Guillaume Mussot

With Malinconia, Yan Levionnois and Guillaume Bellom invite us to a musical exploration of nostalgia. From Debussy to Piazzolla, via Webern, Fauré, Janacek, Bartok, Sibelius and Liszt, this album also offers a journey through the 20th century. Through pieces testifying to the personal vision of this state by eight composers, this programme offers a juxtaposition of styles. Rich in contrasts, it offers an immediately perceptible diversity in which the works illuminate each other.

Born in 1970, Guillaume Connesson has won several prestigious awards. His writing, thanks to an exceptional sense of rhythm and color, is of a very accessible language, even exciting, which has earned him great success, especially with the younger generations. The program of this double CD is the richest possible calling card of the composer's work: it contains his most beautiful pages of chamber music, interpreted by the very best of French soloists, including Eric Le Sage. (piano), Paul Meyer (clarinet) Jerôme Pernoo (cello), Florent Héau (clarinet) and the Parisii Quartet in particular.

Were just one example to be given of the richness and diversity of Mozart's achievements, Concertos Nos. 23 & 24 would undoubtedly make excellent candidates. Completed almost simultaneously in Vienna in early 1786, the two concertos contrast starkly and seem to have been written years apart – or by two distinct yet connected minds of equal genius. Even more astonishing is the fact that they were written in parallel with the first masterpiece of the Da Ponte trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, while sharing with it very few stylistic similarities.

Dreams of Spain is an imaginary musical voyage of composers living in France who were inspired by the sunshine, the dance rhythms and folk music of Iberia: Maurice Ravel, Emmanuel Chabrier, Gabriel Fauré, Mel Bonis, Vincent d'Indy and Manuel de Falla. In Paris at the time of the Belle Époque, after the success of Carmen the French were mad about Spain and all things Spanish, and both sides of the Pyrenees witnessed a musical celebration of the region’s lively folk traditions.

This is the second recording of Machaut's music by the all-male Orlando Consort (countertenor on top), and their way with Machaut is excellent. They have a nice, light tone in the secular pieces that contrasts with the more severe Gothic Voices, and they convey the weighty, ceremonial quality of the big motets. Machaut goes far enough back that nobody can be sure of how it sounded (and the graphics for this all-vocal album show a painting including instruments), but if you like the unaccompanied approach, this will do as well as anything for putting the basic sound of Machaut in your head. And "basic," in the best way, describes this album in another respect as well: the booklet notes by Anne Stone (given in English and French) give the most complete, and more importantly most enthusiastic, introduction one could ask for in a few pages to Machaut's stylistic world.

This album of popular short pieces provides a memento of the first French lockdown in 2020: Renaud Capuçon and pianist Guillaume Bellom performed on social media each day, raising the spirits of their fans. Ideal for streaming, the collection includes music by Enrico Morricone, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Gardel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Schumann.

What did it mean for Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397-1474), chameleon-like expert in every musical genre of his day, to compose four settings of the Mass Ordinary toward the end of his life? Looking back from the vantage point of the next generation, when the polyphonic mass reigned supreme, it might be tempting to interpret these works as a self-conscious summa of Du Fay’s career – an achievement akin to Haydn’s London Symphonies or Beethoven’s late string quartets. On a purely musical level these comparisons are apt. Each mass stakes out unique musical terrain; they are often strikingly experimental; and the entire set is shimmeringly beautiful from beginning to end, revealing a composer at the height of his powers.

The cube made with matches which appears on the cover of this disc, showing on flames in the inside of the digipak and afterwards completely burnt, plays with the ideas that inspire this dazzling recording: the four ways to the knowledge of numbers through the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), which are expressed through something as ephemeral assound, where also the unexpected and the emotion of the moment take place.