Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 27

Who was the young Bach? A rebellious, provocative adolescent? A clever, stubborn careerist? An innovator, as gifted as he was prolific? Certainly a mixture of all three, replies the harpsichordist Andreas Staier in this selection of early works that are anything but run-of-the-mill. This programme shows how Herr Bach, eager to call the music of his time into question, assimilated multiple influences and gave a ‘new look’ to the traditions of north Germany.

The first three volumes of the complete Beethoven sonatas by Paul Lewis were warmly and unanimously acclaimed by the international press:

"Paul Lewis atteint un niveau de décantation tel que la virtuosité semble n'être utilisée que pour intensifier l'expression." (Le Monde de la Musique) • "Légitimement réputé pour ses interprétations de Schubert, Paul Lewis rejoint désormais le "club" choisi des beethovéniens." (La Croix) • "La démarche de Paul Lewis s'inscrit dans une sorte de "nouvelle objectivité", qui n'est en rien une neutralité expressive, mais qui cherche à retrouver la vérité des œuvres." (Diapason) • "We know we're in safe hands. He's a tiger, he's a lamb: he's whatever Beethoven wants, projected with an honesty and clarity that's hard to beat." (The Times) • "I can hardly wait for Mr. Lewis to finish the project. The spaciousness, integrity and imagination in his playing make these performances truly distinguished." (The New York Times) • "Lewis Einspielung lässt sich schon vor Abschluss in den Kanon der großen Gesamteinspielungen dieser Sonaten einfügen." (Piano News)

Freshly arrived in Vienna, Beethoven began systematically revisiting the current musical genres, starting with chamber music. The string quartet was naturally the keystone of this edifice. His first published works in the genre, the six Quartets op.18, confirmed his position as a powerful presence on the Viennese musical scene: the aim was to make his mark with the public, and that challenge was enough for the young composer to surpass himself! This is already ‘music of a madman’, to use the epithet applied to the later ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets, which constituted the first volume of this Beethoven series by the celebrated Tokyo String Quartet.

Emerging from a dark depression, Beethoven chose art rather than death, thus embracing a notion of destiny and heroism which links him to heroes of the past – and of his present. The Eroica Symphony, dedicated initially to Napoleon, and ultimately ‘to the memory of a great man’, was to prompt contemporary commentators to seek out interpretations in the Iliad. It was this work which first inspired the concept of a ‘symphonic poem’: here, it is the metaphor that serves the music, and not the contrary.

Five classics for flute.
At the beginning of the 20th century Mallarmé's Faune had already awoken the flute from its almost century-long 'romantic' slumber to come to the service of more transparent, more colourful… and more delicate sonorites. And yet, this fragile delicacy was abruptly called into question in 1936 when Varèse and Jolivet simultaneously composed Density 21.5 and the Cinq Incantations. Since then the violence and the emotional power the flute is capable of with the lacerating density of its sound made it one of the favorite instruments of post-war composers. This recording brings together five of the indispensable masterpieces in the contemporary flute repertoire, which also happen to be masterpieces of the music of our time.

Variation form runs right through Brahms’s creative output. The composition of variations on themes from sources as diverse as Handel, Paganini and Hungarian folk music was a significant element in the forging of his personal musical language from the traditions of Bach and Beethoven.

‘I like to play the cycle of Preludes without interruption, with the same tension, a certain underlying fear even in the most serene preludes.’ Two years after a first CD devoted to the Waltzes, Alexandre Tharaud returns to Chopin, the composer he has played most often and who has never failed to move him deeply. In addition to the Preludes in A flat and op.45 and the Trois nouvelles études, he has provided the cycle with a more recent echo in music by Federico Mompou. In their personality, their careers, their exclusive relationship with the piano, their attention to sonority, and their inward melody, the two composers have much in common.

Here are three of the greatest quartets of Haydn’s maturity, all dating from the decade of the 1790s when he was the world’s most famous composer. The ‘Lark’ shows him at his most lyrical, the ‘Fifths’ at his most intellectually formidable, while his penultimate completed quartet, op.77/1, with its deeply moving Adagio, is a fitting culmination to his peerless output in the genre.

"Silent music", inspired by the poet San Juan de la Cruz, is a music "that is silent", a music that is silent because you hear it internally. Mompou himself defined it as a "weak heartbeat" which had the mission of penetrating into the most secret depths of our soul.

Alternating the roles of soloist and accompanist, Alexander Melnikov has brought together here two works emblematic of Rachmaninoff at his creative peak – before it was brutally interrupted by the sound and the fury of 1917: the famous Études-tableaux op.39 and Six Poems op.38 were followed by a very long silence. In 1931, it was a man broken by destiny who produced the Variations on a Theme by Corelli, a bitter work that yearns for a past gone forever.

This recording is the first volume of the Matthias Goerne Schubert Edition, an extensive selection of lieder accompanied by distinguished pianists, with booklet notes by Christophe Ghristi: ‘Schubert, in his lieder, recalls us to our condition as short-lived wanderers. A solitary voice sings of its torments and desires, accompanied only by that equally solitary instrument, the eminently self-sufficient piano. Here is no theatre but the echo, at last perceptible, of our inner depths, where silence reigns, where all is grave and nothing lies to us.’