Before Versailles, the epicentre of power in the Kingdom of France was the Louvre, a genuine theatre of ceremonies where music was duty- bound to impress with its magnificence.

The year 1802 was a decisive one for Beethoven. In the autumn, he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he clearly expressed his awareness of the outcome of his inexorably increasing deafness. At almost the same time, he told his friend Krumpholz that he was, "not satisfied" with his "work so far," and he was planning to embark on "a new path." The works, skillfully grouped together by Andreas Staier, correspond precisely to that new direction.

“The mystery of the ballad comes from the way it is told” - Goethe. This fascinating repertory requires the performer to play each of the characters as he or she would in an opera.

Given the paucity of César Franck's piano music on disc, Nikolai Lugansky's focus on this composer is to be commended. On his third release for harmonia mundi, the Russian pianist reveals an organ master strongly attached to the musical forms inherited from J.S. Bach: the prelude, the fugue, and the chorale. Translated to the piano keyboard, Franck's music, with it's expansively conceived structures, requires a completely fresh approach that puts the greatest performers to the test: here, Lugansky took on an additional challenge by preparing his own transcription (a brilliant one, at that!) of Franck's celebrated Choral pour grand orgue No.2.

Almost forty years separate Verklärte Nacht from the Violin Concerto – the former still influenced by the idiom of Brahms and Wagner, the latter deriving from the richness of that later period when Schoenberg managed to combine a multiplicity of approaches within his twelve-note system. Between post-Romantic twilight and ‘classical’ rigour, Isabelle Faust and her most faithful partners offer us an extraordinarily lively interpretation of some of the most remarkable pages in twentieth-century musical literature.

After the widespread acclaim for their previous recordings of C.P.E. Bach and Haydn, the musicians of the Resonanz Ensemble of Hamburg pursue their explorations on instruments with a ‘modern’ set-up.

La publication quasi encyclopédique que le label français harmonia mundi a entamée pour le double anniversaire de naissance et de mort de Beethoven, entre 2020 et 2027 se révèle déjà passionnante par sa mise en regard d’œuvres contemporaines du début du XIXe siècle. Elle nous offre aussi la démonstration d’un Beethoven en prise directe avec les œuvres et les préoccupations de son temps, hors de l’imagerie romantique du génie solitaire dans sa tour d’ivoire.

Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.

Barely two years separate the monumental Sonata in G (October 1826) from its sister in C minor (September 1828), the first of a trilogy composed on the threshold of death, which was to win the struggle a few weeks later. Two years - and a whole world.

Beethoven's five piano concertos relate, in a sense, part of the composers life: some twenty years during which a young musician from Bonn made several revised versions of the first concerto he wrote (a springboard to Viennese success that ended up being called no.2), before becoming the familiar Emperor of music embodied by the brilliant inspiration of no.5. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, it is with these two extremes that Kristian Bezuidenhout, Pablo Heras-Casado and the Freiburger Barockorchester have chosen to start an exciting period-instrument trilogy of the concertos that bids fair to be a landmark!

Beyond their lifelong interest in keyboard instruments of all types (organ, harpsichord and clavichord in the case of Bach; modern piano as a percussion instrument in the case of Bartók), other shared concerns connect these two giants of classical music who at first glance appear to be polar opposites.

The Berlin public of the mid-Eighteenth Century was fascinated by the ‘original genius’ of C. P. E. Bach and never tired of listening to his concertos.

Liberty, enthusiasm and sharing: that might well be the motto of the Kitgut Quartet (named for the ‘kitgut’ or catgut strings it uses), which brings together four outstanding soloists, all of them members of the leading period-instrument European ensembles.

The poetic renewal embodied by Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine and so many others after them radically changed the musical landscape and propelled French art song into a true golden age.

Friends and frequent recital partners Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexandre Tharaud are reunited here for an album conceived as a collection of short stories, presenting both celebrated and little- known masterpieces of the repertory.