Ardour Teebs

The Quatuor Voce is fifteen years old! To celebrate this anniversary, the four musicians present a CD focusing on two composers, Mozart and Schubert, but only one number: 15! This milestone, an age imbued with both ardour and maturity, is therefore embodied in the respective fifteenth quartets of these two geniuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart composed his Quartet No. 15 in 1783, as the second in the set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn. Schubert wrote his Quartet No. 15, his last work in the genre, in 1826. He composed it in only ten days but did not live to hear its first performance, which took place twenty-three years after his death.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the 10th anniversary of the acclaimed piano duo Julian Jacobson and Mariko Brown with Manhattan to Montmartre, dazzling keyboard arrangements of American giants George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Mikko Franck continue their collaboration with Alpha and here invite one of the label’s flagship pianists, Nelson Goerner. The programme is devoted to Richard Strauss, coupling several of the German composer’s early works. The Burleske for piano and orchestra, written at the age of twenty, is brimming with lyricism and Romantic ardour; its tone colours herald Strauss’s operas, while the orchestration anticipates his symphonic poems. The piano part is exceptionally virtuosic: Hans von Bülow, for whom Strauss wrote it, called it unplayable! The Serenade for thirteen wind instruments harks back to Mozart’s Gran Partita K361 for similar forces. This brief work in a single movement begins in a nocturnal colouring, as befits a serenade, before growing more animated and finally returning to the contemplative atmosphere of the opening. The symphonic poem for large orchestra Tod und Verklärung depicts the last hour of an artist’s life: the listener is gripped from the very first bars, which evoke the breathing and heartbeats of a dying man. Strauss allows us to experience his final moments and the transfiguration of his soul in one of the most glorious moments in the symphonic repertoire.

It may be a little surprising, or disconcerting, but it is not the demonstrative, furioso Vivaldi, the Vivaldi full of striking contrasts, that you will find here. The ardour, the spirit, of his music is there of course, but our aim is rather to bring out the more intimate, more complex side of his work, its many timbres, colours, textures and emotions all the variety that is to be found in the music of this extraordinary composer, loved by some exponents of early music and shunned by others. Les Basses Runies have chosen to use many different instruments and timbres for these pieces, and to transcribe and transpose some of them, the aims being to present little-known works, show well-known ones in a new light, and to highlight the rich palette of sound and the many possible timbral combinations afforded by the instruments of Les Basses Runies, thus expressively and movingly revealing the composer s very soul.

The virtuoso pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the last great figures of Russian Romanticism, was prone throughout his life to painful bouts of depression.

Incandescence refers to the state of being extremely bright after being subjected to extreme heat. Drawing on that, Stéphanie Moraly and Romain David gather on this recording Brahms’s last violin sonata, his most passionate, Respighi and Dohnányi’s sonatas and Szymanowski’s Romance, composed during his youth. These four pieces indeed share the same sense of engagement, ardour, and extreme expressivity, seeking to express human passions at their most profound in the final splendours of postromanticism.