainly fun to listen to.

– Gramophone

In this recording entitled Enigma Fortuna, the ensemble La Fonte Musica, directed by Michele Pasotti, aims to shed light on the mysterious and eccentric personality of Antonio Zacara da Teramo (1355-1416). A contemporary of Boccaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi, this composer from the Abruzzi region could almost be likened to a sort of musical Hieronymus Bosch, for the texts he set to music conjure up a ‘topsy-turvy universe’ where the obscene, the imaginary and the grotesque go hand in hand. In his ballata Amor ne tossa he writes ‘Let him understand me who can, for I understand myself’, foreshadowing the proud egotism of the Romantic artists who were to come 400 years after him. With this four-album set presenting the world premiere of Zacara’s complete works, La Fonte Musica offers us an initial approach to understanding his music. And thereby, through the timeless character of art, to understanding a so-called ‘renascent’ era that seems as ‘topsy-turvy’ as our own.

Until the end of the Ancien Régime, one of the main activities of composers – and one of their chief means of subsistence – was that of maître de chapelle or Kapellmeister, directing the music performed at religious services attended by the princely families who employed them. Although this mostly concerned ordinary occasions, sometimes even on a daily basis, such composers also had to provide music tailored for specific and sometimes unexpected events, such as a military victory that had to be celebrated by a Te Deum or, more sadly, the death of a sovereign. For this five-album set, Alpha Classics has assembled eight requiems, from Antoine de Févin’s Mass of the Dead for Anne of Brittany to Luigi Cherubini’s Mass for the return to France of the remains of Louis XVI.

One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now!

Hypnos, God of Sleep . . . Simon-Pierre Bestion’s recordings are often inspired by his desire to recreate a ritual. His aim here was to recreate a Requiem service, ‘the ceremony that accompanies the passage of a human being into the hereafter, while supporting the feelings of all who witness it. Making use of all the freedom that this act of re-creation afforded me, I constructed this program without boundaries between repertories or different musical aesthetics – from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the twentieth century – selecting the works for their captivating musical material, their hypnotic and meditative dimension’. Intonations from Byzantine chant sit alongside guttural voices in Giacinto Scelsi and the English vocal style of John Tavener; Franco-Flemish Renaissance polyphony encounters the influences of eastern or western spiritual traditions present in the contemporary works.

Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, his song cycle Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’), was written shortly before his death in 1828, at the age of only 31. On his winter journey, the singer wanders as a lost soul in harsh terrain, wracked by conflicting emotions, but consoled by his memories of kinder times. Benjamin Appl commented, Every time I perform it, Winterreise feels like a new and different journey, depending on my own mood, the atmosphere in the hall, and of course the shared creativity with the all-important pianist. For singers, Schubert’s wanderer is a lifetime companion, yet a daunting one as we confront all the great recordings and performances that are already out there. The challenge for every singer is not to be inhibited, but to find fresh ways of understanding and transmitting both words and music to their own generation. Somehow, in Winterreise, Schubert has made space for that potential.

As Benjamin Britten said: “Every time I come back to it, I am amazed not only by the extraordinary mastery of it, but by the renewal of the magic. Each time, the mystery remains.” Winterreise is Benjamin Appl’s first release for Alpha Classics as part of a multi-album deal. In this recording he is joined by long-time collaborator and pianist James Baillieu.

The orchestral suite, sometimes simply called ‘overture’ because of the imposing dimensions of its opening movement, enjoyed great popularity in the early eighteenth century, especially in central Germany. Bach had discovered the genre in his youth and cultivated it until his late period in Leipzig. This recording assembles his four overture-suites, including the famous Suite no.2 BWV 1067, which belongs among the late works. Numerous copying errors in the instrumental parts suggest that this piece was originally written a tone lower – in A minor – and therefore probably for a solo instrument other than the transverse flute: in the present recording, this first version, reconstructed from the clues mentioned above, is performed with solo oboe. ‘This is a work of austere beauty, in which contrapuntal skill and melancholic expression are combined in a highly original way with the carefully calculated dance rhythms’, writes Peter Wollny in the accompanying booklet article.

REVIEW:

I really like the spirited performances here. The tempos are brisk and the articulation of strings and winds is crisp. I particularly enjoy listening to the continuo. Their sound is vigorous; and the definition in Julien Debordes’s bassoon playing is remarkable. Having her take the lead in fast movements helps to keep the ensemble together, pushing the tempo forward. Notes are in English.

