Ensemble Celadon, Paulin Bündgen – No. Time in Eternity (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 88,2 kHz]

Ensemble Celadon, Paulin Bündgen – No. Time in Eternity (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 88,2 kHz]

Through a repertoire of Consort Songs for five violas and countertenor, the Céladon Ensemble tries to underline the obvious artistic connections between the music of english Renaissance and contemporary music. This parentage, this harmonic, rhythmic and poetic logic, opens a whole field of exploration into sound identity and tradition. How have such seemingly different composers, belonging to remote eras, dealt with timbre fusion in a similar way, with the same desire to deeply affect, to create a full-bodied sound, both powerful and soothing ? The two eras are not placed in opposition for this concert, as Michael Nyman’s music arises naturally from that of his predecessors ; on the contrary, it is a clever mix of genres that points out to surprising similarities between these works : we could easily believe that Tye’s Sit Fast was composed very recently. From one century to the next, we face a testimony brought to song by the timbre of a countertenor, the intensity of a violas consort that carries a certain magic, the paradoxical expression of a voice which is solitary but also becomes a seventh instrument, one of the violas.

Ensemble Cairn, Guillaume Bourgogne – Pesson: Blanc mérité (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

Ensemble Cairn, Guillaume Bourgogne – Pesson: Blanc mérité (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

Lucid music. Vivacity, wit, intensity, foldings and unfoldings of the pointillist material, embracing the thing itself and its contradiction – sensuality, drollery, dances, abysses like sudden draughts of air. Movement and standstill . . . Music that slaps, pinches, bites, muffles, growls. Here Pesson reinvigorates what might (already) be his own classicism (Carmagnole); draws a pencil moustache on Mozart, who is more than willing to wear it (Transformations du Menuet K. 355); hounds his language so far into the corner that it seems different, and probably becomes so, in the intransigent light of Opałka (Blanc mérité); a language that ramifies and scintillates in Proust (Ne pas oublier coq rouge dans jour craquelé); grows geometric in Pérec (Neige bagatelle); and denudes itself in ‘enfantines’ (Musica ficta). The Ensemble Cairn, a faithful partner of the label, under its director Guillaume Bourgogne, leads us into territories that could hardly be droller.

Ernesto Molinari, Thomas Demenga, Marino Formenti, Peter Rundel, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln – Jarrell: …mais les images restent… (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

Ernesto Molinari, Thomas Demenga, Marino Formenti, Peter Rundel, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln – Jarrell: …mais les images restent… (2017) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

Michael Jarrell claims for himself the status of a craftsman. Well aware that mastery of his art is acquired in the long term, he has often felt the need to return to the same object, considered from a different angle, when he judges that he now possesses more efficient tools and can express his musical ideas with greater precision. Although he says he is fascinated by artists who constantly work at the same idea, he does not seek a reduction of this kind for himself, but rather moves from one work to another through a process of reactions. That attitude is illustrated by this new album in which works and performers intersect; and the artists here are the composer’s most loyal supporters. The arborescences and ruptures, the profundity of the multiple levels of interpretation we can perceive in the pieces on the programme of this disc, make us conscious of the multiplicity of the levels of meaning present in his music. Michael Jarrell’s training as a visual artist has probably honed his sensitivity to forms still further. The impact on him of Paul Klee’s ideas, notably concerning the relationships between forms and movements, is doubtless not foreign to the way he animates the materials with which he composes.

Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Roméo Monteiro, Daniel Kawka – Adámek: Sinuous Voices (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 44,1 kHz]

Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Roméo Monteiro, Daniel Kawka – Adámek: Sinuous Voices (2018) [FLAC 24 bit, 44,1 kHz]

Curious, open-minded, fascinated by other cultures, Ondřej Adámek assimilates every aesthetic whose path he crosses. His works reveal all these influences, stamping them with a very individual sound colour that, combined with a powerful rhythmic sense and solid formal solid architecture, creates highly personal music by no means exempt from dramaturgy. Adámek seeks out specific playing techniques for classical instruments and creates new and original instruments. Here the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under the direction of Daniel Kawka lays before us an eclectic panorama of his music, from the ritualised, even mechanised sinuosities of a lullaby to the disconcerting mechanism of the strange musical machines he invents, which he does not hesitate to place in front of the orchestra.

Brentano String Quartet – Beethoven: Late String Quartets, Op. 130 & Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (2014) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]

Brentano String Quartet – Beethoven: Late String Quartets, Op. 130 & Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (2014) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]

The Brentano Quartet delivers the third volume of Beethoven’s Late Quartets for æon, this disc featuring Op. 130 and 133. The relation between form and language seems to haunt all the writing of his Quartet in B flat major. Indeed, the composer struggles with the enigmatic question of our intimate experience in relation to music and the sense of musical composition.
On the other hand, in the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, Beethoven the visionary proclaims his unshakeable faith in a world like a will facing menace and chaos. The pertinence of the struggle marks the structure and character of every page of the quartet, one of the composer’s most inspired. Impossible not to be impressed by the sharpness of the stroke, the clarity of the discourse and the intensity of the affects. Brilliant virtuosos, the superb mastery of the Brentanos has made them famous and displays its full power in the release of this final volume.

David Lively, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Pascal Rophé – Blank: Reflecting Black (2015) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

David Lively, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Pascal Rophé – Blank: Reflecting Black (2015) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

Here, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Pascal Rophé, with whom the æon label has collaborated since 2003, give us a very fine William Blank monograph, the fruit of the orchestra’s sustained work with this essential representative of Swiss creation, alongside his elder Heinz Holliger and his contemporary Michael Jarrell. Born in 1957 in Montreux, William Blank, composer and conductor, is performed the world over. With him, there are no (or few) evanescent layers, aleatoric or improvised passages. Rather, there is a sort of pointillism with a human face, a maniacal love of small detail behind which emotion is flushed out by harsh, searing intensity or dense outpourings. The works on this programme are representative of the recent evolution in his work, especially the piano concerto, Reflecting Black, written in homage to the painter Pierre Soulages and magnificently served in this recording by pianist David Lively.