Scottish Ensemble’s new release fuses together French and Japanese influences. Featuring works by Debussy and Takemitsu, instrumental color and textures are explored through these works. Scottish Ensemble is the UK’s only professional string orchestra. They are built around a core twelve members, and are known throughout the United Kingdom for their virtuosic and ambitious programming. ”…a scintillation of ace soloists who combine bracing energy, flexibility and precision, breathing and moving as one.” (The Observer)

This album is the first to present an entire program of works by Debussy and Ravel, the greatest exponents of Impressionism in music, transcribed for two guitars. The arrangements bring new life to the rich canvas of sonorities and complex harmonies in these popular works. The reflective atmosphere in Debussy's famous Clair de lune and special upper-harmonic effects in La plus que lente contrast with the "merry romp" of the Golliwog's Cakewalk and Ravel's nod to Schubert in the Valses nobles et sentimentales.

In 1891 Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé asked Debussy to compose incidental music for a theatrical version of his poem L’Après-midi d’un faune (The afternoon of the faun) and the resulting work, with its innovative melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic writing, is both impassioned and expressive. The four-hand arrangement was made by Ravel in 1910. Subtitled “esquisses symphoniques” – or symphonic sketches – La Mer, inspired by the natural phenomena of water, light and wind, is a masterpiece that doesn’t conform to structural convention. Of the evocatively enchanting Images, he wrote that it marked a departure for him, dealing with “realities” not impressionism.

Navona Records is proud to announce the re-release of David Tanner's 1988 album The Eloquent Saxophone. Tanner is no Stranger to Navona; his compositions and arrangements can be heard on two other Navona releases: Of Birds and Lemons (2012) and Dashing (2016). This was his first album, featuring him as a performer. It includes two unaccompanied pieces and two sax quartets recorded by multi-tracking, as well as a rich variety of works with accompaniment admirably rendered by pianist Marc Widner. The music ranges from Schumann to a stylized blues by Gene DiNovi. Tanner's musical language is enriched by classical training and a career encompassing rock'n'roll and jazz as well as symphony. Reviewer Denis Armstrong wrote in Music Magazine, "Not long into this recording, one begins to marvel at the sheer joy David Tanner's playing conveys... a dense and rich recording... at times elegant and elegiac, other times ribald and visceral. But the one constant is the joy and clarity of expression." The first track sets the tone: "Serenade comique" is a brief, frantic sax quartet composition that evokes Parisian traffic or perhaps a flock of birds. "La Blues," the other quartet selection, evokes the melancholy of New York in the depth of night. "It is a treat for the listener to hear this feat of multi-tracking done so well," said reviewer Joseph Viola in Saxophone Journal. Each track is in contrast to the one before it; each represents something different and interesting. To quote Music Magazine again, "The Eloquent Saxophone [is] a thoroughly eccentric, invigorating and generous treat."

This album presents two major orchestral works by Claude Debussy – Images and La Mer – alongside the delightful Danses for harp and orchestra. The French conductor Sylvain Cambreling highlights all the charm of these colorful scores. French-born conductor Sylvain Cambreling is a musician with big ideas. A thought-provoking, colorful and dramatic artist, he has a flair for grabbing the attention of audiences, yet his originality is rooted in thorough knowledge of musicology. As the Chief Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and Principal Guest Conductor of Klangforum Wien, he has offered ample proof of his gifts for imaginative programme-planning and persuasive championship of contemporary music.

This album presents extraordinary works of three twentieth-century composers with diverse cultural backgrounds, underlining the versatility and legacy of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in its centenary year. Richard Strauss’ Schlagobers (Whipped Cream, 1924) is a playful ballet set in a Viennese Konditorei, of which the orchestral suite is featured on this album. With its lively mix of Viennese waltzes and modern harmonies, light-versed tunes interspersed by sudden outbreaks of ravishing beauty, all brilliantly orchestrated, it can be considered a further exploration of the composer’s “Rosenkavalier style”. Claude Debussy is featured with Jeux, Poeme danse (1912), another piece created for a ballet performance, built around an erotic nocturnal search for a lost tennis ball that Pierre Boulez characterized as a “Prelude à-l’Apres-midi d’une Faune in sports clothes”. Debussy’s Jeux has been a major source of inspiration for post-war avantgarde composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen, and, therefore, the transition from Jeux to Gyorgi Ligeti’s Melodien, fur Orchester (1971) is not jarring. Melodien has the unmistakable mix of sensuous yet eerie soundscapes that makes most of Ligeti’s works so filmic and appealing. This album adds a significant chapter to the Pentatone discography of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, which already contains the complete Bruckner Symphonies with Marek Janowski, three dance-oriented albums with Kazuki Yamada, and concerto recordings with renowned soloists such as Arabella Steinbacher, Johannes Moser and Denis Kozhukhin. On this album, the OSR’s new chief conductor Jonathan Nott makes his Pentatone debut.

