Alphie Kohn

Ever since its creation more than twenty-five years ago, the Accentus chamber choir has ardently championed the a cappella repertory: under its conductor and founder Laurence Equilbey, it has produced an impressive discography that sets the benchmark in this music. For this new recording, the first for Alpha, she hands over direction of the ensemble to Christophe Grapperon, its associate conductor since 2013: ‘It can never be said often enough: the a cappella repertory is a Holy Grail of vocal music! It is a sensory experience directly accessible to everyone, but demanding and often atypical for the listener.’ Hahn and Saint-Saëns are on the programme of this album in superb choral works combining simplicity and expressive power, some of which have never been recorded before.

Karl Kohn is represented on this impressive two-album set by all of his solo and chamber music for flute. Kohn writes that "my music since the early 1960’s has been firmly re-connected with the broader heritage of Western art music, either by specific and direct quotation or “parody,” or – prevailingly - by more oblique allusions to characteristics of past style." Though he has spent seven decades working in California, the 95 year old composer writes that "I am struck how it seems to reflect, first, my Viennese musical heritage, and then my training in a neo-classical tradition." The performances feature the American flute virtuoso, Rachel Rudich, the dedicatee of many of Kohn's works.

Brahms often produced four-handed piano arrangements of his orchestral, vocal and chamber music, which made his works more easily available to the general public. The final volume of this highly acclaimed series features the monumental Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major which Brahms played through with the composer Ignaz Brüll in a two-piano arrangement prior to its première in Pest, 1881. Brahms also arranged works by his great friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, among them the dramatic Overture to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Op. 7.