Over time, the memory of the brilliant virtuoso that was Eugène Ysaÿe (Liège, 1858 - Brussels, 1931) ended up supplanting his status as a composer in the collective memory. It should be remembered, however, that Eugène Ysaÿe created, through his works, a fundamentally new and original genre, distinguished by a science of writing and harmonic richness. This album brings together concert works by Eugène Ysaÿe which, with the exception of the Saltarelle carnavalesque, have never been recorded in their orchestral version. It therefore invites us on a unique journey into the composer's sound universe, from his first to his last compositions written for soloist(s) and orchestra.

Few literary works exerted as strong an influence on European culture in the 19th century as Goethe’s play Faust. While several important composers drew inspiration from it, Franz Liszt seems to have had a particularly close relationship with Goethe’s masterpiece. He came up with the idea of a symphony ‘in three characteristic pictures’, each devoted to a key character in the play: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. Rather than telling the story of the play, Liszt composed a psychological exploration of these three main figures. He was also a pioneer in his use of leitmotifs, i.e. short musical ideas that underline a trait of character or evoke feelings, a process that his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner, would take even further in his operas.

Guy Braunstein, who was concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for nearly fifteen years, pursues an international career as soloist, conductor and composer. Inspired by a period of Beatlemania at home with his family, Braunstein wove a dozen songs from the Beatles’ celebrated Abbey Road album into a concerto for violin and orchestra entitled Abbey Road Concerto.

This ambitious project consists of a recording of the complete music for violin and orchestra and cello and orchestra by Saint-Saëns. It marks the beginning of an intensive collaboration between Zig-Zag Territories and the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.

Following his Alpha recording of sonatas by Prokofiev, Ravel and Strauss, the violinist Tobias Feldmann now turns to the concerto form, performing the two major works of the Finnish repertoire for the instrument: the violin concertos of Jean Sibelius and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Premiered in Helsinki in 1904, the Sibelius Concerto proved to be exceptionally difficult technically for the soloist. Sibelius revised his score, but subsequently composed for violin and orchestra only in shorter forms, the serenade and the humoresque. It was not until nearly seventy years later that a Finnish composer wrote another large-scale work for violin and orchestra, with the Concerto of Rautavaara, which in all respects equals the degree of virtuosity demanded by the earlier work.

With the present album, the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liege and John Neschling bring us the sixth and last instalment in a series that has been called 'the finest-ever survey of the composer's orchestral output undertaken by a single conductor' (BBC Music Magazine). The immense popularity of the Roman Trilogy has had the effect of obscuring many parts of Respighi's oeuvre, including arrangements of pieces from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Eugène Ysaÿe, a violin virtuoso admired by all his contemporaries, was an inheritor of what has justly been considered as the Belgian school of violin, whose ascendancy can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century. His work as a composer, however, is much less well known today and it is this facet of his extraordinarily active life that we will explore here. He composed many different types of works; here we present his works for solo violin and orchestra, including two movements of violin concertos which are now available on record for the first time, and his chamber music.

François-Xavier Roth, not this time with his ‘period’ ensemble Les Siècles but with the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, conducts a performance of César Franck’s Le chasseur maudit that has dramatic thrust, demonic intensity and clearly defined textural detail as well. There is a very real sense, in listening to this performance, that Roth and his orchestra have the dark narrative in their very blood, so that its frenzy, its tensions and the cursed hunter’s wild chase towards death come vividly before the mind’s eye.

The present album is the second of two recorded by the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège and Jean-Jacques Kantorow to commemorate the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns. On the first instalment the team offered us ‘deeply impressive performances in stunning sound’ (theclassicreview.com) of the composer’s first and second symphonies and the unnumbered Symphony in A major, but now the time has come for Saint-Saëns’ crowning glory in the symphonic genre: his Symphony No. 3 in C minor, generally known as the ‘Organ Symphony’. The work was composed in 1886, and Saint-Saëns had planned to dedicate it to Liszt but the latter’s death the same year caused the dedication in the published score to be modified to ‘in memory of Franz Liszt’.