Christian-Pierre La Marca CELLO 360

 

CELLO 360

 

Friedrich Thiele / Naoko Sonoda CON MOTO

 

 CON MOTO

Antonio Galera PRÉLUDE

PRÉLUDE

Seattle Symphony / Ludovic Morlot DUTILLEUX Métaboles - L'Arbre des Songes - Symphony No. 2

                                  MÉTABOLES - L'ARBRE DES SONGES - LE DOUBLE

Élodie Vignon D'OMBRES

                                                                        D'OMBRES

Janet Sung / Simon Callaghan / BrittenSinfonia / JacvanSteen THE DEEPER THE BLUE...

SOMM Recordings’ The Deeper the Blue offers an intriguing exploration of colour and timbre in music and a revealing investigation of the connections between four very different composers over a near-100-year period.

Taking its title from painter Wassily Kandinsky’s assertion that a deepening colour ultimately “turns into silent stillness and becomes white”, the recording illuminates the intimate relationship between student and teacher: Vaughan Williams and Maurice Ravel, Kenneth Hesketh with Henri Dutilleux and the influence on Dutilleux of Ravel.

Hailed by The Washington Post for her “riveting” playing and “exquisite tone”, virtuoso violinist Janet Sung and the Britten Sinfonia – one of the UK’s “most flexible chamber orchestras” (Evening Standard) – make their SOMM debuts alongside long-time label artists, conductor Jac van Steen and pianist Simon Callaghan, the latter partnering Sung in Ravel’s jazz- and Blues-accented Sonata for Violin and Piano. The last chamber music Ravel composed, it is a colouristic extravaganza brimfull with joy and irrepressible energy.
The harmonic language of Dutilleux’s piano suite Au gré des ondes boasts a wide colour palette enhanced in brilliance and charm by his former pupil Kenneth Hesketh’s orchestral arrangement, here in its first recording. Harmonic and instrumental colour is central to Hesketh’s own music.
Also receiving its first recording, and composed in 2016 for Janet Sung, Hesketh’s Inscription-Transformation for violin and orchestra is a richly intricate weaving together of the textures and tones of violin and orchestra. Commemorating Dutilleux and Hesketh’s grandmother, who died during its composition, it’s a febrile, endlessly mutating work that pits stratospheric violin against agitated orchestra in music as complex as it is gratifying in the intensity of its expression.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ compact, muscular, Bach-influenced Concerto for Violin and Orchestra combines meditative repose with dance-like extroversion, Maurice Ravel’s ever-popular Tzigane a fiery, virtuosic homage to Hungarian folk music.

Johannes Moser / Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin / Thomas Søndergård LUTOSLAWSKI - DUTILLEUX Cello Concertos

This album features cello concertos by Witold Lutosławski and Henri Dutilleux performed by the multiple prize-winning German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conducted by Thomas Søndergård. These works, premiered in 1970, are two of the biggest gems of the twentieth century, the golden age of the cello. While equally virtuosic and engaging, both pieces showcase different aspects of the musical landscape of the late twentieth century. Lutosławski’s concerto explores the possibilities of chance composition in the form of a duel between the solo cello and a ferocious orchestral accompaniment, in which the individual ultimately prevails. In comparison, soloist and ensemble work together more smoothly in Henri Dutilleux’ “Tout un monde lontain”. In this “cello concerto”, the composer invokes a mystical “world from afar”, inspired by Baudelaire quotes and full of allusions to French musical greats such as Debussy and Messiaen, while simultaneously sounding unmistakably Dutilleuxian.

Matt Haimovitz / Philippe Cassard PORTES OUVERTES

Matt Haimovitz’s latest recital of twentieth-century cello compositions sustains the thesis of its predecessors (12/95 and 5/97) that extreme contrast, not merely variety, has been the spice of twentieth-century musical life. To juxtapose two works from 1914, Reger’s Third Suite and Webern’s Three Little Pieces, the former expansive and retrospective, the latter aphoristic and reaching nervously into an unknowable future, makes the point with admirable immediacy.