Debussy wrote songs throughout his career, beginning at the age of 18 with Nuit d’étoiles, with which this collection also begins. Most of his vocal output was inspired by the singers he encountered as a young man in the fashionable salons of fin-de-siecle Paris, and in particular the soprano Blanche Vasnier: from that time, Debussy’s songs resembled an amorous diary of dreams and desires of infinite sweetness, entrusted to a voice capable of the utmost seduction. The epilogue to his love story with Vasnier is heard in Apparition, after which Lorna Windsor moves to the years of Debussy in Rome, and in particular his sumptuous settings of Baudelaire. There follow the much more elusive settings of Verlaine and Rimbaud, dating from his ‘impressionist’ and even ‘post-impressionist’ late years, and often inspired by his encounter with the soprano Mary Garden, the first Mélisande. Lorna Windsor has established a reputation as a specialist in contemporary music: her catalogue on Brilliant Classics includes the songs with piano by John Cage (8850) and a more recent, wide-ranging album of solo-vocal music by Feldman, Kagel, Kurtág and others. She also has considerable experience in French repertoire, having studied with the doyen of French baritones, Gérard Souzay, and given performances in France of Offenbach and Satie, as well as recording the songs of Satie. A further point of interest to the album concerns the piano used by Antonio Ballista: a 1923 Pleyel. Ballista himself was born just 13 years after the piano was made, and for more than half a century he formed half of one of the best-known and most recorded piano duos of their time, in partnership with fellow Italian Bruno Canino. Though he has accompanied many eminent singers such as Cathy Berberian, Anna Caterina Antonacci and Kim Criswell, his work with singers has been very rarely represented on record, making this album a collector’s item in Ballista’s distinguished career as well as a ravishingly idiomatic record of French song.

Philippe Graffin’s virtuosity combined with his skills as a sleuth have led to the world-premiere recording of a “Posthumous” solo violin sonata by Eugene Ysaye, an astonishing discovery that extends the Belgian composer’s canon of his essential six sonatas for the medium. Philippe unearthed the nearly-completed manuscript in the library of the Brussels Conservatoire, and polished off the final movement in the most Ysaye-esque manner possible. Philippe’s penchant for intuitive programming I brought to bear on Fiddler’s Blues, combining two Ysaye works - including another premiere, with a pair of folksy, Bohemian-flavored works by George Enescu, another virtuoso violinist/composer who emigrated from his native Romania and like Ysaye settled in Paris.

Enescu was a classmate of Maurice Ravel, whose Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Faure is an affectionate nod to their teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, whilst his azure-tinged Violin Sonata influences the album’s title. Ravel’s slightly older contemporary Claude Debussy befriended Ysaye. Whereas Ysaye soared writing works for solo violin, Debussy wrote none. Suggesting how such a work may have sounded, Philippe contributes his own arrangement for solo violin of Debussy’s enduring piece Claire de lune.

REVIEWS:

This duo’s rapport comes across in sparky performances. Premieres of pieces by Ysaÿe are a draw, but the Enescu sonata and Hora Unirii are a real treat and leave you feeling anything but blue. ★★★★

-- BBC Music Magazine

The big story here is the first recording of a previously undiscovered seventh unaccompanied violin sonata by Eugène Ysaÿe…Played with flourishing panache and easy command, it makes an electrifying opening to this deceptively titled recital: essentially a survey of the early 20th-century Parisian scene…There’s a real feeling of dialogue.

-- Gramophone