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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Bach & Bernier: Routes du café (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:36 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
The history of coffee is fascinating! From the opening of the first establishments in Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century to the appearance and diffusion of the drink in Europe in the following century, coffee and coffee houses were highly fashionable. Two composers devoted a cantata to the topic. Gottfried Zimmermann opened his famous coffee house in Leipzig in 1715 and organised concerts there. Around 1735, Bach composed his famous cantata Schweigt still, plaudert nicht, which was probably performed there. It depicts the humorous dispute between a father and his daughter over her consumption of coffee. In Paris, Nicolas Bernier’s cantata Le Caffé (1664-1734) praised the beverage and its many virtues. The ‘Coffee Road’ Olivier Fortin has mapped out here makes a detour to London around 1660, where the composer Matthew Locke frequented the Turk’s Head Coffee House and promoted a string fantasia. Fortin has chosen to organise this album like a fasil, a ‘suite of pieces’ in traditional Ottoman music, with taqsims (improvisations) interspersed among the compositions and played on such instruments as the ney flute, the Arab violin and the yayli tanbur.
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Ensemble Diderot, Johannes Pramsohler – The Paris Album (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:11 minutes | 1,45 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Audax Records
Ensemble Diderot continues to explore the development and dissemination of the trio sonata in baroque Europe with this exciting new release. Entirely dedicated to works from the era after Lully’s death, this album celebrates the newly found freedom at the time when composers started to combine French style with transalpine ardour. Johannes Pramsohler and his musicians bring their usual precision, passion and energy to this programme packed with new discoveries.
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Ensemble Diderot and Johannes Pramsohler – The London Album (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:08 minutes | 1,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Audax Records
Five years after their celebrated Dresden Album, Johannes Pramsohler and his colleagues of Ensemble Diderot continue their journey exploring the trio sonata in baroque Europe with a programme dedicated to works from Purcell’s London. Through a combination of well-known works and world premieres they show how English composers used the new Italian form as a vehicle for their creative output and how easily foreign composers picked up the English idiom to create chamber music that could hardly be more profound and expressive.
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Ensemble Diderot & Johannes Pramsohler – Sonatas for three violins (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:19:41 minutes | 915 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Audax Records
The music recorded here encompasses a period of around a hundred years. The earliest works come from the time around 1600, which is considered one of the most profound watersheds in musical history. The new expressiveness unleashed above all by Monteverdi’s music was at the same time also potent in the increasingly independent instrumental music. This development is directly connected with the emancipation of the violin and its marvelous cantabile and virtuoso possibilities. When the composers started to make the individual sections of the ricercar into independent contrasting movements, and accordingly separated them from each other also in terms of tempo, the transition to a cyclical manner of formation, that is to say, to a stringing together of independent movements, was initiated and a meaningful musical organization adopted as a maxim.
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Ensemble Diderot, Johannes Pramsohler, Diana Haller, Philippe Grisvard – Echoes of the Grand Canal (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:18:10 minutes | 846 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Audax Records
“Illuminated by the golden glow of the sun, the cloud on high radiates in splendor, reddens.” The text of Hasse’s motet reads like a description of a cloud as painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe. Ensemble Diderot and mezzo-soprano Diana Haller offer a fascinating soundscape to accompany the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the death of the Venetian master. Two world premiere recordings give yet again proof of the adventurous spirit that reigns over Johannes Pramsohler and his crack team of musicians.
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Ensemble Dialoghi – Mozart & Beethoven: Quintets for piano and winds (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 51:07 minutes | 919 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Ensemble Dialoghi makes their harmonia mundi début with this program of quintets for piano and winds. A work of ‘maturity,’ which the twenty-eight year-old Mozart considered ”among his best,” is paired with a ‘youthful effort’ penned by a twenty-six year-old Beethoven. Dating from an auspicious phase in each composer’s career, both pieces were met with an enthusiastic reception. Beethoven, it was said, was inspired by Mozart’s piece and composed his in tribute. The theatrical character of these works is not lost on the high-spirited virtuosos who make up this period-instrument ensemble.
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Ensemble des Equilibres – Des cordes marines: Trios for Violin, Alto and Cello (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 58:41 minutes | 969 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Arion
The Ensemble des Equilibres, touched by the beauty and artistic importance of three great works: Jean Cras (1879-1932), Joseph-Ermend Bonnal (1880-1944) and Albert Roussel (1869-1937) ) – a fundamental part of the French classical repertoire, has set itself the task of immortalizing them in the form of a disc, in order to offer the general public the pleasure of discovering them, and to assure to these works the posterity which come back. This one leaves at ARION at the end of February 2017.
On the occasion of the launching of this new opus, the musicians of the ensemble will have the pleasure of presenting to the public two of these works: the trios of Bonnal and Cras. The two composers have a common background in both of them: a naval officer and composer for Cras, a very serious organist of Sainte Clotilde and a ragtime composer under the pseudonym Guy Marylis for Ermend-Bonnal. And where Bonnal was inspired by his dear Basque Country, Cras opened wide the doors of his music to the influences of the many countries he visited.
The three Madrigals for violin and viola of the Czech Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959), himself a pupil of Albert Roussel, will complete this program.
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Ensemble des Equilibres, Agnès Pyka, Laurent Wagschal – Brahms aujourd’hui… (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 55:59 minutes | 958 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Klarthe Records
Brahms ‘ three sonatas for violin and piano form an ensemble picked up in time, barely ten years between the first and the last. In these works, the mastered language is put at the service of Brahms poetry where his sensitivity to nature, his literary references and his personal introspection emerge.