The rest of the music here is more mainstream, the Britten Sonata showing that there was as much mileage left in the old classical genres in 1960 as Debussy had found in his Sonata more than 40 years before. With these works, of course, Haimowitz is competing against a long series of distinguished predecessors on disc, and his partnership with Cassard (how often have they played these works in concert, I wonder?) can’t match the empathy of Moray Welsh and John Lenehan in the Britten, or – it goes without saying – of Rostropovich and Britten himself in both sonatas.

The recording as such is at its best in the unaccompanied works, its closeness and resonance reinforcing the powerful musical profile of Dutilleux’s elegant yet forceful Strophes, and helping to ensure that Reger does not seriously outstay his welcome. In Webern, Debussy and Britten the piano sound has an abrasive aspect to it, as if the object were to underline the incompatibility of two such different instruments. But the playing is technically first-rate, and should certainly open doors (why the French title?) to anyone exploring this repertory for the first time.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)

Quatuor Psophos CONSTELLATIONS

Winners of the Grand Prix at the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition in 2001, the Psophos Quartet was founded by students of the Conservatoire national supérieure de Paris. Trained and mentored in Basel by the great Walter Levin, the quartet was strongly influenced by his passion commitment and musical rigour.
The Quartet was the first French quartet chosen to be part of the prestigious BBC Radio 3 ‘New Generation Artists’ scheme from 2005-2007 and was also named ‘Best Ensemble of the Year’ at the 2005 Victoires de la musique.

The quartet has performed in prestigious halls and festivals all over Europe including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Wigmore Hall, London and its trajectory has been further enriched by appearances at the Folle Journée festivals in Nantes, Tokyo, and Lisbon, at the BBC the Proms and many other renowned festivals. These performances have given the quartet the opportunity to share the stage with musical personalities including Renaud and Gauthier Capuçon, Nicholas Angelich, Bertrand Chamayou, Cédric Tiberghien, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Emmanuelle Bertrand and Nemanja Radulovic.

In 2009 the quartet welcomed two new members, Eric Lacrouts (violin) and Guillaume Martigne (cello), a change that has proved to be enriching both artistically and on a human level. The balance provided by these new forces gives the ensemble a new serenity that perpetuates its maturity and its high standards.
Driven by a wide-ranging artistic curiosity, the quartet works with leading artists from diverse fields. A collaboration with Jean-Marie Machado and Dave Liebman brought them to the jazz world with Painting notes in the air and they have performed at Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris and Lyon Opera with choreographer Philippe Decouflé.
For three years the Psophos Quartet was Quartet in Residence at the Theatre Athénée Louis Jouvet in Paris, where is presented its own series of chamber music concerts inviting such artists as Bertrand Chamayou, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Jean-Marc Luisada, Nils Moenkemayer et Jörg Widmann.

Hélène Devilleneuve / Rikako Murata DUTILLEUX - DESTENAY - POULENC - SANCAN - BOZZA

The French oboist Hélène Devilleneuve, famous worldwide as soloist and also First Oboe solo of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France since 1995, has selected some works from the French repertoire of which a good proportion comes out of the usual. Because if one gives often enough the Sonata de Poulenc, sometimes that of Dutilleux, we strictly never hear those of Eugene Bozza, Pierre Sancan and still less - which is not to say little - the Trio for Oboe , Clarinet and piano by Edouard Destenay. Bozza, however, was crowned with a First Grand Prix of Rome, and his style happily accepts all the influences of his time, from Stravinsky to Milhaud through jazz as well as, much further, the polyphonic rigor of Bach; Pierre Sancan, it is true better known as a great pianist and pedagogue, delivers here a delicious Sonata, with touches to the Debussy and some incursions modernist perhaps factious. As for Edouard Destenay (1850-1924), one does not know much of his life as a musician, especially since he made a career in the highest ranks of the French Army. Hélène Devilleneuve is accompanied on the piano by Rikako Murata, winner of the Maria Canals Competition in Barcelona.

Emmanuelle Bertrand LE VIOLONCELLE AU XXe SIÈCLE

Through these selected masterpieces of the repertoire for solo cello, Emmanuelle Bertrand invites us on a journey to the heart of languages of popular inspiration. When music takes over the idioms characteristic of each culture, pushing back the limits of instrumental technique, reshaping and dismantling the rules the better to express a specific identity, then the cello truly ‘speaks’ and takes us beyond frontiers, where the souls of a people take root.

