Philippe Katerinetotal à L'ouest

The year 2021 will mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Philippe de Monte. This Flemish Renaissance master was one of the greatest composers of his generation. He held the prestigious position of Hofkapellmeister to the Imperial Court for thirty-five years, first in Vienna and then in Prague. He composed more music than any other composer during the second half of the sixteenth century, producing close to eight hundred works; these included secular and sacred madrigals; forty chansons, forty masses, two hundred and fifty motets, and a handful of other sacred works.

With Philippe Jaroussky’s new album, Storia di Orfeo, the French countertenor realises a long-held dream: to portray the mythic Orpheus – divine musician who ventures into the underworld to retrieve his beloved wife Eurydice from the clutches of death – in his many guises, an inspiration for the very first opera and beyond.

The grandest of Mozart's wind serenades in performances that fully measure up to their wit and profundity. Philippe Herreweghe's attributes as a conductor, perviously revealed in an outstanding series of baroque and classsical choral works, are revealed in these warm and wise period performances, with outstanding playing.

The second project of Collegium Vocale Gent and Philippe Herreweghe for Phi to focus on Renaissance music is devoted to one of the most remarkable of all composers: Carlo Gesualdo. Both his life, characterised by extravagant and excessive behaviour, and his compositions left their mark on the history of music. Although best known for his secular music, he also wrote an almost equivalent number of sacred works that demonstrate his fervent faith.

From the overt Romanticism of Saint-Saëns to the nostalgia-laden modernity of Poulenc, Bruno Philippe takes us on a journey through (almost) a century of French cello music. Alongside Tanguy de Williencourt, he also performs the cello version of Franck's famous Violin Sonata, one of the absolute peaks of nineteenth-century chamber music.

Threni (1957-58) is his longest, most ambitious and complex dodecaphonic score, and probably one of its summits. A work like the Requiem Canticles (1966) goes even further in this direction: the composer’s last masterpiece, it seems to summarise in itself the evolution of an entire lifetime, combining elements from the different stylistic periods that punctuated his career – whilst marking a highpoint in the spiritual quest that became increasingly important in Stravinsky’s life. In this major album, Philippe Herreweghe reveals with conviction his love for the composer’s music, and under his sure, inspired direction, the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic reveal their pure poetry.

Arthaus presents the Vienna State Opera’s outstandingly cast new production of Werther on DVD. The production was the Vienna State Opera debut for the young Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan – the Argentinian tenor Marcelo Álvarez, took the title role. Although he had already secured an international reputation through his performances in leading opera houses all over the world, this was his first appearance in the premiere of a production in Vienna. His Charlotte, on this occasion the young Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča, joined the Vienna State Opera in 2003.

All Helmchen’s recordings for the PentaTone label have been award winners. The romantic and virtuoso piano concertos by Mendelssohn never became as popular as his violin concertos but are of just as high a calibre. Helmchen regularly works with Philippe Herreweghe and this collaboration has resulted in a very special album.

There is no shortage of performances of the two Bach cantatas on this release by the Ricercar Consort and the Collegium Vocale Gent, under the direction of gambist Philippe Perlot. They are two of the most imposing among Bach's examples of the form, with two large sections, a variety of movement types and elaborate orchestration, and Bach strove to impress with both. Good readings are available in cycles by conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Masaaki Suzuki, and others, but there's a lot to be said for Perlot's approach, which has been developed over a deliberate set of recordings of cantatas that have something to say to each other.

Written one after the other in the space of just three months and with unprecedented energy, Mozart’s last three symphonies carry within them the aesthetic ideal of their composer, touched by a grace that is already pre-Romantic, and thus form an exemplary musical testament. The Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, a pioneering collective among period-instrument orchestras, reveals a richness, a modernity, a visionary complexity that prepares the way for the Beethovenian revolution.