Ngrid Kappelle, Håkon Austbø Messiaen: Mélodies Complete

A while ago we recorded "Purgatorium" by Håkon Nystedt and "Four pieces from a distance" by Ørjan Matre - Composer, together with NyNorsk Messingkvintett. Now the first taste is finally out!

This is Alexandra Dariescu’s final release in the trilogy of Parisian preludes. Boulanger’s solo Prelude for Piano gives us a glimpse of what Lili might have gone on to write, had she lived beyond the age of 24. Fauré’s Preludes Op 103, published in 1910 are by comparison relatively late works but contain some of his most startling and original piano writing; which Aaron Copland referred to elegantly as 'intensity on a background of calm’. Finally on this recording, Messiaen gives each of his eight prelude a title, accompanied by a description often including the colours Messiaen experienced in this music through his synaesthesia, and reflecting his life-long love of birdsong.

This is another welcome, and important, exhumation from the EMI catalogue courtesy of ArkivMusic. It is welcome in the sense that it is surely one of the finest recordings of this seminal work and important in that is restores one of Argerich’s rare performances of twentieth century music.

From an Alpine crow circling rocks and precipices to a lonely curlew off the coast of Brittany; from a golden oriole singing in the sun to a tawny owl hooting in a dark forest… The Catalogue d’Oiseaux of Olivier Messiaen forms an extraordinary and varied tribute to the landscape and bird-life of France, and to its composer’s powers of invention as he explored and developed innovations in harmony, melody and rhythm at a time when all the elements of music were in flux and up for grabs. Any new recording of one of the 20th-century’s major piano cycles is a major event.

When Håkon Storm and Jan Wiese first met and played together in the spring of 2017, they uncovered the potential for a particular kind of music – a unique and interesting kind of jazz.

The Norwegian vocal ensemble Edvard Grieg Kor is the resident a cappella ensemble at Troldhaugen, the home of Edvard Grieg. Displaying versatility across all musical genres, it performs regularly with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and also forms the core of the Chorus of Bergen Nasjonale Opera.

The Norwegian vocal ensemble Edvard Grieg Kor is the resident a cappella ensemble at Troldhaugen, the home of Edvard Grieg. Displaying versatility across all musical genres, it performs regularly with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and also forms the core of the Chorus of Bergen Nasjonale Opera.

Between 2008 and 2014 Universal Classics reissued nearly all of Martha Argerich’s Deutsche Grammophon recordings in a series of boxed sets, largely according to genre (solo, chamber, duo, concerto, and so forth). There also was a box containing her output for the Philips label and another devoted to her complete recordings with Claudio Abbado. All of this material appears anew in DG’s 48-CD collection Martha Argerich: The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, with the addition of the 1977 Stravinsky Les Noces conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the Chopin and Schumann duos with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and more recent releases like the Berlin and Cologne Chopin Radio Recordings, the 2014 duo piano recital with Daniel Barenboim, and the 4-disc Lugano Concertos collection. The discs are packaged in original-jacket facsimiles and sequenced in more-or-less chronological order by release date.