Concerto Royeaux

The St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra is proud to present the third International Composer Competition. This competition aims to discover talented music creators, establish creative relations with them, contribute to the successful career of young composers in their music’s professional performance, and initiate the creation of new works for the chamber orchestra and their dissemination.

Georg Philipp Telemann was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is one of the most prolific composers in history, at least in terms of surviving oeuvre. Telemann was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favourably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally.

Mauro DAlay was a virtuoso violinist and composer from Parma who acquired great fame and fortune throughout Europe.

By its title and its twelve violin concertos, Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico immediately captures the imagination. Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano, with the addition of high-calibre keyboardists, present the full collection with the six additional adaptations for keyboard by Bach.

Last year it was the Kempff solo recordings which brightened up our winter days at the start of the new year.
Now we can offer, for the first time, a compact 14-CD set of his complete concerto studio recordings. They span from his 1925 recording of Beethovens First Concerto (the first ever to be made of that work) to his visionary 1977 performances of Mozarts Concertos Nos. 21 and 22, now receiving their first international CD release. Unlike the solo recordings set, this edition is non-limited.Kempff traversed the set of Beethoven Concertos three times in the studio (only No.2 was not set down during the shellac era); all those performances are included in this set.
Theres more Mozart, Brahms and Schumann. In addition, 1950s Decca recordings of two Mozart concertos, the Liszt and Schumann concertos are also featured.

Emmanuel Pahud is one of the most prolific and distinguished flutists active in contemporary France. His repertory is broad, stretching from the Baroque to contemporary music, including jazz. Pahud was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 27, 1970. When he was four, he first heard the flute and immediately demanded to be taught how to play it. His family, which was not musical, traveled frequently for his father's work responsibilities, and he lived as a child in Baghdad, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. In the latter city, the family of flutist François Binet lived in the same apartment building as Pahud, and he began studies with 15-year-old Philippe Binet. Soon he graduated to studies with François Binet. At the family's next stop, in Brussels, he studied with Michel Moinil and Carlos Bruneel, playing a Mozart concerto with the National Orchestra of Belgium at 13. Pahud enrolled at the Paris Conservatory, winning several major prizes while he was a student, and after graduating, he soon landed principal flutist slots with the Basel Radio Symphony in Switzerland and the Munich Philharmonic. He continued his studies with Aurèle Nicolet, who had formerly been principal flutist with the Berlin Philharmonic and coached him on how to approach his audition for that ensemble. The stratagem worked, and in 1992, Pahud was invited by conductor Claudio Abbado to join the orchestra as the principal flutist.

Mortensen studierte an der Königlich Dänischen Musikakademie Kopenhagen bei Karen Englund (Cembalo) und Jesper Bøje Christensen (Generalbass), er setzte seine Studien bei dem Cembalisten Trevor Pinnock in London fort.

The concertos for strings are a very special genre in Vivaldi's output. Contrary to the concertos for solo instruments, those offer a real balance and amazing range of colours between all the intruments concerned. Following a very successful first volume, released in 2004, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano offer a new milestone recording in Vivaldi's instrumental music, full of colours and refinement.