-- American Record Guide

Véronique Gens’s version of La Voix humaine has been eagerly awaited! This ‘lyric tragedy in one act’ might have been written for her, so ideally suited are her feeling for language and her dramatic intensity to Poulenc’s monologue on a text by Jean Cocteau, composed in 1958. This is a far cry from the ‘light’ Poulenc of the 1920s. Cocteau paid him the highest compliment: ‘Dear Francis, you have fixed, once and for all, the way to speak my text.’ Véronique Gens confesses that she had always wanted to perform and record this piece; now she has achieved her ambition, in close partnership with the Orchestre National de Lille under its music director Alexandre Bloch. Also featured on the album is the Sinfonietta: this is in fact a genuine symphony, but, as Nicolas Southon writes, ‘there is no denying that the work – commissioned by the BBC in 1947 – has a freshness and a freedom of tone that justify its title’.

REVIEW:

La voix humaine is a monodrama. Gens had long wished to sing and record the piece, and was asked to perform it many times. She waited till she was ready for such a demanding piece, a work she must carry for forty minutes of, at times, very intense solo singing. Poulenc’s favourite soprano Denise Duval performed it first. She almost co-composed the piece.

It is clear that Madame Gens has really thought through the work and what it requires. Her decision to wait to be certain before she was ready to tackle this piece would seem to have paid off handsomely. This is an outstanding interpretation, the right artist recording the right work at the right time. That top C is nailed alright, and at the few other moments of “real singing” her familiar sound and line are as eloquent as usual. But the rest, the ‘heightened talking’, is equally persuasive, realistic and moving. Of course, that realism is also distressing, as we eavesdrop on deep personal anguish. At one point, Elle confesses to a suicide attempt. Some listeners will surely find the work rather harrowing, not one for everyday listening. But if one of the duties of art is to portray life in all its grimness as well as all its glory, then La voix humaine should be heard.

-- MusicWeb International

There is no piece of music that the Patricia Kopatchinskaja cannot play in a way that unwinds your expectations and forces you to hear it anew.

This new recording marks the reformation of the legendary duo of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say. The Moldovan violinist says the Turkish pianist ‘is a volcano, with an indomitable strength and energy’, while he emphasizes the ‘freedom’ that her ‘spontaneous playing’ exudes: ‘At each concert, she creates a different character and tells a new story.’ The explosive duo presents a program devoted to Bartók’s Violin Sonata no.1 (‘a marvel from start to finish, one of his finest works’, says Patkop), Brahms’s D minor Sonata (‘I imagine a feather in flight at the opening of the sonata’) and Janáček’s Sonata, ‘an extreme work, wounded and heart-rending’.

REVIEW:

There is no piece of music — works by Tchaikovsky or Schoenberg, or an old folk tune — that the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja cannot play in a way that unwinds your expectations and forces you to hear it anew. So it is with the latest chapter in her partnership with the intrepid Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say. The Janacek sonata that opens this recording and the Bartok Sonata No. 1 that closes it clearly play to the duo’s strengths: curiosity, an impatience with convention and exceptional technique. They pounce, almost too eagerly, on each of the Janacek’s lightning-quick mood changes; and in the Bartok, a piece in which the two instruments work virtually at cross purposes, they achieve an ESP-like mutual responsiveness.

Their rendition of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, however, is the paramount achievement here. Resisting the urge to swath this wistful music in a big luxuriant tone, Kopatchinskaja adopts a timbre that’s sometimes bristly, sometimes gossamer-light. She and Say push the music to extremes: The quiet moments seethe and the outbursts approach violence, but it’s all done with impeccable control. The piece sounds bereft and heartbroken even as it avoids the clichés of Romanticism. It’s not the way I’d want to hear it played every time, but it’s invaluable for offering a glimpse deep into a work you might have thought predictable, which is exactly what these imaginative musicians are after.