This title was released for the first time in 2000/11.

Emmanuelle Bertrand DUTILLEUX - LIGETI - BACRI - CRUMB - HENZE

All credit to Emmanuelle Bertrand for choosing an all-20th-century programme for her first solo recital. Its content is as well varied as any, and, since the competition in the works by Crumb, Henze and Ligeti tends to be full-price, she starts with an in-built advantage.
Bertrand is a less seasoned player and a less consistently polished interpreter than Wolfgang Boettcher, whose recent disc, including Henze’s Serenade and Ligeti’s Sonata, is crowned by an imposing account of Dallapiccola’s Ciacona, intermezzo e adagio. She is nevertheless fully equal to the varied technical challenges of her chosen repertory, as her admirably uncontrived performance of George Crumb’s early Sonata shows. In general, Bertrand’s playing in Crumb and Ligeti is less consistently forceful than Pieter Wispelwey’s, and the recording – creditably – is less concerned to project her sound in intense close-up. While her versions of the Henze and the Ligeti are not as freely expressive as Boettcher’s, she impresses in Dutilleux’s brief but telling trilogy, and her advocacy of the Suite No 4 by Nicolas Bacri provides the disc with a substantial novelty.
Bacri (b 1961) is not, on this evidence, a composer of very distinctive personality. He relies on familiar, at times hackneyed, types of instrumental patterning and characterisation to fill out generously proportioned structures, and this 19-minute suite doesn’t really take wing until the last of its five movements. Nevertheless, there’s enough of interest on the disc as a whole to make me hope that more of Bertrand’s playing in the 20th (and 21st) century repertory will soon be made available.' (Gramophone)

Esa-Pekka Salonen / Barbara Hannigan / Anssi Karttunen / Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France DUTILLEUX Correspondances

The initial idea of the work consisted in making a choice of some letters from various authors and susceptible of engendering different forms of lyrical expression conveyed by the soprano voice and the large symphonic orchestra.

Short interludes are sometimes used as bindings between these letters, the first of them is preceded by a poem by the Indian author Prithwindra Mukherjee, "Cosmic dance", poem which may itself appear as a kind of address (ode), of message to Shiva…

The following episode is based upon the main passages of a letter from Soljenitsyne to Mstislav and Galina Rostropovitch (1984, February 9th), evoking his trials, the one in the camps, ten years before, and overcame thanks to the heroic support of his friends Slava and Galina, and to his own faith as well.

It is from the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo that excerpts such as: "I have a great need of religion, so I go out at night to paint the stars…" are drawn out. This episode is preceded by the evocation of a very short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke named Gong.

So different are these texts, in their form and in their content, in common they reflect an equal inclination toward the mystical thinking by their authors. Together with the idea of the Cosmos, this is what seemed a unifying element to the composer.

The work's general title, "Correspondances", beyond the different meanings which could be given to this word, refers to Baudelaire's famous poem, "Correspondances" and to the synaesthesias he himself evoked. On another hand, the "baudelairian" idea that in our world, the divine finds inevitably its image in a devilish world, catches up Van Gogh's thought when, from Arles, he wrote to his brother that "next to the sun (the good Lord), unfortunately there is the Devil Mistral".

Each of these episodes is object of a slightly peculiar orchestration privileging such or such family of instruments. So, the evocated images, colours in Vincent Van Gogh's letter will mainly find their echo in the wood timbres and in the brass section as well. Soljenitsyne's letter to Slava and Galina will be backed in a dominative way by the strings, especially by the celli, often in a celli quartet. As for "Danse Cosmique", it's the whole orchestra which will surround the singer. On the contrary, the piece III Gong, sort of interlude hardly includes half of the large orchestra.

Finally, a remark: at the very end of Soljenitsyne's letter, as a watermark, as in a mist is a quotation from "Boris Goudounov" when is heard the Holy Fool (Innocent or Simpleton)'s grief about the misfortunes of the Russia.

In the same way, in the centre of the pages devoted to Van Gogh's letter, the composer used, as a quotation, the main motive of his own score "Timbres, Espace, Mouvement ou la Nuit étoilée " written in 1978 under the influence of the famous painting "The starry Night". (Henri Dutilleux)