Cordes

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.

Entre le quintette et le quatuor de Saint-Saëns, il y a toute une vie de compositeur, des joies, des douleurs, des idées, des motifs, la construction d'une existence et d'une esthétique. C'est cette substance éminemment sensible que le Quatuor Girard, une des formations françaises les plus prometteuses du moment, accompagné du jeune pianiste Guillaume Bellom, a voulu saisir dans ce nouveau disque B Records, enregistré dans l'atmosphère douce et feutrée de la Fondation Singer-Polignac.

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.

Though chamber music is incontestably the least well-known component of his corpus, Camille Saint-Saëns was a master of the genre, leaving us with a large collection of works. We may think of Saint-Saëns as a conservative and very academic composer. And yet, we would be well advised to remember that he was, in fact, a pioneer. Even as a young man, Saint-Saëns delved into chamber music instead of opera, the conventional form for an up-and- coming musician. He composed chamber music throughout his life - through to the final woodwind sonatas in 1921 - restoring luster to the form which, in France, had been all but forgotten.

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.

Yet another Christmas release features the Christmas vocal polyphony of Cristobal de Morales, who is regarded as the first significant Spanish composer of the Renaissance. Like most compositions for this Christian feast, his Christmas motets circulated and were performed throughout Europe, traveling far beyond Spain's borders. His archaic, mystical and expressive musical language, that one almost might term place-less and timeless, must have played a role in this dissemination. Moreover, Morales was active not only in Spanish cathedrals but also spent many years of his creative career as a papal singer in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.