-- New York Times (David Weininger)

Although he already has a rich stage and recording career behind him, this is Tim Mead’s first solo album. ‘Juxtaposing the sacred and secular aspects of Vivaldi’s work, this program explores the earthly passion of the divine and the heavenly beauty of love’, says the English countertenor. ‘When they are placed side by side, his highly individual approach reveals that these two worlds are closely intertwined, in music at once astonishing and highly virtuosic.’ With his partners from Arcangelo, directed by Jonathan Cohen, we hear him in the famous Nisi Dominus and the no less celebrated cantata Cessate, omai, cessate, alongside the Salve Regina RV618 and Amor, hai vinto.

This album contains a selection of key a cappella choral works by Erkki-Sven Tüür. For the Estonian composer born in 1959, words and music are intimately linked. The number of syllables in a word, the position of the tonic accent, and the word as a cultural phenomenon with a definite meaning are of essential importance. This can be heard in the Kyrie of his Missa Brevis (2013) where, like a spiral, the polyphony of the voices is transformed into a chordal texture at the beginning of the ‘Christe eleison’, and then dissolves into individual voices at the second ‘Kyrie eleison’.

Canticum Canticorum Caritatis (2020) is inspired by St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. Tüür dedicated this work to Endrik Üksvärav and Collegium Musicale, the performers on this album. The multidimensional Omnia Mutantur (2020) possesses an extremely clear structure, interweaving the famous thoughts of Ovid and Virgil about the transient nature of all things. Triglosson Trishagion (2008), indebted to the Orthodox tradition and sung in Estonian, Russian and Greek, and Wanderer’s Evening Song (2001) complete this program, which is characterized by a meditative, interiorized approach to the composer.

REVIEW:

Erkki-Sven Tüür is one of the most important Estonian composers of the 20th/21st century, and this album pays outstanding tribute to him with an insight into his work for a cappella choir.

The Collegium Musicale under Endrik Üksvärä succeeds again and again in disentangling the dense sound textures of Tüür’s music, transforming them into a floating sound of delicate intimacy, which now and then can also be very expressive and decisive – for example in the Credo of the Missa Brevis.

The album bears the title of the most recent work on this recording – Canticum canticorum caritatis from 2020 – in which the central concept of caritas is the musical and interpretive focus.

The last work on the recording – Rändaja õhtulaul/Wanderer’s Nightsong – is no less expressive, with recourse to Gregorian chant. Here, too, the Collegium Musicale hits the mood right on the nose time and again: the trembling dreams, the calls from eternity, wrapped in mystically suggestive interpretations.

-- Pizzicato

‘London, April 1604. With the freshly printed partbooks of his Lachrimae under his arm, John Dowland walks from the printing house to his home in Fetter Lane. He should have been back in Denmark long ago, but for the moment all his thoughts are on the new publication he is carrying, his latest and most ambitious work to date: a complete cycle of instrumental music, twenty-one dances, honourably dedicated to Anne of Denmark, Queen of England.’ For Dowland has just completed one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance music. He had left England to enter the service of the Danish court, disappointed at not being appointed court composer to Elizabeth I, but he seems to have made the best of all his setbacks to compose this magnificent collection of purely instrumental works, much of it bathed in the melancholy typical of late sixteenth-century England.

Musicall Humors – a collective of the finest gambists of their generation – performs the complete set of pavans, galliards and ‘almands’, grouped into suites, each with its own character. A character inspired by the music, but reinforced here by the changing composition of the consort and the players taking turns to perform the ‘top line’, so that each musician’s personal playing style gives each piece a specific colour.

REVIEWS:

Dunford immerses the five-person gamba ensemble led by Julien Léonard and Lucile Boulanger in a rich and often extremely fragile-seeming web of voices and moods with a composure and sovereignty that moves and inspires. Everything breathes in the most wonderfully sonorous interplay, nothing groaning excessively. And when they dance, they maintain their posture and dignity like a dream.

-- ConcertoNet

We are faced with an absolutely referential recording, of intense and unprecedented beauty. Musicall Humors offers us the complete collection, but in a sequence of pavans followed by galliards, which refreshes our ears with the contrast, compared to the usual arrangement.

-- Scherzo

Venice was surely the capital of music and the arts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and one of the most coveted positions in the city was that of maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s Basilica. A few lucky chosen candidates succeeded one another in bringing to life the musical splendour of the basilica, all of them fabulous musicians and composers prolonging the legacy of the great Claudio Monteverdi. For its third recording on Alpha, the ensemble Les Surprises has chosen to sail towards Venetian waters and mix with these geniuses of affect, word-setting and theatre, exploring music that ranges from grandiose double choruses to intimate duets or trios combining sacred and profane.

