In the Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, instrumental music became a source of sonic and expressive experimentation. Influenced by vocal rhetoric, composers sought to replace words with a new musical language. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists developed, as did invention, improvisation and the search for surprising sonorities. Along with the organ or the harpsichord, the violin was the instrument of choice for experimenting with these new techniques. Italian and German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Farina, Schmelzer, Mealli, Buxtehude, Biber, Pisendel and Bach vied with each other in imaginativeness. The violinist Chouchane Siranossian and the harpsichordist Leonardo García Alarcón – both loyal Alpha Classics artists – have chosen to explore this repertory, here including Bach’s Sonatas BWV 1019, BWV 1021 and BWV 1023 among other pieces.

"You have understood nothing of my simplicity", wrote Paul Verlaine in Child Wife. And that is precisely what Julien Joubert’s music seems to whisper to us with each note.The composer and pianist works regularly with the Maîtrise de Radio France, which has premiered many of his works. Here he has set two cycles by the great nineteenth-century poet to music for this recording (Ariettes oubliées and Aquarelles, for mixed choir). An ambitious programme, yet accessible to everyone, in all simplicity.

En musique classique, les albums thématiques ont la cote, comme si les interprètes étaient saturés d’enregistrer toujours les mêmes œuvres des mêmes compositeurs, ce que l’on peut finalement comprendre. Ces compilations plus ou moins heureuses, autrefois présentées sous la forme d’un simple récital, revêtent aujourd’hui un programme, souvent philosophique ou prétendument comme tel. Le premier album de la soprano franco-chypriote Sarah Aristidou n’échappe pas à cette nouvelle règle avec un programme pour le moins éclectique pour ne pas dire hétéroclite, consacré à ce cinquième élément qui la fascine : l’éther, une substance, dit-elle, « qui échappe à notre conception du temps, qui ne peut être ni perçue ni touchée et qui désigne l’essence divine de l’âme ».

"Specchio Veneziano" or the Venetian mirror – this programme compares and contrasts two composers from the city of the Doges: on the one hand the celebrated Vivaldi, on the other a virtual unknown, Giovanni Battista Reali, who was born there in 1681, three years after Vivaldi, and died in 1751, ten years after his illustrious colleague. A violinist himself, he composed trio sonatas, including a very spectacular Folia, which Théotime Langlois de Swarte, Sophie de Bardonnèche, Hanna Salzenstein and Justin Taylor juxtapose with Vivaldi’s Folia, alongside other highly virtuosic pieces, many of them complete rediscoveries, since half of this programme has never been recorded before.

Ce nouvel enregistrement du Café Zimmermann présente les musiques du Cantor de Leipzig sous un autre angle, celui des fameux livres de musique dont les musiciens annotaient les pages et les pièces qui leur plaisaient particulièrement. Sont ainsi réunies des oeuvres composées par Johann Sebastian Bach à la fin des années 1740, qu’on peut qualifier d'intimes, dont la Sonate en trio de son Offrande musicale. Le style baroque de cette sonate "expérimentale" est mis en perspective avec celui, novateur, développé par son fils Carl Philipp Emanuel dans l’une de ses propres sonates en trio.

Above the album worked the 'Bach: L'Extase Musicale ', and his release took place on 2021. The album has got songs with a total duration of more than an hour. A compilation is a compilation of original music.

Comme autrefois ceux de son défunt maître Michel Corboz qui lui a appris à « se méfier de trop d’intellect appliqué à la musique », les enregistrements de Leonardo García Alarcón sont très attendus. Cette nouvelle version de L’Orfeo de Monteverdi sous sa direction montre d’ailleurs clairement cette filiation, grâce à l’expression que le chef argentin insuffle à sa vision si opératique du chef-d’œuvre monteverdien qui n’est pas sans rappeler la lointaine version de Corboz, enregistrée en 1968 pour les disques Erato avec le lumineux Orfeo d’Éric Tappy.

« Il n’arrive peut-être pas d’évènements inutiles », chante le vieil Arkel au premier Acte de Pelléas et Mélisande. Ici, c’est plutôt le non-évènement qui, paradoxalement, a rendu possible ce nouvel enregistrement de l’opéra de Debussy dont les réussites discographiques ne sont pas légion. Contraint d’annuler sa production à cause de la pandémie mondiale, l’Opéra de Bordeaux a décidé de garder le souvenir des longues séances de répétitions sous la forme d’un enregistrement de studio dans l’Auditorium de sa propre maison.

