Brendel Choice

The two Swedes Jan Lundgren and Hans Backenroth are musical storytellers, their playing is without any vanity and full of vivid stories. Qualities that Lundgren has already demonstrated with his own projects, the pan-European success trio "Mare Nostrum" and in duos with trombonist and singer Nils Landgren and bass icon Georg Riedel. Especially the latter finds a worthy continuation in the collaboration with Backenroth, an internationally sought-after European bassist.

Philippe Tondre presents the most important musical project of his life. There was no doubt about the choice of programme. The music of Robert Schumann is, in a way, his Madeleine de Proust. The Romances opus 94 rocked him from an early age and accompanied him throughout his studies. All these late works for instrument and piano by Heinz Holliger and Alfred Brendel, Alexeï and Leonid Ogrintchouk, Albrecht Mayer and Markus Becker were included in his first recordings. This project was an opportunity to rekindle the flame of many emotions that have marked him over the last fifteen years. These memories have guided him throughout the recording: every element of his musical education has played a part in this recording journey.

After this preamble or subtle captatio benevolentiae, I will tell you that in 1992, at the age of ten, I gave my first public recital in the beautiful monastery of Santa Maria del Puig, founded no less than in 1240 near Valencia and where my parents had married in 1980. I could not have imagined that only seven years later I would go to live and study in New York and that Haydn would accompany me on that difficult journey as a fragile but permanent connection to my childhood… And in that 1992 recital, the main score of the evening was a Haydn Sonata, one of the ones I include on this CD: the Sonata in D Major Hob. XVI/14, which is so full of tenderness and of a serene bucolic-pastoral luminosity. It is an inner idyll of simple but sublime grandeur. And so began the red thread that represents Haydn in my life, a kind of locus amoenus (a pleasant place) where I have so often found, and continue to find, solace, consolation and shelter. In my childhood, everyone loved Mozart and Beethoven. Haydn was the ugly duckling. I always felt I was an ugly duckling and maybe that is also why I loved him so much from the beginning…