During the long era when Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were creating the musical canon of Western Europe, the songs of enslaved Africans resounded in the colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, expressing pain and longing, but also joy and the desire for freedom. The American countertenor Reginald Mobley - a rising figure in baroque music, notably under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner with whom he sings very regularly - and the French pianist Baptiste Trotignon, winner of numerous awards (Victoires du Jazz, Django d'Or) have combined their talents and sensibilities to celebrate these spirituals and the music of Black composers including Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) and Florence Price (1887-1953), whose beautiful transcriptions and melodies blend with Baptiste Trotignon's subtle arrangements of the famous Sometimes I feel like a motherless child or I got a robe... The melody "Because", composed by Florence Price on a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, inspired the title of the album: Because I had loved so hard (...) Because I had loved so vainly... Why this album? Because...

CONTENTS:

• anon.: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
• trad.: Were you there?
• trad.: I Got a Robe
• Trotignon: Why
• Price, Florence: Because
• trad.: Steal away
• trad.: Save Me Lord, Save Me
• trad.: Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard
• trad.: Nobody knows the trouble I seen
• Price, Florence: Resignation
• anon.: A Great Campmeetin'
• Price, Florence: Sunset
• trad.: My Lord, What a Mornin'
• anon.: By an’ by / There is a Balm in Gilead
• Barrett Strong, Norman Whitfield: I Heard It Through the Grapevine
• anon.: Deep river

REVIEWS:

On their new album Because, American countertenor and early-music specialist Reginald Mobley and French pianist Baptiste Trotignon offer a collection of music from the Renaissance.

No, not that Renaissance.

The album is an updated compendium of Negro spirituals...and art songs published, collected, or written in and around the Harlem Renaissance — a period of revival in Black art, literature, culture, and music that spread from the Manhattan neighborhood throughout the United States and the Western world in the early 20th century...this movement and these songs have impacted American music on a scale that is unsurpassed, from jazz to pop to hip-hop, as well as a significant body of classical repertoire.

With Because, his first solo album, [Mobley] offers a powerful portrait addressing the musical legacy of Black spirituals and the complicated paradoxes contained within them: themes of bondage and salvation, power and tenderness, pain and beauty, spirituality and temporality.

We rarely hear a countertenor wade into this repertoire, and Mobley’s voice, which seems to get better by the year, is wonderfully pristine. Like good champagne, his tone is both effervescent and rich. In 20th-century art songs such as Florence Price’s “Because I Had Loved So Deeply” or Harry Burleigh’s “Jean,” or traditional spirituals like “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” he does not produce sound so much as spin it in long, sumptuous phrases.

As an accompanist and arranger, Trotignon is both resourceful and inventive, and it’s clear that he also lives and breathes this music.

-- Early Music America

Victor Julien-Laferrière, winner in 2017 of the first Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium dedicated to the cello, presents here two French works for cello and orchestra: Outscape by Pascal Dusapin: "The title itself carries the musical project (...) a word rich in meaning that indicates a variety of meanings from the most common to the most philosophical. “Outscape” is the way or opportunity to escape, to invent a path of one's own. I liked this word because it is basically like a summary of the history of my work." Alongside this work composed in 2015 and here recorded in its world premiere (conducted by Kristiina Poska), the French cellist, the Orchestre National de France, this time conducted by David Robertson, celebrate Henri Dutilleux (who died just 10 years ago, on 22 May 2013), with his famous concerto, whose title is taken from a poem in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, La Chevelure: " A whole far-away world, absent, almost defunct"...

REVIEW:

Tout un monde lointain… finds Dutilleux at his stealthiest – not least in the first of its five continuous movements, ‘Énigme’, to whose refractory changes of mood JulienLaferrière is as attentive as he is to the probing inwardness of ‘Regard’ and the plangent dialogue of ‘Houles’. Nor is he afraid of mining a deeper vein of expression than many in the shimmering vistas of ‘Miroirs’, before ‘Hymne’ brings this Baudelaire-inspired sequence to an energetic if ultimately equivocal conclusion.

