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Vertavo String Quartet, Björn Nyman & Sveinung Bjelland – Kjell Habbestad: Quattro Stazioni (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:11:44 minutes | 2,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
The title of this album refers to “String Quartet No. 1”, which has the same name. But it can also stand as an all-inclusive name for the four compositions represented on the album, four stations on my journey as a composer, four different approaches to musical expression in time and space. The journey begins in 1989 with “String Quartet No. 1 Quattro stazioni”, and ends in 2013 with “String Quartet No. 2”. Between these stations (albeit in reverse order on the album) are “Air d’ete suedois” for clarinet quintet (2009) and “Divertimento” for clarinet and piano (2010).
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Vertavo String Quartet – Verdi – Sibelius (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:55 minutes | 945 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
Here is a truly sublime record: the string quartets of two composers known for completely different genres (opera for Verdi and symphony and symphonic poetry for Sibelius) are united. They are certainly two composers of opposing horizons, of incomparable aesthetic and universe. However, the formidable Vertigo String Quartet – one of the best quartets in the world – unites them with an irrepressible realism and bright tenderness of great sensitivity and subtleness. Verdi composed, with “amusement”, his brief Quartet in 1873 and regarded the piece of chamber music with distance, in no way considering it a major work of his. The Vertigo String Quartet naturally tailors it to German traditions, not too far off the works of Mendelssohn for example, through highlighting the inventive instrumentation, notably in the intriguing finale. A knockout Scherzo (Allegro assai mosso) in which some methods, strangely, evoke the universe of the Finnish composer with its harmonic bass pedals. The transition into Sibelius’ Voces intimae is natural but the expression remains, of course, radically different. For the Sibelius section, Vertavo’s incredibly beautiful strings have their own extraordinary clarity, and the balance between the four instruments, very difficult in this often neglected score, are simply exceptional (Vivace, Adagio di motto). Composed in 1909, the Quartet “Voces intimae” remains intimately linked to the Fourth Symphony. The Adagio di molto material encounters a second flourish in the slow section (Il tempo largo) in the Fourth. Vertavo play the Quartet “Voces intimae” precisely like a miniature symphony, detailing with almost surgical precision (but never cold!) the harmonic superpositions, bursting textures and an absolute absence of classical polyphony: the purely timbral aspect of the Sibelian universe is displayed with a spellbinding nature – the passages in “moto perpetuo” in the final Allegro are unforgettable! Here, the Vertavo String Quartet, through its stylistic accuracy have recorded without a doubt one of the strongest interpretations since the, historic, Fitzwilliam String Quartet’s for Decca in 1978. – Pierre-Yves Lascar
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Versus – Ex Voto (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 37:23 minutes | 437 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ernest Jenning Record Co.
The output of New York indie pop institution Versus slowed considerably after a wildly productive run throughout the ’90s. New material trickled out and the occasional live performance denoted a band not completely dormant but just in a prolonged state of semi-hibernation. Ex Nihilo, a four-song EP released in the spring of 2019, was the band’s first new material in almost a decade, and from the way things had been going, it was anyone’s guess when their next new music would arrive. Just a few months later, sixth full-length Ex Voto continued the somewhat futuristic themes begun with the EP, rounding out Versus’ trademark co-ed vocal harmonies and inventive melodic perspectives with themes of mortality, escape, and dystopia. Album opener “Gravity” was presented in a more robotic reading on Ex Nihilo, but here the production is more fully fleshed out, heavy on winding guitar leads and supportive countermelodies from synth. Lyrics are heavy and even morbid, angry sentiments that could apply to either the bitter end of a relationship or the horrifying end of the world. After a lengthy instrumental intro, the bright jangle of “Mummified” betrays lyrics about the afterlife, lies dissolving in sunlight, and a general sense of the unknown. The brightness of the tune and its jagged lyrical undercurrents make for an almost surreal feeling, and this sharp contrast touches much of the album. The crystalline electro-pop of “Baby Green” is catchy and hopeful, but just enough to hide pained lyrics that could be addressing a person or a meteor speeding towards the Earth. Lyrics about deep space, time travel, and human shortcomings all serve as possible metaphors for lost love or the passing of time as Versus’ guitar-forward songcraft is in its most polished form. Always tempering their pop sweetness with a dark edge, Versus sound in complete control of their sound on Ex Voto. While no one following the band could have predicted that they’d turn in a meticulously constructed album of futuristic wonder almost 30 years after their scrappy rise in the heyday of ’90s indie pop, the weird and excellent Ex Voto is just that. It’s also some of their most immediate and refreshing work in a catalog of classics, made even more impressive by the undeniable feeling that Versus are still growing after all these years. ~ Fred Thomas
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Versing – 10000 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 41:21 minutes | 820 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Garage, Post-Punk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hardly Art
Like many important bands, Seattle quartet Versing got their start in college radio Tacoma’s KUPS. The group’s main songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Daniel Salas served as alternative music director there, where he met guitarist Graham Baker, drummer Max Keyes, and bassist Kirby Lochner. Now Versing are poised to spread their coolly combustible brand of rock on those said airwaves…and beyond if the world knows what’s good for it. Baker, Keyes, Lochner, and Salas have risen through Seattle’s competitive rock ecosphere with nonchalant élan. They cheekily titled a previous album Nirvana, but never mind the bleach: Versing isn’t emulating Sub Pop’s most famous artist. Rather, these four twentysomething aesthetes are forging an exciting sound that finds a golden mean between lustrous noise and ebullient melody. With Versing, songwriting is obviously crucial, but much of the pleasure in 10000 comes from its guitar textures. They’re swarming, yet also spiky and agile. Gently chiding the Seattle music scene’s self-seriousness while acknowledging Versing’s playfulness and irony, Salas says, ”There’s a ‘let’s just f**k around and see what comes out,’ aspect of what we do, which I think is uncommon for Seattle bands.” Versing’s freewheeling attitude has paradoxically resulted in 10000, an engrossing album that’s impossible to feel ambivalent about.
