Voici enfin l'ouvrage indispensable qui s'adresse à tous les overbookés ! Forte de son expérience personnelle et de présidente de « Maman travaille », premier réseau des mères actives, Marlène Schiappa propose sa méthode éprouvée pour réussir à concilier vie professionnelle et vie personnelle, sans y laisser la santé ! Elle est épaulée par le manager de carrières Cédric Bruguière, qui apporte l'éclairage du coach à chacune des problématiques traitées….
Vivaldi and the violin concerto? Vivaldi is the violin concerto! One must get past the cliché (‘Vivaldi composed the same concerto 500 times’) to understand the extent to which composer, instrument and genre form an indissoluble whole; and that is what Théotime Langlois de Swarte and the musicians of Le Consort have set out to do. From his early youth in Venice to his last days in Vienna, the ‘red-haired priest’ pushed back technical and academic boundaries, constantly creating new narrative forms: the journey of a lifetime.
The course of my whole life would undoubtedly have been very different if, one October evening in 1955, I had not had been fortunate enough to hear a live rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem. A few months earlier, on 1st August, I had turned 14, and luck would have it that my teacher, Joan Just (a composer, and the director of the Conservatoire in my home town of Igualada), decided to prepare the work with the choir of the local Schola Cantorum. That evening I was on my way to the Conservatoire to attend my usual counterpoint and harmony lessons with him; for some reason, I didn’t receive the message telling me that classes had been cancelled due to a rehearsal of the Requiem.
With Forgotten Arias countertenor Philippe Jaroussky pays tribute to composers of the late Baroque era and to the great librettist of the age, Pietro Metasasio. All ten arias on the album, written between 1748 and 1770 by nine composers, are heard in world premiere recordings. Metasasio’s librettos were set by multiple composers – Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck and Mozart among them – resulting in hundreds of operas. The more familiar names on the multi-faceted programme of Forgotten Arias are Gluck, Johann Christian Bach, Jommelli, Hasse and Piccinni. Less well-known are Bernasconi, Ferrandini, Traetta and Valentini. Jaroussky’s partners on the album are the conductor Julien Chauvin and his orchestra Le Concert de la Loge. All in all, Forgotten Arias looks set to be highly memorable.
For this new recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Jordi Savall conducts an all-female orchestra, as Vivaldi did in his time at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, parti- cularly in the field of folk music, playing violin, folk fiddle, kyl- kobiz, ghizzhak and similar instruments. She studied Baroque violin with Enrico Onofri (Palermo Conservatory) and Hiro Kurosaki (Mozarteum University), focusing on historically in- formed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires. Such a profile made her the ideal candidate for a collaboration with Jordi Savall. She plays a Francesco Ruggeri violin, built in 1680 in Cremona, Italy. This double album sold at the price of a single new release of- fers the recording of the Four Seasons with and without the son- nets written by Vivaldi and four others concerti by Vivaldi. The version with read text sheds a particularly revealing light on Vivaldi’s work.
Jérémie Rhorer and Le Cercle de l'Harmonie launch a new collaboration with Alpha Classics, with several projects planned, following the Mozart operas released on the label in 2016 and 2017. Here they tackle a monument of the sacred repertoire that is fascinating for its rich, complex, even ‘mysterious’ conception. Rhorer tells us that his interpretation pays close attention to the question of tempi, which have often become progressively slower and heavier since the post-Romantic period: the tempi have ‘a direct bearing on the vocal comfort of the singers, since breath control is one of the great difficulties of this work’, he says. For this recording, he has called in a quartet of top-flight soloists along with the Audi Jugendchorakademie, a remarkable German youth choir founded in 2007. In conjunction with his period-instrument orchestra, soon to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, they offer a passionate vision of Beethoven’s masterpiece.
After Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, Jordi Savall continues his journey into the 19th century with the Italian Symphony of Felix Mendelssohn, a composer he records for the first time. He delivers 2 versions of the work: the one which was performed at the wolrdwide premiere in 1833 and the revised one from 1834. The most conspicuous changes are to be found in the last tree movements. The comparison of the two scores and the performance on period instruments take us as close to Mendelssohn's work and original intention as we will ever get. Thanks to Jordi Savall's insightful conducting, there is still something to discover in Mendelssohn's most famous symphony.
In 1650, seven years after Claudio Monteverdi’s death, the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti, with the help of Francesco Cavalli, a student and successor of Monteverdi, decided to put together the compilation Messa a quattro voci et salmi. It was a unique tribute to Monteverdi. In an era when looking back was not fashionable, the preservation of written music was rare, and for the most part the names of dead musicians were quickly forgotten, Monteverdi’s fame seemed to persist for a long time.
Following the publication of the collection Parnassus Musicus Ferdinandaeus in 1615, all kinds of compiled collections of sacred music started to appear, often featuring music for smaller ensembles and of course, in the new early-Baroque style, music scored for voice, instruments and basso continuo. The compiler, usually a composer himself, gathered works from his colleagues, added some of his own work and had the collection published. Nowadays because of copyright this would be unimaginable, particularly if publishing the compositions of one’s own contemporaries.