Angèle Dubeau recently recorded a podcast with Rick Philips, in which she talks about the Portrait series, featuring up until now composers Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and, very recently John Adams. “The music of these three composers does speak to me,” she explains in the interview. She talks about how she chooses the repertoire and why these composers appeal to her and to the audience.
She has a voice that lends itself to baroque music but also to contemporary repertoire. Why choose when you can do it all with the same apparent ease? She certainly dislikes labels or to have to pick one period of music history instead of another. Soprano Shannon Mercer is featured on the cover of the March issue of La Scena Musicale. You can read the profile here…
You can listen to her in Francesca Caccini’s works in O viva rosa.
Numerous articles have been published about his music but who better than the composer himself to share views about his music, his inspiration and how he got started. Philip Glass tells all to John McCaa.
To listen to some of his most inspired works, performed by Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà…
With its saluted concerts and recordings, Ensemble Caprice’s recognition keeps on growing. A cover article in La Scena Musicale‘s most recent issue (December 2009-January 2010) is dedicated to the Ensemble and its music director Matthias Maute. It can be read it (it starts on page 24).
To listen to Ensemble Caprice’s latest recording…
Alain Lefèvre’s recording world would not be complete without mentioning the importance of the composer he has become in recent years. Picture Garden, his fourth album featuring his own compositions, is a much-awaited opus after his Blissfully Sleepless, which earned him a Félix at the 2006 ADISQ Gala.
“I was four years old when I first sat down at the piano, he recalls. Still today, my daily rendez-vous are shared with Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, and so many others… Unfailingly they are there waiting for me, demanding, listening each and every day to my finger gymnastics. Each time, I have to surpass myself and transcend their scores on the stages of the world. Always, I strive to deliver the purest essence of these great composers. Quite a challenge. I would close a window on the world, if I didn’t find my own heartbeat, my release, in the rigorous discipline that is the hallmark of classical music.
So, composing came as a natural step, a new breathing, musically setting down my anxieties, joys, sorrows, disappointments, dreams, expectations and happiness. I was fifteen when a first musical theme made its way from the inner workings of my mind to the forefront of my thoughts. Since then, some thirty works which I have composed, rest in my piano bench as well as in the closets of my mind. Impressions and memories of all my travels while touring, were always a great source of inspiration, may it be in a new encounter, a laughter, a sigh, a smile, a sadness, a victory. Every little detail talks to my senses, a perfume, a color, a note, a landscape. With my compositions, I felt like breaking a silence and give another voice to the words and images of my life.”