Lavinia Meijer FANTASIES & IMPROMPTUS

FANTASIES & IMPROMPTUS

 

Annelien Van Wauwe / Orchestre National de Lille / Alexandre Bloch BELLE ÉPOQUE

Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe revives the golden glow of a bygone age on her PENTATONE debut album Belle époque, together with the Orchestre National de Lille and its music director Alexandre Bloch. The programme is built around treasures of French turn-of-the-century music such as Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie, Pierné’s Canzonetta and Widor’s Introduction et Rondo (the latter two in arrangements by Jelle Tassyns). Belle époque also offers works that display a spiritual kinship to the age, such as Brahms’s first clarinet sonata, arranged by Luciano Berio, and a world-premiere recording of Paris-based contemporary composer Manfred Trojahn (Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre). 

Annelien van Wauwe is a former BBC New Generation Artist and winner of the renowned Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award 2018. She kickstarts an exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE with this first solo album. The Orchestre National de Lille and Alexandre Bloch release their second PENTATONE album, after their 2018 recording of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles, crowned with a Diapason d’or.

John Finucane / Elisaveta Blumina FRENCH HOLIDAYS

Feather-light music played as light as a feather: this is John Finucane’s first GENUIN release in a nutshell. He joins on the recording with piano partner Elisaveta Blumina, who has already appeared on three CDs with the Leipzig label. In this exquisite combination of French Romanticism and Post-Romanticism, the virtuoso Irish clarinetist does not betray the slightest hint that he is performing some of the most challenging pieces written for his instrument. Works by Debussy, Françaix, Saint-Saëns, and Widor are played with such joy and naturalness that we feel transported to the world of Paul Verlaine or Marcel Proust.

Maria Milstein / Nathalia Milstein LA SONATE DE VINTEUIL

In search of la petite phrase: what Francophile wouldn’t be fascinated by a recital devoted to the various real-life works that might have been the model for the violin sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu? It’s an enchanting idea, and it’s only surprising that more duos haven’t taken advantage of it prior to this debut disc by the sisters Maria and Nathalia Milstein.

It doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin. Franck’s Sonata (a prime candidate) is missing, and Debussy’s late Sonata – a work with more tenuous Proustian connections – closes the disc. We do, however, get Gabriel Pierné’s much less familiar Sonata, Op 36, and it’s exquisite: very much in the tradition of Saint-Saëns’s First Sonata, the disc’s centrepiece, and played by the pair with gleaming panache coupled to an affecting inwardness.

These are appealing qualities, and they characterise the whole disc. Maria, on violin, can bring the requisite brilliance when required (the sweep up to the end of the first movement of the Pierné is magnificent), but her sound in quieter passages has a tremulous, almost vocal quality. And although Nathalia, on piano, has a luminous tone and gives a clearly defined character to her rhythms, there’s an intimacy – an instinctive ebb and flow – about the pair’s interplay that makes everything here feel like real chamber music.

They charge Debussy’s central Intermède with an intense theatricality, changing tone-colour by the phrase and almost by the note. But they handle the long lines of the Saint-Saëns with equal assurance, and play two Reynaldo Hahn song transcriptions with unaffected sweetness. A disc with which you might well fall in love. (Richard Bratby / Gramophone)

Trio Wanderer FAURÉ - PIERNÉ Trios avec Piano

Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Trio is a late work (1923) which at once aroused the admiration of his contemporaries and is now regarded as one of the finest trios in the French repertory. The much less well-known Trio of Gabriel Pierné, premiered a year earlier, is characterised by its solid architecture, its great melodic richness, and a notably inventive rhythmic style. Two masterpieces that make an eminently logical coupling. It was premiered in Paris, at the Société Nationale de Musique, on 11 February 1922. Pierné himself played the piano part, with George Enescu on the violin and Gérard Hekking on the cello. After the concert, the composer Paul Ladmirault wrote a very flattering article in Le Courrier musical. One understands what Ladmirault meant when he wrote that it ‘may take its place alongside the finest chamber music of César Franck and M. Fauré’.

"the Wanderers’ versions rank with those of Domus (Hyperion) and Pascal Rogé and friends (Decca)... Harmonia Mundi has done the trio and Tamestit’s voluptuous viola proud. The sound is sumptuous, almost symphonic in scale and expansiveness, especially in the surging Brahmsian outer allegros. The intimate Fauré has rarely sounded more dramatic or passionate." (Hugh Canning / Sunday Times)