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Véronique Sanson – Funky French League Remixes (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 23:22 minutes | 287 MB | Genre: French Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner (France)
Les amateurs des “années américaines” de Véronique Sanson le savent bien : sa discographique groovait sévèrement dans les années 1970.
Enregistrés respectivement en 1974 et 1977, les versions originales de “On m’attend là-bas” et “Bernard’s Song” occupent une place de choix dans le répertoire de Véronique Sanson. Issus des albums Le Maudit et Hollywood, ces titres estampillés West Coast font aujourd’hui l’objet de remixes 100% groove par le collectif de DJs The Funky French League.
Découvrez ci-dessous leur Young Pulse Remix de “Bernard’s Song”, extrait du EP digital 5 titres Funky French League Remixes by Véronique Sanson disponible dès aujourd’hui sur toutes les plateformes (maxi-vinyle disponible en février 2019).
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Veronique Sanson – Duos volatils (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 55:42 minutes | 618 MB | Genre: Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia
Cet album de duos, c’est la somme de multiples instants éphémères, empreints de légèreté, de belles voix mêlées et de grains de folie.
Un jeu avec les vieux complices de toujours ou avec la jeune génération.
Chacun des invités apporte sa griffe, on va de surprise en surprise, tout est changé – et, finalement, rien n’est vraiment changé : l’âme Sanson est bien là, inaltérable, pimentée d’autres talents, le temps d’un grand album.
Véronique Gens, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Hervé Niquet – Visions (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:41 minutes | 936 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
After an album of French songs (Néère) that earned her a “Gramophone Award” in 2016, Véronique Gens presents her new recital, this time with orchestra, which gives her an opportunity to display the maturity of her ‘Falcon’ soprano, the central tessitura typical of French Romantic opera, which takes its name from Cornélie Falcon, who created the works of Meyerbeer and Halévy staged in the 1830s. She pays tribute here to a number of composers whose unknown operas she was the first to reveal in projects mounted by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, including David, Godard, Saint-Saëns and Halévy. The programme selects arias from all the genres in vogue in the Romantic era: opera (Saint-Saëns, Halévy, Godard, Février), opéra-comique (David), oratorio (Franck, Massenet) and the cantata for the Prix de Rome (Bizet, Bruneau). A nod to Wagner and his Tannhäuser – in its French translation of the 1860s – completes this programme conducted by a longstanding colleague of the soprano, one of the leading specialists in French music, Hervé Niquet.
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Véronique Gens, Marie-Adeline Henry, Frédéric Antoun, Andrew Foster-Williams, Jean Teitgen, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Ulf Schirmer – Saint-Saëns: Proserpine (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:34:40 minutes | 958 MB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Bru Zane
The protagonist of Saint-Saëns’ Proserpine, premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 14 March 1887, is no reincarnation of the ancient goddess, but a Renaissance courtesan well versed in culpable amours. According to the composer, she is ‘a damned soul for whom true love is a forbidden fruit; as soon as she approaches it, she experiences torture’. Yet for all the innocence of her rival Angiola, the unexpected happens: ‘It is the bloodthirsty beast that is admirable; the sweet creature is no more than pretty and likeable.’ Visibly enraptured by this delight in horror, Saint-Saëns indulges in unprecedented orchestral modernity, piling on the dissonances beneath his characters’ cries of rage or despair. He concluded thus: ‘Proserpine is, of all my stage works, the most advanced in the Wagnerian system.’ The least-known, too, and one which it was high time to reveal to the public, in its second version, revised in 1899.
