Memory Echo sees Nitin Sawhney return to music and ideas he began exploring in 2018 with Hélène Grimaud for her Memory album. For this new release Sawhney has woven together four of his original compositions – The Fourth Window, Picturebook, Time and Breathing Light (performed by Hélène Grimaud) – with haunting remixes of Satie’s Gnossienne No.1, Debussy’s Clair de lune and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, Op.34 No.14. By refining the essence of his collaboration with the French pianist, he has created the seven-track Memory Echo, set for release in digital-only format on 25 October 2019.
Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.
Biography by Evan C. Gutierrez
Hélène Ségara hails from the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. She was born in the small town of Sex-Four-les-Plages on February 26, 1971. Her young life was complicated by a rocky family life, and at 14, she left her mother's home to live with her father, at which time she began performing in clubs and bars along the Riviera. She built up a strong repertoire and fan base, venturing out to record her 1993 debut record, Loin. At the age of 25 the young singer decided to move to Paris in search of more fertile artistic soil. After some months she met producer Fabrizio Salvadori, who was impressed with her talent and professionalism. Through Salvadori, Ségara met a number of songwriters and producers with whom she would collaborate on her debut single "Je Vous Aime Adieu." The song was an immediate hit, garnering Ségara the support she would need for the release of her first professional full-length record, Coeur de Verre.
For her first solo album with ATMA Classique, the celebrated Canadian soprano Hélène Brunet has chosen baroque and classical arias that have always been part of her life and for which she feels a deep affinity. Under the direction of Eric Milnes, the period ensemble L'Harmonie des saisons accompanies her in this program featuring music by Bach Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart and Leonardo Vinci, whose two arias are recorded here as world premieres. I remember being completely enamored, at fifteen, with Vivaldis famous aria Nulla in mundo pax sincera, attempting head voice singing for the first time and discovering the peculiar lightheaded effects of this new vocal technique.