An Old Fashioned Christmas

Along with the Etudes and En blanc et noir of 1915, Claude Debussy‘s three sonatas constitute the last will and testament of the composer, who died in Paris on March 25, 1918. It’s not due to there being the final works in Debussy‘s chronology that confer this privilege open them so much as the fact that they perfectly manifest the composer’s ideal of French music distinguished by « clarity, elegance, simple and natural declamation (in which) seeks, above all, to please. How could one better describe these three masterpieces ?

Pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff's musical impressions here, along with a range of other smells recalled from her Russian childhood. When Eckemoff visited Finland and saw how much it reminded her of Russia she decided it was the best place to record an album about her Russian aroma memories, and recruited a Finnish band to realize her vision.

This new release is a recording of a concert held on March l8th, 2006 as part of the eighteenth Telemann Festival Days in Magdeburg, which is the leading forum for world-class performances of his major works. There is no doubt that the three cantatas performed on that day fit that description. They are all fairly lengthy, scored for strings and winds and feature virtuosic arias, choruses and chorales. In other words, they are much closer in construction to Bach’s cantatas than to Telemann’s better-known small-scale Harmonische Gottes-Dienst cantatas. Stylistically, too, all three works contain movements that could easily be mistaken for Bach.