Analekta

Since winning the Silver Medal and the Krystian Zimerman Sonata award at the 2015 Chopin Piano Competition, Montreal and Quebec at large have been gaga – for good reason – over Charles Richard-Hamelin. Recorded live in concert this past May at Salle Raoul-Jobin of the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City, this album may begin conservatively with Beethoven’s Two Rondos for Piano, Op. 51, but takes a turn with George Enescu’s Second Suite, Op. 10. With the Enescu, Richard-Hamelin digresses from clinical Classicism into the Romanian composer’s grandiose late-Romantic chromaticism. Even in a live recording, Richard-Hamelin shows not only acute elegance and poise, but extreme precision and a heightened emotional sensibility.

As Rameau wrote in his treatise on harmony, “A good musician should surrender himself to all the characters he wishes to portray, and like a skillful actor, put himself in the speaker’s shoes.” Regardless of the means used to achieve this, the composer uses music and the interplay of harmony to convey feeling. This album on the Analekta label features bass-baritone Philippe Sly and soprano Hélène Guimette accompanied by musicians from Clavecin en concert under the direction of Luc Beauséjour.

Autumn 2017 marks the celebration of our 30th anniversary. It is to better serve our great Canadian musicians that the recording company Analekta was founded in 1987. Through the hundreds of albums and thousands of works recorded since its inception, Analekta has always strived to achieve perfection…

Quelques notes issues du contralto velouté de Marie-Nicole Lemieux suffisent pour tomber sous le charme. Timbre unique, sens inné de la ligne musicale, apprivoisement des textes de l’intérieur, charisme étonnant, aisance apparente dans tous les répertoires, présence scénique remarquable, la chanteuse semble posséder tous les atouts. La carrière de celle qui se produit maintenant sur les grandes scènes du monde entier devait prendre son envol en 2000, alors qu’elle remporte, presque coup sur coup, le Concours Joseph-Rouleau et le Concours musical international Reine Élisabeth de Belgique. Premiers jalons d’un parcours qui deviendrait rapidement stellaire. Nous la retrouvons ici dans une compilation regroupant certaines des plus belles pages enregistrées sous étiquette Analekta, signées Scarlatti, Handel, Vivaldi et Brahms.

Composer Unsuk Chin has a special relationship with Canada; long before she began wowing them at IRCAM and began to take Europe by storm, Chin's music had been heard in Canada as part of the ISCM Music Days festival, as early as 1984. Kent Nagano, a conductor with whom Chin often works, was named to the post of music director to the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in 2006, prompting her return to Canada and ultimately to this Analekta recording, Unsuk Chin: Rocaná/Violin Concerto.