la Mate

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Britain's greatest female composer, wrote six operas. The Boatswain's Mate, composed in Egypt in 1913-14, and first performed in 1916, was far and away the most popular of them, and between the wars, was often performed. It is a wonderfully tuneful and funny work, the most successful of all the British operas of the period, using folk music to evoke English rural life. Smyth was a close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst. She had been strongly involved with the suffragette movement immediately before she composed The Boatswain's Mate, and it's generally considered her most feminist opera (the overture quotes 'The March of the Women', her famous suffragette song). Smyth wrote her own libretto, adapting a story and play by W. W. Jacobs.

In the Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, instrumental music became a source of sonic and expressive experimentation. Influenced by vocal rhetoric, composers sought to replace words with a new musical language. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists developed, as did invention, improvisation and the search for surprising sonorities. Along with the organ or the harpsichord, the violin was the instrument of choice for experimenting with these new techniques. Italian and German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Farina, Schmelzer, Mealli, Buxtehude, Biber, Pisendel and Bach vied with each other in imaginativeness… The violinist Chouchane Siranossian and the harpsichordist Leonardo García Alarcón – both loyal Alpha Classics artists – have chosen to explore this repertory, here including Bach’s sonatas BWV 1019, 1021 and 1023 among other pieces.

"A few years ago I composed a large-scale piano piece for László Borbély, entitled Schmuÿle & Samuel Goldenberg. The piece refers to the movement of the same title from Mussorgsky's well-known piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky depicts two Jewish figures of very different characters, the driving force of his work being the juxtaposition of musical material inspired by them. This is the only concept I myself have taken as a starting point: a personal, parlando rubato, declamatory musical material and a pronounced, decisive, energetic, chorale-like movement confronted with each other. My resulting piece is thus akin to the Mussorgsky piece through the programme in the background, through the institution of the 'common ancestor'. In later years, it occurred to me to compose the other "Mussorgsky Pictures" accordingly, and to do so in pairs, by combining one Mussorgsky movement with another – starting from the musical conflict of my Schmuÿle movement. I have christened the series I have thus created "Memories of an Exhibition".

Après que les échecs ont détruit sa famille, Mallory a juré de ne plus jamais y jouer. La jeune femme se consacre désormais entièrement à son travail de mécanicienne pour subvenir aux besoins de sa mère et de ses soeurs. Elle accepte à contrecoeur un dernier tournoi, où elle affronte Nolan, le champion du monde en titre, bad boy prodige des échecs. Une attirance inattendue naît entre eux. …

Une personne peut-elle réellement mourir de solitude? Y a-t-il un lien entre la capacité à exprimer des émotions et la maladie d'Alzheimer? Les gens ayant une certaine personnalité sont-ils prédisposés à développer un cancer? En somme, le stress et les émotions peuvent-ils contribuer à l'apparition de diverses maladies? …