The numerous possible meanings of Dusapin's Outscape (2015), are reflected in the timbral and textural interplay of music where a corresponding emotional intensity gradually takes precedence. Even in the dramatic final stage, an interiorized quality remains foremost yet, as JulienLaferrière renders it, there is never an absence of immediacy.

With vibrant orchestral playing and sound of real vividness, this disc can be warmly recommended.

-- Gramophone

Among the many composers he commissioned new works from, including Britten and Lutosławski, the cello concerto that Rostropovich commissioned from Henri Dutilleux holds a special place. Rostropovich commissioned new works at the drop of a hat, and it took only a backstage introduction by Igor Markevitch in 1961 (reminiscent of Rostropovich’s first meeting with Britten, the introducer being Shostakovich) for him to prompt Dutilleux to write something for him. Rostropovich added that the famously slow and meticulous composer take his time, which Dutilleux did, producing Tout un monde lointain… , the concerto’s given title, in 1968. This led to the premiere in 1970 and later a famous recording by Rostropovich for EMI, transferred to CD in 1988.

The title, which translates as “An entire world far away,” was a considered choice, taken from the poetry of Baudelaire – in the early 1950s Dutilleux was inspired to write a ballet based on Les fleurs du mal, but it came to nothing. Baudelaire is the source of the one-word titles of the concerto’s five movements, but it is reasonable simply to consider them as indicators of the music’s atmospheric moods. As varied as the score is, Dutilleux focuses on the cello’s lyrical voice.

Dutilleux ascribed much of the work’s immediate success to Rostropovich’s performance, which is likely enough. That poses a formidable challenge for subsequent soloists, in the present case Victor Julien-Laferrière, an admired French cellist born in Paris in 1990. I’ve appreciated him as a member of the outstanding Trio Les Esprits[.]

Therefore, I listened to the present release with faith in Julien-Laferrière’s abilities. He is in every way exemplary, and the absence of Rostropovich’s strong presence isn’t felt unless you do a bar-by-bar comparison. Dutilleux lived long enough – he died at 97 in 2013 – to journey through many stylistic phases, and I’d say that Tout un monde lointain… , despite its modernist harmonies, is richly Romantic. A flair for theatricality infuses the score, which aids in directly communicating with the listener.

David Robertson, a specialist in modern and contemporary music, provides ideal accompaniment, and although Serge Baudo is excellent on the Rostropovich recording, this new version features more precise and colorful orchestral execution from the Orchestre National de France, along with improved, up-to-date recorded sound.

The notion of a distant imagined world is a shared theme with Pascal Dusapin’s Outscape from 2016 – in a free-form composer’s note he rhapsodizes about the connotations of this English word, which frankly I’d never run across before (it’s a synonym for “an escape”).

Outscape is engrossing, underscored by Julien-Laferrière’s intense and highly accomplished performance of the solo part. I often couldn’t follow the argument by ear, but there was no trouble remaining involved with a work that exemplifies the current eclecticism so vividly. The mood is often deliberate, at times mournful, and it helps that the music’s emotional tone is so clear and direct, even as its gestures widely divagate.

It’s frustrating, no doubt, to compete with a classic recording, all the more because the Dusapin must stand up to Rostropovich’s pairing, the esteemed Lutosławski Cello Concerto, another of his most notable commissions. But Julien-Laferrière has a great deal going for him, and there’s no obstacle to giving this release a strong recommendation.

-- Fanfare

A highly prolific composer, Giovanni Legrenzi practised his art in oratorios and other works for the church, as well as in opera and chamber music. In fact he explored all the musical genres of his period, taking over the baton handed on by Gabrieli and Monteverdi, and enjoying an enviable reputation among his contemporaries. Better known during his lifetime (1626-1690) for his operas rather than for his religious music, Legrenzi was widely admired and copied all over Europe.

Of his eight known oratorios, only three have survived, including this gem: La morte del cor penitente (The Death of the Repentant Heart), a chamber oratorio probably composed in 1671. The theme is the spiritual development of the Sinner, the central figure of the work, who must pay his debt to God to save his immortal soul. The oratorio’s text provides a whole vivid universe of ‘affects’ (emotions) relating to spiritual torments and temptations. In his pilgrimage from the Cross to the heavenly light, beset by the competing voices of Sin and Hope, the Sinner duly makes his repentance, and finally achieves redemption.