Cordes

Yet quite contemporary, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Alberic Magnard (1865-1914) have very little in common. However, they have each written a unique string quartet (respectively in 1893 and in 1903, and both created by Belgian groups). This common point is far from being anecdotal. Indeed, many French composers of all this pivotal period maintained with the string quartet such a relationship that they arrived at the same result: to write "their" string quartet.

Based only on these 2 quartets, I would have to rank Joseph-Ermend Bonnal as one of the best composers I have never heard of.

With "Le souffle des cordes" Renaud Garcia-Fons aims to go further in the meeting of classical and traditionnal instruments. It's a "crossover" project mixing composition and improvisation.

This is a good selection of motets because it hardly duplicates the last two such discs. On Orlando Consort’s collection of Josquin’s motets ( Fanfare 34:1), only Read more is heard, and none of them are on David Skinner’s more varied disc (33:1). It follows another Josquin disc by Cordes (35:6), though it was recorded a year later, a fine offering that unfortunately had to compete with an excellent recording of a Mass in Peter Phillips’s ongoing series.

Here we have the type of disc that fills in the cracks, a discovery of several unrecorded byways of Schutz’s miscellaneous secular oeuvre. Of course, the seventeenth century being what it is, secular and sacred are deliberately dovetailed into a cultural pea soup: these works – so different from the thoroughly Mediterranean Op. 1 Madrigals – are embedded in the literary morality of the age (how typical and reverently set is the text of Haus und Guter: “house and goods are inherited from one’s parents, but a pious and virtuous wife is from the Lord. He who finds a wife, he finds something good and receives blessings from the Lord”) and are not entirely profane.

Un portrait de Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) sans concerto pour violoncelle, sans le menuet fameux du quintette en mi majeur ? Mais non moins fidèle au caractère du compositeur toscan émigré en Espagne : fantasque et passionné.