Well-known for promoting the legacy of André Mathieu, Alain Lefèvre has decided to devote himself to a new composer every year from now on. He will premiere François Dompierre’s 24 Preludes in Lanaudière in July, Walter Boudreau’s Concerto de l’Asile in 2013 with the OSM, but that doesn’t prevent him from also defending the repertoire of yesterday, as it is the case with his latest Rachmaninov/Scriabin project with the OSM, under Kent Nagano.

He talks about this recording and upcoming projects in the current issue of La Scena Musicale, page 34. (A review of the album can also be viewed on page 32.)

You can download and listen to the album here…

Following thir release of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies , the Orchestre de la Francophonie, under the direction of its music director and founder Jean-Philippe Tremblay, now presents a new reading of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

“Wanting to instil “new life” into this incredible symphony, we opted for an approach inspired by historical performance practices from the middle of the 19^th century, as expressed by musicologists and musicians,” explained Jean-Philippe Tremblay. “We must keep in mind that the Symphonie fantastique’s premiere, in 1830, occurred just a few years after Beethoven’s Ninth (1824) and that it shocked music aficionados of the time.”

A revolutionary masterpiece, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique has become a cornerstone of the symphonic repertoire. It evokes various situations lived by a young artist (Berlioz himself). Through a series of visions, his beloved is sublimated into a musical concept, the idée fixe, which comes back in every movement and  each time under a different form.

“The author imagines that a young vibrant musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the wave of passions [la vague des passions], sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her,” explained Berlioz himself. “By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love. This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.”

To listen and download the album…

One of our readers, seemingly taken by Graupner’s music, was inquiring about this a few weeks ago. Yes, it is now official. A new release devoted to  Bach’s contemporary is now available. This time, we are talking about the first recreation in the world of the composer’s Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross.  It would seem that this music was never heard again until Les Idées heureuses performed it in March 2005 in Montreal.

“We hope that listeners will approach it with a sensitive ear, in the spirit of discovery,” says Ms. Soly. “In order to enjoy it and appreciate its rightful value, we must first relinquish the expectation that we are about to hear something resembling one of Bach’s Passions. Graupner’s cantata cycles are a series of dis¬crete meditations on themes evoked by the last words spoken by the crucified Christ.”

She explains that the musical worlds of those two masters should be perceived as distinct entities:

“Bach marks the culmination of the baroque style, while Graupner is already engaged, at 60 years of age, on the path which leads to Empfindsamkeit, the ‘sensitive style’ of the late 18th century. So we must not expect monumental archi-tectural structures, but rather lend an ear to an extremely original, spontaneous and subtle language.”

To listen to this new and inspiring album…

Today in International Women’s Day and why not feature an all-women-band, the Cecilia String Quartet, in Dvorak, his Cypresses more precisely. The story behind the work is actually quite romantic.

Dvorak was 23 when he fell  head over heels in love with one of his students, the 16-year-old Josefa. He turned to music to seduce her and, in two weeks, had completed a set of 18 love songs, to somewhat sentimental texts. She politely declined the offering and the composition stayed in the composer’s drawers for a while. Eight years later, love would strike Dvorak once more. This time, he got infatuated with Josefa’s younger sister Anna. She was to become “the one” and they would share a long and happy life together.

He had not forgotten about the songs though and went back to them several times throughout his career. “Think about a young man in love – this is what they are about,” was he to write when he published eight of them as his Love Songs.  He would as well arrange a dozen  for string quartet, renaming them Cypresses, the lyricism of the strings making up for the voice’s inflections of the original version.

You can listen to six of them on the debut album of the Cecilia String Quartet, winner of the prestigious Banff International Quartet Competition in 2010.

Bach’s St. John Passion is one of the masterworks of the choral repertory. A very dramatic work, it displays the unfolding details of the suffering of Jesus – and their effect on those caught up in it – in personal terms. It is almost breathless in its progress through the sequential events of the Passion, and the chorales and arias heighten this intensity.

A new recording of this masterpiece is now available from The Bach Choir of Bethlehem. The oldest American Bach Choir, it gave the first complete American performances of Bach’s B Minor Mass in 1900 and of the Christmas Oratorio in 1901. Since its founding in 1898, the now-famous Choir has been attracting thousands of visitors from across the United States and beyond to the annual Bethlehem Bach Festival in Pennsylvania. You’ll understand why be listening to their reading of the work here…

Soloists include Julia Doyle, Daniel Taylor,  Benjamin Butterfield, Charles Daniels, William Sharp, Christopheren Nomura and David Newman.