Ardour Teebs

If you've only listened to Heifetz's crude interpretation of Sibelius's tempestuous and capricious concerto in the past, you might be incredulous after listening to this CD. "What? This is the Sibelius Concerto? It's a far cry from the one in my memory." After listening to it twice, however, tears should prick your eyes–the result of two gusts of contrasting emotions in one stroke: anguish over all the beauty, passion and subtlety you've missed in the past from this fabulous concerto, and jubilation at your new discovery of this supreme recording and the privilege to relish every bar of the music.

French pianist Geoffroy Couteau moves with sovereign ease from one mood to another in these works, bringing out their vividly contrasting colours and emotions in perfect unison with his attentive partners. The clarinet sonatas mark the end of Brahms’s output of chamber music and perhaps its peak; their gentleness and tenderness combine gracefully with the twilight glow that emanates from these pieces, showing a disarming simplicity close to Mozart. The Horn Trio, on the other hand, expresses the ardour and energy of a composer in his early thirties and at the height of his artistic powers.

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.

Almost all the music performed on these separately available discs is, or has been, available in competing versions. But Le Concert Spirituel under Hervé Niquet’s experienced direction achieves an expressive intensity which overshadows its rivals. Charpentier wrote over 30 Tenebrae for the last three days of Holy Week and their texts, drawn from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, inspired the composer to extraordinary heights of anguished declamation. Much of the music is a skilful blend of French court air with Italian monodic lamentazioni, which he had encountered during his three years in Rome as Carissimi’s pupil. The five Lenten (Carême) Meditations on the path to Christ’s Crucifixion belong to a group of ten such pieces which are hardly less striking than the Tenebrae for their expressive ardour. If the performances are not always refined, they lack nothing in respect of fervent and idiomatic declamation.

For the fourth and penultimate volume of his Fauré series, Eric Le Sage has been joined by Alexandre Tharaud, Emmanuel Pahud, and François Salque, long-standing accomplices, in order to record these pieces for four hands. Recipient of numerous prizes both in France and abroad, this complete Fauré series is already asserting itself as a reference for the interpretation of Gabriel Fauré’s chamber music with piano.

‘Deborah contains some of the most glorious music Handel ever wrote. Even if many of the numbers have been recycled from earlier works, the invention is still staggering. Handel devotees can thus amuse themselves spotting the tunes while everyone else can revel in the sumptuous scoring and the sheer vitality and humanity of the piece, all superbly conveyed in Robert King's recording’.

“And the violin dances Furiant, carried away by an irresistible ardour”. Beyond the intrinsic character of gypsy music, which constantly moves back and forth between melancholy and joy, dance is the obvious thread running through this album. It creates a bond through its intensity and infinite rhythmic contrasts, revealing a wide range of emotions. One dance can contain an entire life, with its laughter, its tears, its perpetual movement, its ruptures, its unpredictability in the passage from one emotional state to another…