Ensemble Le Déluge

Laurent Wagschal & Ensemble le Déluge – Louis vierne (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:55 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Calliope

Although he naturally composed a great deal for the organ, Vierne was also a great symphonist, an outstanding colourist and melodist. A complete musician, he composed about ten works of chamber music, refined and inherited from his romantic masters (Wagner, Widor and Franck mainly). Also an accomplished pianist, he loves to accompany singers and instrumentalists and knows how to subtly marry timbres, as this recording shows.

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Ensemble Le Déluge, Laurent Wagschal – Camille Saint-Saëns: Duos pour piano et cordes (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 03:30:26 minutes | 3,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Ad Vitam records

Though chamber music is incontestably the least well-known component of his corpus, Camille Saint-Saëns was a master of the genre, leaving us with a large collection of works. We may think of Saint-Saëns as a conservative and very academic composer. And yet, we would be well advised to remember that he was, in fact, a pioneer. Even as a young man, Saint-Saëns delved into chamber music instead of opera, the conventional form for an up-and-coming musician. He composed chamber music throughout his life – through to the final woodwind sonatas in 1921 – restoring lustre to the form which, in France, had been all but forgotten. A driving force in the 19th century movement to reinvigorate the French school, Saint-Saëns paved the way for an entire generation of French musicians. This included his student Gabriel Fauré, who would go on to make an important contribution to the chamber music repertoire himself. These works embody the essence of Saint-Saëns’ composition: his lifelong and unyielding quest for perfection in form, and quality of the melodic line. It is fair to call Saint-Saëns a natural-born melodist, a true aesthete devoted to endowing a phrase with purity and beauty.
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