After two volumes praised by the international press (Diapason d'Or, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik etc.) the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich presents the third release in its Tchaikovsky cycle, featuring the Sixth Symphony and Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky said he "put his entire soul" into the Sixth Symphony. He admitted that his programme was "more subjective than ever" and that he "often […] wept copiously" while working on it. The overall atmosphere is created by the sombre key of B minor and an obsessive sighing motif that recurs throughout the symphony.In Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky focused on thematic areas, setting them to music in different ways: the peaceful, chorale-like gesture associated with Friar Lawrence in the introduction, the bitter struggle between the Capulet and Montague families, and the intoxicated love of Romeo and Juliet. The work ends with the return of a chorale of reconciliation and the transfiguration of the lovers.

In this recording entitled "Enigma Fortuna", the ensemble La Fonte Musica, directed by Michele Pasotti, aims to shed light on the mysterious and eccentric personality of Antonio Zacara da Teramo (1355-1416). A contemporary of Boccaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi, this composer from the Abruzzi region could almost be likened to a sort of musical Hieronymus Bosch, for the texts he set to music conjure up a "topsy-turvy universe" where the obscene, the imaginary and the grotesque go hand in hand. In his ballata Amor ne tossa, he writes "Let him understand me who can, for I understand myself", foreshadowing the proud egotism of the Romantic artists who were to come 400 years after him.With this set presenting the world premiere of Zacara’s complete works, La Fonte Musica offers us an initial approach to understanding his music. And thereby, through the timeless character of art, to understanding a so-called "renascent" era that seems as "topsy-turvy" as our own.

Handel is best known to the wider public for his large-scale choral and orchestral works, but his organ music is equally precious. It was the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels who, diverting him from a career in the law, spotted his exceptional abilities on the instrument. By the age of seventeen, Handel was already the resident organist at the Domkirche in Halle, and he was later to defeat Domenico Scarlatti in a contest of virtuosity during his time in Rome.Martin Haselböck and the Orchester Wiener Akademie have recorded the Organ Concertos, Op. 4 and Op. 7 in the prestigious Vienna Musikverein, world-famous for its acoustics. Haselböck plays on the hall’s imposing Rieger organ in what is one of its very first recordings. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the fourth organ in the Musikverein since the hall opened in 1870. With its considerable dimensions – much larger than the organs Handel used to play on – the instrument offers a tonal palette rich in contrasts.

Alex Vizorek revisits Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. The French composer never imagined that his bestiary would become one of the most famous works in musical history, a staple repertory piece on a par with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The Belgian comedian and actor has rewritten the text of this "grand zoological fantasy", which he narrates here alongside Duo Jatekok and the Orchestre National de Lille under the direction of Lucie Leguay.

After the success of the recent recording of works by Veress and Bartók, which won both a Gramophone Award and a BBC Music Magazine Award in 2020, the Lockenhaus Festival series, curated by its artistic director Nicolas Altstaedt, continues its journey through central Europe with Antonín Dvořák and his famous ‘Dumky’ Trio, named after a genre of Slavonic folksong generally performed by blind wandering minstrels who accompanied themselves on the kobza or bandura (twelve-string lute). Dvořák, whose father played the zither, immersed himself in this music and creatively translated its substance into his own music. The trio was premiered in 1891 and, in response to its ecstatic reception, Dvořák decided to perform it during his grand farewell tour before leaving for the United States. Zoltán Kodály’s Duo for violin and cello (1914), which completes the programme, also bears witness to the influence of folk music.

After the past 18 months, we could all be forgiven for forgetting that our generation doesn't have the monopoly on sitting in mortal peril at the mercy of a powerful and uncontrollable natural force. However we don't. Humankind has of course both been here before, and bequeathed us the art by which to remember it – including many of the texts set by German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach in his Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde.
Published in Nuremberg respectively in 1697 and 1710, these two vocal collections contain respectively 50 and 25 arias for one to four solo voices accompanied by instrumental ensemble and basso continuo, setting poems that flit between the moralistic and secular spheres; and while ultimately this is conjecture, they do at least appear to hint at their contemporary context of an era lived against the backdrop of natural disasters including Bubonic Plague, and the superstitious fear provoked in 1680 by the appearance of Europe's largest comet of the seventeenth century – an event perhaps referenced in the line, “Today bloody comets shine, Tomorrow we are free of distress”.

The winner of the very first Queen Elisabeth Competition for cellists in Brussels in 2017, Victor Julien-Laferrière also won the Victoire de la Musique Classique in 2018 in the category Soloist of the Year, and joined Alpha Classics in 2019 for several recordings. After a first recital album devoted to Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Denisov in the company of the pianist Jonas Vitaud, he now presents two cello concertos by Antonín Dvorák (op.104) and Bohuslav Martinu (no.1, H196), accompanied by the Liège Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Gergely Madaras.