Lofofora Ouvrez Les Esprits

Trio Les Esprits turn their attentions to Franz Schubert. This album showcases their composer's two late masterpieces for trio, works of expansive melodic generosity. The couplings put the violin and cello in the spotlight: the group's cellist, Victor Julien-Laferrière, performs the sonata originally written for the long-extinct arpeggione, and its violinst, Mi-Sa Yang, presents the haunting Fantasie in C.

On October 6, 1802, in Heiligenstadt, a village near Vienna where he had sought peace and quiet in order to treat the hearing loss that had caused him psychological pain for several years, Beethoven signed a letter intended for his two brothers in which he voiced his despair. Never sent and secretly kept in a desk drawer, the “Heiligenstadt Testament” is one of the first manifestoes in music history on the subject of romantic interiority. It shares the depression of a man cut off from the outside world and powerless in front of his own tragic destiny. It is an even doubly tragic destiny, since Beethoven wrote that he was “ born with an ardent and lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society “, but he had to lead a life of solitude to remain hidden and misunderstood by his contemporaries, because it was impossible for him to reveal his deafness.

The Piano Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, by Ludwig van Beethoven is a piano trio completed in 1811. It is commonly referred to as the Archduke Trio, because it was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the youngest of twelve children of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor. Rudolf was an amateur pianist and a patron, friend, and composition student of Beethoven. Beethoven dedicated about a dozen compositions to him.

The Piano Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, by Ludwig van Beethoven is a piano trio completed in 1811. It is commonly referred to as the Archduke Trio, because it was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the youngest of twelve children of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor. Rudolf was an amateur pianist and a patron, friend, and composition student of Beethoven. Beethoven dedicated about a dozen compositions to him.

The Piano Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, by Ludwig van Beethoven is a piano trio completed in 1811. It is commonly referred to as the Archduke Trio, because it was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the youngest of twelve children of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor. Rudolf was an amateur pianist and a patron, friend, and composition student of Beethoven. Beethoven dedicated about a dozen compositions to him.

'Titon et l'Aurore' is an opera in three acts and a prologue by the French composer Jean-Joseph de Mondonville which was first performed at the Académie royale de musique, Paris on 9 January 1753. The authorship of the libretto has been subject to debate; Mondonville's contemporaries ascribed the prologue to Antoine Houdar de la Motte and the three acts of the opera to the Abbé de La Marre. Titon et l'Aurore belongs to the genre known as the pastorale héroïque. The work played an important role in the so-called Querelle des Bouffons, a dispute over the relative merits of the French and Italian operatic traditions which dominated the intellectual life of Paris in the early 1750s.

Pelléas et Mélisande has taken it's place as one of opera's greatest masterpieces. Debussy deployed a unique style in this work, flexible and natural, never forcing the prosody of words and phrases. In this new historically informed interpretation, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have endeavored to do justice to this music that is at once so strong and so delicate, supported by a handpicked cast of today's finest French singers.

Les éléments invite you to a winter evening, a musical journey from the Middle Ages to the present day where songs and poems celebrate winter, its festivals and its coldness, in the intimacy of the a cappella choir. The great composers of the repertoire rub shoulders with new compositions, arrangements of traditional Christmas songs from the provinces of France specially commissioned for this programme. Best enjoyed by the fireside!