La Dysfonction Ostéopathique

Hugo Reyne décide, en 1987, de fonder un ensemble dont la vocation est la redécouverte du patrimoine musical français des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Le nom qu´il lui choisit réunit le mot simphonie, synonyme à cette époque d´ensemble instrumental, et le Marais, l´un des plus beaux quartiers de Paris, représentatif de la période baroque.

"A few years ago I composed a large-scale piano piece for László Borbély, entitled Schmuÿle & Samuel Goldenberg. The piece refers to the movement of the same title from Mussorgsky's well-known piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky depicts two Jewish figures of very different characters, the driving force of his work being the juxtaposition of musical material inspired by them. This is the only concept I myself have taken as a starting point: a personal, parlando rubato, declamatory musical material and a pronounced, decisive, energetic, chorale-like movement confronted with each other. My resulting piece is thus akin to the Mussorgsky piece through the programme in the background, through the institution of the 'common ancestor'. In later years, it occurred to me to compose the other "Mussorgsky Pictures" accordingly, and to do so in pairs, by combining one Mussorgsky movement with another – starting from the musical conflict of my Schmuÿle movement. I have christened the series I have thus created "Memories of an Exhibition".

En quoi consiste exactement le bouddhisme ? Pourquoi fait-il aujourd'hui tant d'adeptes en Occident ? Comment expliquer le succès d'une forme de sagesse à la fois si ancienne et si nouvelle ? …

Hypnos, God of Sleep… Simon-Pierre Bestion’s recordings are often inspired by his desire to recreate a ritual. His aim here was to recreate a Requiem service, ‘the ceremony that accompanies the passage of a human being into the hereafter, while supporting the feelings of all who witness it. Making use of all the freedom that this act of re-creation afforded me, I constructed this programme without boundaries between repertories or different musical aesthetics – from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the twentieth century – selecting the works for their captivating musical material, their hypnotic and meditative dimension’. Intonations from Byzantine chant sit alongside guttural voices in Giacinto Scelsi and the English vocal style of John Tavener; Franco-Flemish Renaissance polyphony encounters the influences of eastern or western spiritual traditions present in the contemporary works.

The extraordinary series of 1998-2006 recordings of the nine published books of madrigals by Monteverdi, from Claudio Cavina and the Italian ensemble La Venexiana, is now available in limited-time and limited-number boxed set form from Glossa. This multi-award-winning cycle set new standards in textual declamation, rhetorical color and harmonic refinement. Also included is the Live in Corsica album of Monteverdi madrigals (2002) and a newly-written essay by original series essayist Stefano Russomanno of which all, along with full texts and translations in PDF form, are also included.