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Ensemble Gilles Binchois & Dominique Vellard – Fons luminis Codex Las Huelgas (Sacred Vocal Music from the 13th Century) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:37 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Evidence
Since 1979 Dominique Vellard has been the inspirational driving force behind the Ensemble Gilles Binchois : more than 35 years of research and performance that have led to the creation of some of the essential recordings, especially of music from the medieval and Renaissance periods. An outstanding catalogue of recordings devoted to the music of Machaut, the Notre-Dame School, the Burgundian repertoire, early french polyphony or the spanish Renaissance, on labels such as Virgin Classics, Harmonic Records, Ambroisie, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Glossa y Aparté, have met public, critical and musicological acclaim. The Ensemble Gilles Binchois performs regularly mostrly across Europe, but also in Morocco, India, Malaysia USA and South America.
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Ensemble Fratres – Mozart: Quintettes K. 406 et K. 593 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:40 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © HORTUS
Fartitions incontournables dans le corpus de musique de chambre et pourtant peu jouées, ces deux quintettes à cordes de Mozart ont la particularité d’être composés de deux altos, dialoguant avec les deux violons et le violoncelle. Cette formation instrumentale était nouvelle à cette époque, quoique déjà pratiquée par Michael Haydn et Boccherini. L’Ensemble Fratres qui interprète ces oeuvres, poursuit un travail passionnant de reconstitution sonore :
il s’est en effet emparé d’une tradition du jeu d’archet aujourd’hui disparue, portant le nom de “grand détaché porté”.
Délaissée au milieu du 19ème siècle, cette technique était basée sur la nécessité de libérer au maximum la corde du violon en vue d’obtenir un son beau et puissant.
Ensemble Eolus & Jean-François Madeuf – Telemann: Per la tromba & Il corno da caccia (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 57:46 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ricercar
The old instruments of the Stadtpfeiffer were replaced by French-styled oboes and bassoons in German courts and cities at the beginning of the 18th century. These became the bandes de hautbois to which trumpets were added, the combination becoming the basis of the military band. After the marches and the parades, however, these musicians were also invited to take part in the court’s formal entertainments. It was for these circumstances that Georg Philipp Telemann and his contemporaries created a completely new type of repertoire that was linked to the French and Italian genres of the Suite and the Concerto. Hunting horns were also added to the ensemble at certain moments. This is the repertoire that Eolus tackles here, with total respect for the characteristic techniques of horn and trumpet harmonics; others have attempted to conquer this repertoire by completely unhistorical performance practices.
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Ensemble Edge – Dimma – a tribute to Jan Johansson (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:52 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Vocal Jazz, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Storyville Records
Swedish jazz-pianist Jan Johansson (1931-1968) was a musician with a distinctively courageous sense of combining several styles of music, blending jazz and folk music into his own voice. With his characteristically light touch on the piano, Johansson created a unique and melancholic sound which many listeners associate with Nordic identity and history.
On September 16th 2021 Jan Johansson would have turned 90.
If not for a tragic car accident in 1968, perhaps Johansson would have lived to experience the important musical mark his music has made upon over two generations.
This album stands as a testimony of those effects. A deeply grateful generation of singers and musicians come together across musical genres to celebrate and pay tribute to Scandinavia’s biggest jazz icon: Jan Johansson.
Ensemble Dulcis Melodia, Jean Francois Haberer – Les Musiciens de Leopold (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 57:03 minutes | 555 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Les Chemins du Baroque
One might well be surprised to learn that a small down like Saverne could have played host to so many Alsatian musicians in the 17th century. The reason is that after the spread of the Reformation in Alsace, the Catholic authorities set up outside Strasbourg: Molsheim was chosen for the chapterhouse, and Saverne for the episcopal palace. The – lay – administrator of the diocese was none other than Archduke Leopold of Austria, a Hapsburg (who would be something of a nuisance to the French crown!), who got on with raising up the Saverne chapel by importing several musicians from Vienna like Vincenz Jelich, Bernhardin Wolck and Raimundo Ballestra. Between 1615 et 1625, these composers would distinguish themselves with many works, several shining examples of which are presented here. We hear voices, accompanied by all the instrumentation of the baroque period: sackbut, cornett, recorder, theorbo, the positive organ. Following Leopold’s departure, and above all the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War in the region, which left it devastated and depopulated for decades, musical live in Saverne was snuffed out, like these three musicians, who would all die in the 1630s. This is an excellent, vivacious performance from the Dulcify Melodia ensemble, efficiently conducted by Jean Francois Haberer.
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Ensemble Dragma – Laufenberg: Kingdom of Heaven (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:17:29 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ramée
Heinrich Laufenberg lived and worked between c.1390 and 1460 in the Swiss canton of Argovia, southern Germany and Alsace. He was the author of a vast body of works, comprising spiritual hymns, didactic epics and religious prose. A manuscript housed in the Strasbourg Library, which took up the major part of his work, was completely destroyed in a fire in 1870. Happily, a copy had been made of it, so part of his oeuvre was able to be passed on to posterity. The surviving songs of Heinrich Laufenberg are of great beauty, in terms of both music and content: in one of them, he praises Mary in a thoroughly poetic way; in a lullaby, he asks Jesus’ protection for the sleeping infant; in yet another, he describes for us the kingdom of heaven in detail and in all its richness.
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Ensemble Domus Artis & Johannes Keller – Madrigali al tavolino (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:24 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Glossa
The thirty-two polyphonic madrigals by Michelangelo Rossi, which are preserved only in manuscript in a score and a set of partbooks, have only recently become known. These pieces are unusual in anumber of ways: on the one hand, for music from the second quarter of the seventeenth century, they seem “conservative”, composed in five parts with two tenor voices instead of two sopranos. On the other hand, they appear to be avant-garde in their vertiginous harmony (chromaticism andmodulations), which lead them, in spite of the traditional counterpoint, far beyond the borders ofharmonic tonality. And they are strikingly “vieltönig”, as this was especially cultivated in Rome of thoseyears. The term “vieltönig” can perhaps be translated as “multitonal” in the literal sense of using many pitches and refers to a conscious use of more than twelve notated pitches per octave.
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Ensemble Melpomen & Conrad Steinmann – CHOROS – Chorische Musik zur Tragödie Oidipous von Sophokles (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:52 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Solo Musica
“ΧΟΡÓΣ/CHOROS or Oidípous Týrannos of Sophocles» us of ancient Greece, newly imagined by Conrad Steinmann.
What did Greek antiquity sound like? This question, which had already heated the minds of scholars in 16th-century Italy and led to the invention of opera in wonderful ways, has also occupied the Swiss flutist and musicologist Conrad Steinmann for some time. But unlike 450 years ago, when Andrea Gabrieli set Sophocles to music in Italian translation, Steinmann and his Ensemble rely on the rhythms and accents of the original ancient Greek and on meticulously recreated instruments of the classical period. Choruses from Sophocles’ “Oedipus” are at the centre of this fascinating Sonic Adventure and conjure up the twilight of an ancient family saga with the tragic figure of that direct descendant of her brother Kadmos, and thus distant relative of Europe.
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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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