la Veillee Imaginaire

Some albums exist outside of time or place, gently floating on their own style and sensibility. Of those, the La’s lone album may be the most beguiling, a record that consciously calls upon the hooks and harmonies of 1964 without seeming fussily retro, a trick that anticipated the cheerful classicism of the Brit-pop ’90s. But where their sons Oasis and Blur were all too eager to carry the torch of the past, Lee Mavers and the La’s exist outside of time, suggesting the ’60s in their simple, tuneful, acoustic-driven arrangements but seeming modern in their open, spacy approach, sometimes as ethereal as anything coming out of the 4AD stable but brought down to earth by their lean, no-nonsense attack, almost as sinewy as any unaffected British Invasion band.

Inspiration, energy and freedom compose the alluring menu of La Vaghezza's very first opus. The five instrumentalists of the young Italian ensemble, recent winners of the EEEMERGING+ scheme, sculpt one by one these magnificent pieces of 17th century Italy, like jewels to be (re)discovered. La Vaghezza is a trio sonata ensemble playing music from the 17th and early 18th Centuries, with a special interest in the unpredictability, extravagance, originality and freedom found in 17th Century Italian music. Their musical interpretations are historically informed, but always guided foremost by their common sensibility as an ensemble and their search for 'La Vaghezza', an aesthetic concept which describes a beauty impossible to understand or grasp: like smoke, something calling to be touched yet remaining intangible.

La Coscienza di Zeno is quickly becoming the new "enfant terrible" of Italian prog, 3 sensational albums into a career that just keeps giving vivid music that adheres to the classic elements that makes RPI so attractive to many , and puzzling to some others.
La Coscienza di Zeno is named after a well-known Italian novel, the title of which translates into English as ''Zeno's conscience''. The band initially played a modern style of progressive music that was influenced by the giants of UK prog rock. In fact, while they were working on their debut album they recorded a track for the Yes tribute project "Tales from the Edge"…

La Simphonie du Marais under their director Hugo Reyne are terrific. They bring this music alive with such stylish performances that bring fine textures, variety, colour and often some exotic moments, Hugo Reyne knowing just how to lift these suites to reveal every fine moment … These performances remain the benchmark.

Julien Chauvin and Le Concert de la Loge join Alpha and launch a new cycle devoted to Mozart. This project is a natural continuation of Julien Chauvin’s work of rediscovery focusing on the interpretation of the music of Haydn and his contemporaries in Paris in the late eighteenth century. The first recording assembles the majestic and grandiose Symphony no.41 in C major, known as the Jupiter, the Violin Concerto no.3 in G major and the Overture to Le nozze di Figaro. Julien Chauvin is, of course, the soloist in the violin concerto and, with his Concert de la Loge (which is no longer ‘Olympique’, since the French National Olympic Sports Committee forced the ensemble to amputate its name in 2016, despite the fact that it dates from…1782), they embark on a Mozartian marathon that promises to be electrifying!

The great “composer of the millennium” Johann Sebastian Bach stands like a solitary rock in the landscape of music history. There is less talk about where he came from and what influenced him stylistically. Chorwerk Ruhr embarked on a search for clues with highly interesting results: the young Johann Sebastian also listened to and studied works that were already around 100 years old. In any case, during his later years as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, he ensured that the collection of motets Florilegium selectissimarum Cantionum was purchased anew – it was used so frequently in lessons under his aegis that the music material was completely worn out. The collection by the early Baroque master and school cantor Erhard Bodenschatz, first published in 1603, illustrates the then new compositional technique of the Baroque in a clearly comprehensible way in songs mostly by German or Italian masters.

It's encouraging that nearly four decades into one of the most impressive careers in indie rock, Yo La Tengo are still finding new ways of doing things. On 2018's There's A Riot Going On, the band upended their usual process of writing material and then re-creating it in the studio by setting up recording gear in their rehearsal space and capturing their music in a freer and more spontaneous manner. For that album, YLT handed the tracks over to John McEntire (of Tortoise and the Sea and Cake) for mixing, but 2023's This Stupid World sees them cutting out the last middleman in their process – this time, the band mixed the tracks themselves, and for the first time they've made an album with essentially no outside input.

This instrumental disc which bears the subtitle “17th-century violin music in Spain” is a speculation around Spanish organ music having been arranged for other instruments in the same way Italian music of the time was. With a colourful setup of musicians including Enrico Gatti on violin, Leon Berben on harpsichord and organ, and Pedro Estevan on percussion, La Real Camara as directed by Emilio Moreno provides an adventurous and fully enjoyable view of the music which might have been heard in the century of Velazquez and Calderon de la Barca.

"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".