Julian Prégardien / Éric Le Sage / Sandrine Piau SCHUMANN Dichterliebe

The album is opened with a lovely yet rarely recorded duet from “Spanisches Liederspiel” (Op.74), where Prégardien is joined by Soprano Sandrine Piau. A short Romance by Clara is then played expertly by Eric Le Sage, then more duets by husband and wife, all lovely performed, until we get to Dichterliebe. This prologue to the Op. 48 cycle works very well, preparing the listener to the world of love, anguish and hope the famous group of songs entails.

Prégardien uses the new Bärenreiter edition to the Dichterliebe, which puts into question few phrasings, markings and, most of all, the decision to omit several songs from the cycle, supposedly due to a request made by the first publisher. Happily, Prégardien and Le Sage don’t bite, and keet the masterful flow of the original 16 songs. Nonetheless, Prégardien not only incorporates some of the new editorial recommendations, but also adds a little of his own. In the first song of the set, as an example, the tenor ornaments with small grace notes on repeated phrases. They are eloquently done, though listeners will have to decide if they truly add to the experience or call attention to themselves. Small surprises can be undoubtedly delightful, though, as when Piau joins for the “Ich liebe dich!” (“I love you”) calling in “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh”.

Éric Le Sage FAURÉ Nocturnes

With their poetry, their passonate and intimate lyricism, their refined style that gradually reveals hidden depths, the thirteen Nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré are the most significant group of works in his oeuvre for solo piano.

Composed over a period of forty-six years (between 1875 and 1821), they bear witness to the composer’s remarkable stylistic evolution. From a form of expression rooted in romanticism, to an aesthetic fully aligned with 20th-century modernity, Fauré can be said to have shaped his musical personality like a sculptor. His Nocturnes are not all of equal importance, but as a whole their diversity and development offer a perfect panorama of his art.

Éric Le Sage, one of the French piano school’s main representatives, whose many recordings for Alpha include the complete chamber music of Fauré, here interprets the repertoire closest to his heart.

François Salque / Eric Le Sage BEETHOVEN Les Sonates pour Violoncelle et Piano

Beethoven's cello sonatas were among the first works to explore the potential of the cello as a solo chamber instrument. French cellist François Salque catches the nature of this status in his splendid recordings of the early Op. 5 sonatas on this two-disc Sony set: it's a lively recording in which the cello seems to grow into its new role. Sample the unexpectedly massive (16-minute) opening movement of the Cello Sonata No. 1 in F major, Op. 5, No. 1, a sort of extended essay in the development of new sonorities for cello and piano; in Salque's hands the cello seems constantly to be stepping to the forefront in unexpected ways. Salque and pianist Eric Le Sage deliver suave readings in a classic French tradition, and their approach works wonderfully in the Op. 5 sonatas, less well in the middle-period Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69, and once again excitingly in the late fourth and fifth sonatas, which also were stylistically transitional works and among the first in which Beethoven's late style really showed itself. Here again, the precise ways of Salque and Le Sage yield results in terms of clarity in the big new fugal finale of the Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102, No. 2, and especially in the complex ebb and flow of the two-movement (or is it four?) Cello Sonata No. 4 in C major, Op. 102, No. 1. With fine sound from the Salle de la Conservatoire de Liège, this is Gallic Beethoven playing at a high level. (James Manheim)

Éric Le Sage / Paul Meyer / Claudio Bohórquez BEETHOVEN Trios for Clarinet, Cello & Piano

With this new series entitled ‘Salon de musique’, Alpha presents recordings made by artists who have enlivened the Festival of Salon de Provence for some years now: the pianist Eric le Sage, who has made many recordings for Alpha, the clarinettist Paul Meyer etc… with cellist Claudio Bohórquez, they have now put two Beethoven trios on disc.

By 1798, the year Ludwig van Beethoven composed his Trio for piano, clarinet and cello op.11, he was already well-known in Vienna as a remarkable improviser and an ambitious young composer. the piece was clearly aimed at the enlightened aristocracy, as well as competent musical amateurs. This did not prevent the critics, though universally positive, from judging the score to be over-complex in places. Dedicated to the Empress Marie-Theresa of Austria, the Septet was published in 1802 by Hofmeister, and on being well-received it was then rearranged for various combinations. Beethoven himself made a version for clarinet, cello and piano, op.38 in E Flat major – the one recorded here.

Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Stéphane Denève GUILLAUME CONNESSON Cosmic Trilogy - The Shining One

There’s a new generation of French composers we know little about on this side of the channel, names like Bacri, Beffa, Escaich, Zavaro, and Connesson, now around 40 (see Philip Clark, 1/10, for details of the French context). Thanks to this CD and Connesson’s association with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra we can start to discover more about him.

Aleph, the first part of Connesson’s Cosmic Trilogy, was commissioned by the RSNO and dedicated to its French conductor. The whole cycle is involved with ideas deriving from Stephen Hawking and Kandinsky but Aleph makes an orchestral showpiece on its own – a kind of supercharged version of Ravel’s Daphnis with more than a hint of John Adams.

Connesson admits that his style is eclectic but the much longer second section, also an RSNO commission, lacks the rhythmic impetus that sustains the first one and it wanders in a kind of Debussian reverie. The third section, Supernova, actually written first, inhabits the limitless vistas of outer space. Influences stream past – Messiaen, Milhaud, Bartók, Stravinsky, film music – in an efficiently scored panoply. The CD ends oddly with The Shining One, described as a piano concerto although it lasts only nine minutes. There’s a central section that starts by recalling John Ireland – that must be a coincidence – before the piece whips up to a hyperactive finish. Committed performances vividly recorded. (Peter Dickinson / Gramophone)

GUILLAUME CONNESSON Musique de chambre

Guillaume Connesson, born in 1970, is currently one of the most widely performed French composers worldwide. Commissions are at the origin of most of his works (Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre National de France...) including Pour sortir au jour, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2013) and Les Trois Cités de Lovecraft (co-commission of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lyon). Moreover, his music is regularly played by numerous orchestras (Brussels Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra et al.)
He won a Victoires de la Musique award in 2015 as well as Sacem’s Grand Prize in 2012.
His discography includes, amongst others, two monographs of chamber music and two symphonic monographs on the Deutsche Grammophon label. The first, Lucifer, obtained a ’ Choc’ from Classica magazine, and the second, Pour sortir au jour, numerous critical distinctions such as the ’Diapason d’Or de l’Année’ as well the Classica ’Choc de l’Année’.
After studies at the Conservatoire National de Région in Boulogne-Billancourt (his birthplace) and the Paris Conservatoire, he obtained premiers prix in choral direction, history of music, analysis, electro-acoustic and orchestration.
He has been professor of orchestration at the Aubervilliers-La Courneuve Conservatory since 1997.
In residence from 2016 to 2018 with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra as well as with the Orchestre National de Lyon, he is also devoting himself to the composition of an opera, Les Bains macabres (on a libretto by Olivier Bleys), commissioned by the Opéra National de Bordeaux.