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Véronique Gens, I Giardini – Nuits (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:39 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
As the symbiosis between the art of the poet and that of the composer, the French mélodie became the jewel of the salons of the ‘Belle Époque’. By placing a string quartet and a piano around the singer, Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, Lekeu’s Nocturne and Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson oscillate between chamber musical intimacy and orchestral ambition. Alongside these famous pioneering pieces, this programme devised by the Palazzetto Bru Zane champions a return to the art of transcription, so popular in the nineteenth century, with the aim of expanding the repertory for voice, strings and piano in order to unearth some forgotten treasures. Hence Hahn, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, La Tombelle, Ropartz, Louiguy and Messager all appear in a programme whose guiding thread is the emotions of nocturnal abandonment: the charms of twilight, the trajectory of dreams, the terror of nightmare or the exhilaration of festive occasions. Alexandre Dratwicki has made these arrangements in the style of the nineteenth century. Appropriately enough, the programme ends with La Vie en rose, for this music offers a kaleidoscope of all the colours of human feeling. The texture of solo strings and piano sets Véronique Gens’s incomparable storytelling artistry in a new ligh.
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Véronique Gens, Ensemble Les Surprises & Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas – Lully, Charpentier & Desmarets: Passion (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:10 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
This programme marks the eagerly awaited return of V’eronique Gens to Baroque music and Lully, in which she made a name for herself at the start of her career. It presents airs from Atys, Pers’ee, Alceste, Proserpine, Le Triomphe de l’Amour and other works by Louis XIV’s famous composer, but also several by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (M’ed’ee), Henry Desmarets and Pascal Collasse.
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Véronique Gens – Chausson: Poème de l’amour et de la mer & Symphonie Op. 20 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:05 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Ernest Chausson is a most unusual figure in French music, positioned at the crossroads where the romanticism of Berlioz and Franck meet the language of Wagner and the symbolism of the young Debussy. His Poème de l’amour et de la mer is a unique score for the period and certainly his greatest work; simultaneously a profane, naturistic cantata, a monologue, and a song cycle, it was composed between 1882 and 1892. Véronique Gens is recording this cycle for the first time, although she has already issued Le temps des lilas with Susan Manoff at the piano (“Néère”), about which Ernst Van Bek wrote in Classiquenews: « it mesmerises with the nuancing of its colours, the allusive precision of every sung word ».
Véronique Gens’ talent is equally on display in this recording too, with the Orchestre National de Lille – an orchestra she already knows well – under Alexandre Bloch, its new chief conductor, whose appointment and first concerts and recordings have already caused a sensation… The Symphony in B-flat major completes this programme: a summit of French symphonic writing, for some a milestone as important as the Symphony in D of Chausson’s teacher César Franck!
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Véronique Bonnecaze – Debussy (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:14:04 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Paraty
It is partly thanks to his acquaintances among writers and painters from the end of the XIXth century that Debussy’s idiom evolved. In a context of heated international politics, the return to French classicism allows some artists to reaffirm the values of the age of Louis XIV. Indeed, his so prodigiously creative music, which today is played with too much caution, makes no claim of being avant-garde. In the musician’s eyes, it simply expresses the pleasure to play and to discover new sounds.
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Veronique Bonnecaze – Chopin: Complete Sonatas (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:14:06 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Paraty
1826. The Chopin family lives in Warsaw. Frederic is still a young man, just on the edge of adulthood. His catalog is already rich with some piano pieces, rondos, variations, waltzes, mazurkas and polonaises. Living in a certain material comfort and having taken refuge in relative solitude – he who desired so much to drop out of school – Chopin studies counterpoint – only counterpoint because he already masters piano technique to perfection – with Józef Elsner (1769-1854), at the Higher School of Music. He also registers at the University of Warsaw, as an auditor, to history and literature classes. The two subject matters are tinted by the two major influences of their time, Enlightenment on the one hand and Sturm und Drang on the other. Both nourish the new Polish literature that in turn, with revolutionary energy, feeds into proud nationalism. Slavic and Polish traditions are magnified by the likes of Elsner, himself a composer of operas. And so he dreams about the destiny of his most gifted student: Will Chopin become the Messiah of Polish opera? After all, piano repertoire should logically eclipse itself before the exalting priorities of present times. In fact Chopin is studying singing and Italian, but without cutting himself off from his prodigious abilities as an instrumentalist.
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Veronika Harcsa & Bálint Gyémánt – Shapeshifter (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 43:59 minutes | 456 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Traumton
With two albums thus far (Lifelover und Tell Her), Veronika Harcsa and Bálint Gyémánt have fascinated press and audiences as a duo since 2014. “Harcsa is an amazingly versatile musician, a brilliant vocalist and gifted entertainer in the best sense,” states allaboutjazz.com, and public radio MDR adjudges: “Harcsa’s voice oscillates in many different colors. […] At times she sounds like the jazzy sister of Alanis Morissette and in the next moment she turns into a spherical siren.”
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Veronika Dzhioeva – Ritorna vincitor! (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:29 minutes | 988 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delos
Since graduating from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 2005, soprano Veronika Dzhioeva has become one of Russia’s leading singers, and is in great demand throughout Europe and abroad, regularly appearing at prestigious houses and working with leading orchestras and conductors. A remarkably versatile singer, she has won considerable acclaim for her mastery of parts ranging from Mozart to the weightiest of spinto and dramatic soprano roles.
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