Outhere Music

Leonardo García Alarcón writes: “The memories of my childhood in Argentina always bring me back to the singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, synonymous with shared family moments… Serrat’s poetry and music around a barbecue in Argentina; “De vez en cuando la vida” made me cry as it has made millions of people cry in Latin America, Spain and elsewhere… Joan Manuel Serrat is part of our life, he is our Jacques Brel!… Or, if we project ourselves back to the sixteenth century, he is in a sense our little Camerata Fiorentina, that movement of Italian poets and musicians in Florence. Serrat has allowed the whole of Latin America and Spain to reappropriate the works of its poets… "

This is Lucile Boulanger’s first solo recital. The French gambist, universally praised for her natural and moving playing – BBC Music Magazine even described her as ‘the Jacqueline du Pré of the viola da gamba’ – juxtaposes Bach with Carl Friedrich Abel, a great master of the bass viol and a close friend of the Bach family. Although Johann Sebastian never wrote for solo viola da gamba, we know that he transcribed many of his works for other instruments. So Lucile Boulanger has chosen, for example, to transcribe three dances from the Sixth Suite, ‘because it sounds particularly good on the viol, being written for five-stringed cello (a step towards the six or seven strings of the viol?). It is in D, the viol key par excellence, and its style, already somewhat galant , is reminiscent of Abel… This album gives me the opportunity to showcase the viol as both a melodic instrument – with the grain of the bow, the fragility of tone – and a polyphonic one.’

Semele is a masterpiece. For what else can one call a drama in which the perfect symbiosis of text and music conjures up such suggestive power? ‘To hold the mind, the ears and the eyes equally spellbound’: this recommendation by La Bruyère (Les Caractères: ‘Les ouvrages de l'esprit’) refers to the ‘machine plays’ so adored by the public in the Baroque period. But even without machinery or indeed without sets or real staging, Handel’s oratorio involves us in the tragic fate of his heroine with supreme skill.

In 1906, Komitas gave a concert and lecture in Paris. Debussy came on stage after the concert and knelt before the Armenian composer (who was also a priest, a singer and a pioneer of ethnomusicology), exclaiming: ‘I bow before your genius, Reverend Father.’

Juliette Hurel and Hélène Couvert, who have long enjoyed a close rapport on the concert platform and on disc, here celebrate five French women composers at the turn of the twentieth century. Countess Clémence de Grandval was the composer of some sixty songs, of which Saint-Saëns said: ‘They would certainly be famous if their composer did not have what many people regard as the irremediable defect of being a woman.’

Kurt Sanderling (1912–2011), born in Prussia, fled Germany for the USSR on the invitation of his Jewish relatives living there, to seek artistic and personal refuge from the Nazi regime.

Awarded a Diapason Découverte, André Lislevand’s debut album Forqueray Unchained (Arcana A486, 2021) celebrated one of moments of greatest splendor for the viola da gamba: that of the ancien régime in France. In this repertoire, the young musician proved to be "absolutely on top of his game and not afraid to explore the extremes of his instrument’s aesthetic world, though without ever losing touch with le bon goût " (Early Music Review). The same youthful freshness and energy can be found in his second album, though here he explores the German repertoire of the central decades of the 18th century, a period that witnessed the gradual decline of the instrument, but was still capable of expressing unexpected treasures and developing an idiom that often seems to anticipate the years to come.

Anton Bruckner called his Symphony no.8 in C minor a ‘mystery’; others have seen it as an ‘apocalyptic’ work. For Paavo Järvi, it is the composer’s ‘most unusual symphony’ and the ‘pinnacle’ of his symphonic output. In the history of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Eighth Symphony occupies a special place, since it was the first Bruckner the orchestra performed – in 1905, twelve years after the premiere in Vienna of what was then the longest symphony in the history of music, and Bruckner’s only work to call for harps: ‘A harp has no place in a symphony, but I couldn't do otherwise!’, the composer reportedly said.

This album celebrates a musical rapport that has lasted for twenty years and, above all, a true friendship: ‘We’re like two sisters, on stage and in life’, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta like to say. In parallel with their dazzling solo careers, they have frequently got together for concerts in trio or double concerto formation (like the one written for them by Francisco Coll, recently released on ALPHA580). But they have conceived their new recording for a rather rare combination, the violin- cello duo – with the aim of choosing pieces they found interesting either stylistically or for the way they use the instruments. The programme includes the Duo written by Zoltán Kodály in 1914, which was not premiered until 1924, two years after Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello, along with a few forays into the Baroque period (Leclair, Scarlatti, Bach) and, of course, works by twenty-first- century composers to whom the two soloists are very close: Jörg Widmann, Francisco Coll and Julien-François Zbinden are on the itinerary of this introspective journey into the generous world of two total artists.

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was one of the most complete musicians of the Elizabethan era. He made talented contributions to every genre of vocal and instrumental music. In the domain of the fantasia for viols , he wrote for numerous combinations of between two and six instruments and elaborated endlessly inventive formal structures, in which traces of Italianism are by no means absent. L’Achéron offers us a wide selection from this repertory, which it has recorded on viols based on early seventeenth-century English models.