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Ensemble Denada – Live in Bremen (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 54:55 minutes | 593 MB | Genre: Jazz, Vocal Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Jazzland Recordings
Soulful, sultry and a little sassy, Toronto jazz vocalist Simone Morris exudes a rare blend of soulfulness and subtlety. She’s a natural storyteller who artfully lures audiences into her craftily-spun musical stories. Rooted in jazz, this long-awaited debut album “Settling Up” weaves a musical path that conveys Morris’ diverse musical experience and background. Using her own life experiences to connect with audiences in a personal way, she engages in an intimate conversation that reveals her take on life and love.
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Ensemble Démesure & Juliette De Banes Gardonne – Caresana: Secular Chamber Cantatas (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 53:21 minutes | 933 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Brilliant Classics
Secular cantatas of love and tragedy by a Neapolitan precursor of Pergolesi, in world premiere recordings.
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Ensemble Dedalus, Didier Aschour – Lamb : Atmospheres Transparent/Opaque (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:03:54 minutes | 605 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © New World Records
This recording is an excellent introduction to the distinctive sound world of Catherine Lamb (b. 1982), who studied with James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, in that it documents a recent large-scale piece that epitomizes her compositional aesthetic, Prisma Interius IX (2018), and was recorded under the composer’s supervision. “I have been attempting to describe, in more elemental terms, the perceptual roles between musicians who are activating interactions in harmonic space. Overlays Transparent/Opaque (2013) was an initial attempt towards showing forms aside phenomenological clarities in which to enter from relational and therefore parallaxical points, in this case through shifting overlays………the seven overlays are in constant flux, but the forms are synoptic, placed on their own and in their own space, as objects. Prisma Interius IX (2018), in contrast, would be one large crystal placed amongst the musicians, rotating with filtered light. So that each unfolding of the tonalities illuminates the form that is always present, allowing for a feeling of constant expansion…. Prisma Interius IX is the culmination of a series of pieces written between late 2016 to summer 2018, examining particular (perhaps archaic) musical roles, and how they situate within the phenomenological/perceptual space my work has been growing into for the past 14 years.” ~~ Catherine Lamb
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Ensemble Danguy, Tobie Miller – Chédeville: Les saisons amusantes (D’après Antonio Vivaldi) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 51:43 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ricercar
The life of Nicolas Chédeville (1705-1782) covers exactly the golden age of the hurdy-gurdy and the musette, the French baroque bagpipe. His time witnessed an ‘art of living’ that revelled playfully in the idealization of nature as a mirror of ancient Arcady, and his works contributed to the soundscape of his time, one that portrayed this idyllic milieu in operatic dramas whose heroes were constantly questing for the past … In 1739 he published Les Saisons amusantes, concertos by Antonio Vivaldi arranged for bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies. These transcriptions of concertos from Il Cimento dell armonia e dell’inventione include arrangements for the hurdy-gurdy of three concertos from the Four Seasons (“Spring”, “Autumn”, and “Winter”). The same year Chédeville made further bucolic arrangements of another three Vivaldi concertos from the same set, calling them Les Plaisirs de l’été, La Moisson, and Les Plaisirs de la Saint-Martin (a version of Vivaldi’s Il Piacere). Tobie Miller, a star virtuoso of the hurdy-gurdy whose first recording for Ricercar (“La belle vielleuse”) was heaped with critical praise, tackles this repertoire with infectious spontaneity.
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Ensemble Daemonion – François Francœur : Violin Sonatas (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:53 minutes | 1,57 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Passacaille
Francois Francoeur (1698-1787) was, besides Jean-Marie Leclair, one of the most important representatives of the French violin school. He was able to combine the technical virtuosity of Italian provenance with French elegance and smooth melody. The Deuxieme Livre de sonate a violon seul et basse continue was published around 1730. The baroque violinist Anais Chen presents, together with Daniel Rosin and Maria Gonzalez, six of the twelve sonatas, which, on their first hearing, make you want more music from Francoeur.
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Elvis Presley – Stereo’ 57 – Essential Elvis Vol. 2 (1989/2013)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 01:00:17 minutes | 2,38 GB | Genre: Rock
Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Digital Booklet | © RCA Records
“Subtitled ‘The Essential Elvis Volume 2,’ and dating from 1989, this set contains 20 tracks that range from gospel to rock ‘n’ roll, astonishing stereo takes that were supposed to have been erased or discarded. As luck would have it, they were saved. The resultant versions of what is otherwise absurdly familiar material will leave you breathless (provided you’re an Elvis fan — and shame on you if you’re not). Thanks to a studio chat, this is glimpse of the past you never expected to share: true stereo, as good as it gets, from a time when mono still ruled. The mono bonus tracks are dandy, too.” — Sound Quality: 92% – Ken Kessler, Hi Fi News, November 2013
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Elvis Presley – Elvis Is Back! (1960/2012)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 32:26 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Rock
Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Digital Booklet | © RCA Records
Although they have common recording origins, two of the three singles, “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” were very quirky by the standards of Elvis songs at the time — the former inspired by Elvis’s admiration for Tony Martin’s 1949 hit “There’s No Tomorrow,” while the latter was recorded at the request of Col. Parker as a favor to his wife. They add to the diversity of sounds on this record, which shows a mature Elvis Presley. “Dirty, Dirty Feeling” and “It Feels So Right” showed he could still rock out and challenge authority and propriety, while “Reconsider Baby” and “Like a Baby” offer some of his best blues performances; but “The Thrill of Your Love” (a very gospel-tinged number), “Soldier Boy,” “Girl of My Best Friend,” and “Girl Next Door Went a’ Walking,” also displayed the rich, deep vocalizing that would challenge critics’ expectations of Elvis Presley playing rhythm guitar throughout. He also comes off better than on any of his other albums since arriving at RCA, as a musician as much as a “star” (he’d always had a lot more to say about running his sessions than the critics who loathed his RCA years indicated). ~~AllMusic Review by Bruce Eder
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