The High Road to Kilkenny Gaelic Songs and Dances from the 17th & 18th centuries
Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, François Lazarevitch, Robert Getchell
After the success of For ever Fortune, early music from Scotland, François Lazarevitch continues his exploration of the ‘Celtic’ repertories with a new programme devoted to early Irish music. This repertory of old airs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consists of dances, songs in Gaelic and varied instrumental pieces: they tell tales of wars, of love, of strong drink and tobacco, of children and bards. A leading specialist in the flute and bagpipe families, François Lazarevitch opens out new horizons of colours and sounds. He has gathered around him here a number of distinguished performers of early music (including the fabulous Baroque violinist and fiddler David Greenberg) and invited the American tenor Robert Getchell, who cuts a very credible figure as a singer going back to his roots.
VIDEO
the new quartet's first album!
CONVERSATIONS
Nevermind
(Louis Creac'h, Robin Pharo, Anna Besson, Jean Rondeau)
NEVERMIND is made up of four young musicians and friends whose passion for early music and for the influence of jazz and traditional music stimulated them to form an ensemble whose virtuosity is equalled only by their youthful impetuosity and their love of fine music . . . For its first disc, Nevermind tackles the treasures of the Baroque in the shape of two totally neglected French composers.
Alpha Classics continues its discovery of young talents with this project conceived by the inspired musicians of Nevermind. Their credo is to introduce the widest possible audience to the riches of music that has been too long ignored.
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ANTONIO BERTALI LA MADDALENA
Scherzi Musicali, Nicolas Achten
Through the combination of sacred and profane that she embodies, the profoundly human personality of Mary Magdalene greatly inspired artists of the Baroque era, whether painters, poets or composers. It was in the sphere of influence of Italian oratorios, highly prized at the court of Vienna, that Antonio Bertali devoted a most moving sepolcro to her in 1663, a genre traditionally played during Holy Week. In 1617, in Mantua, it was in the form of theatrical interludes that she was honoured by court composers such as Salomone Rossi, Muzio Effrem and Claudio Monteverdi, who wrote the prologue for this other Maddalena.
ÉDOUARD LALO CONCERTANTE WORKS
FOR VIOLIN, CELLO & PIANO
Jean-Jacques Kantorow, Soloists of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel,
Liège Royal Philharmonic
Édouard Lalo made his mark on French music with his opera Le Roi d’Ys, but his instrumental output also has considerable historical importance, with its resolutely innovative aims for its time. More specifically, his concertante music rewards the attentive ear with a brilliant, skilfully constructed style, studded with fresh rhythmic and harmonic inventions that renew the melodic and orchestral language of the genre.
With the participation of: Vladyslava Luchenko, Woo Hyung Kim, Nathanaël Gouin, Ori Epstein, Elina Buksha, Lorenzo Gatto.
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LUTOSLAWSKI
NDR Symphony Orchestra, Krzysztof Urbański
Since 2015, Krzysztof Urbański has been principal guest conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, one of the leading German orchestras. They are currently preparing together the inauguration in January 2017 of Hamburg’s new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, a major musical event in Germany with which Alpha Classics will be associated. Krzysztof Urbański is also music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. A resolutely international career for a young conductor who recently earned praise from the Chicago Tribune for ‘his keen musical instincts and vigorous way of translating his ideas into orchestral sound that has both shape and meaning’.
For this first recording, he was keen to celebrate a great composer, one of the most eminent of the twentieth century and a Pole like himself, who, like Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, gloried in the sound material of the orchestra and displayed boundless imagination. Though less well known than his illustrious colleagues for the moment, Lutosławski amply deserves to meet a wider public, for his music can speak as directly to connoisseurs as to simple music-lovers. We hope that this programme will help to further his reputation.
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THE LION’S EAR
La Morra
In 1513, Giovanni di Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (1475-1521) – son of the mythic Lorenzo il Magnifico – was elected Pope Leo X. Giovanni had inherited his family’s refined interest in, and zealous support of, the arts: literature; painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. But of all of these, Giovanni – perhaps due in part to his poor eyesight – favored music, for which his passion was legendary among contemporaries. The musical life of Leo’s court was unimaginably rich and vibrant, as innumerable eyewitness accounts confirm. This recording aims to bring that world acoustically to life and illustrate the range of practices typifying Leo’s own musical experiences. It is a tribute to a rare and extraordinary patron of music – himself a composer and musician –, who occupied that singular position at the very summit of the universal ecclesiastical hierarchy.
THIERRY PÉCOU LES LIAISONS MAGNÉTIQUES
Jonathan Stockhammer, Ensemble Resonanz, Ensemble Variances
