Chloris

17-year-old Andréas Perez Ursulet – a singer who is both baritone and countertenor – emerged as victor of the 2018 edition of Les Prodiges, the French TV talent show for young people with a classical training in music or dance. He first became fascinated by opera when he was just four years old. “People still see classical music as something you have to be chosen to do,” he says. “I want to show that it can be accessible to anyone.”

Launched in 2020 with a Chopin étude performed by the legendary Daniel Barenboim – and now embracing a huge range of vocal and instrumental music, from the Renaissance to the 21st century – the Musical Moments series showcases new recordings from internationally renowned artists and rising stars of the classical world, as well as offering moments of escape from day-to-day life, through music of every mood, from tranquil, reflective and consolatory, to experimental, exciting and uplifting.

Launched in 2020 with a Chopin étude performed by the legendary Daniel Barenboim – and now embracing a huge range of vocal and instrumental music, from the Renaissance to the 21st century – the Musical Moments series showcases new recordings from internationally renowned artists and rising stars of the classical world, as well as offering moments of escape from day-to-day life, through music of every mood, from tranquil, reflective and consolatory, to experimental, exciting and uplifting.

One of the most famous musical enigmas in literature, the fictional Vinteuil Sonata at the heart of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), is the inspiration for a new CD featuring sibling musicians Maria (violin) and Nathalia Milstein (piano).

Sophie Dervaux’s debut album on Berlin Classics is very much in the French tradition. Together with her French colleague, pianist Sélim Mazari, the bassoonist presents works on this concept album Impressions that are by composers of various eras, including Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Fauré and Koechlin. The bassoon – unusually – takes the stage as a soloist and so fulfils the purpose that the Vienna Phil bassoonist had in mind: to present the unique singing sound of the instrument and enrich the world of the bassoon in the process.

The Lebanese-American Karim Sulayman joins the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for this album of works by Reynaldo Hahn.

Praised by BBC Music magazine for his ‘lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma’, the Lebanese-American Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist. He joins the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for this album of works by Reynaldo Hahn. The founder members Tom Poster and Elena Urioste write: ‘Kaleidoscope has championed many unjustly neglected composers, but in the case of Reynaldo Hahn the neglect seems particularly puzzling to us. is music is immediately approachable, soaringly beautiful, and speaks directly to the heart; audiences, on the rare occasions that they get to hear it, seem to adore it. His life story is fascinating, too: born in Caracas, to a Jewish-German father and a Catholic- Venezuelan mother of Spanish / Basque origin, the handsome and urbane Hahn charmed high-society Paris, enjoying great success as composer, conductor, singer, writer-lecturer, and music critic. The Piano Quintet had been on our programming wish list for some time: it was lauded as Hahn’s greatest work at its 1922 première, and the powerful intensity of its first two movements in particular acts as a firm rejoinder to those who criticised Hahn as a lightweight salon composer. By the time he finished his Piano Quartet, in 1946, Hahn was a man out of place in the world; this is music which bears no trace of modernism, instead looking back nostalgically to Hahn’s heyday in la belle époque.

After exploring the music of his Sephardic ancestry on the acclaimed recording Latino Ladino (Naxos 8573566), Yaniv d’Or brings a refreshing perspective to the Dichterliebe from Schumann’s proverbial ‘year of song’. French songs of the 19th and 20th centuries offer d’Or’s exotic voice further dimensions in the floating harmonies of the young Duparc and Debussy, including Reynaldo Hahn’s beautiful Bach pastiche, and concluding with the classical simplicity of Poulenc’s first songs.

The artistic cooperation of Federico Longhi (an internationally famous baritone) and Cristina Pantaleoni (a refined pianist and teacher of score analysis) has lasted for more than thirty years and originated, for both, in their first years as Conservatory students.