Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez Miranda, Aline Zylberajch – Kagami – Mirror (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez Miranda, Aline Zylberajch – Kagami – Mirror (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:03:04 minutes | 2,44 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ramée

The yamato word for mirror, 鏡kagami, can be read as “kami (divinity) surrounding ga (self)”: if you look in a mirror, what you see is your own self surrounded by divinity. Kaori Uemura has called her tale Kagami , because she believes that music reflects the inner depths of the self in the same way as a mirror. Mirrors were used in art as a reflection of what is, and as an allegory of truth and wisdom, a means of knowing yourself as you are. This recording is also a tribute to the Baroque composers who saw music not only as a mirror of divine creation, but equally as a means of expressing human emotions through musical figures which could produce specific affects.

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Michèle Devérité, Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez – The Forquerays, or the Torments of the Soul, Vol. 2 (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Michèle Devérité, Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez – The Forquerays, or the Torments of the Soul, Vol. 2 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:58:39 minutes | 1,36 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

This recording presents for the first time the complete works of the Forqueray family – music that is powerful, virtuosic, fascinating, that touches our innermost being – and combines harpsichord pieces with pieces for viola da gamba and basso continuo. It includes the four early pieces by Antoine Forqueray from the Recueil de pieces de violle avec la basse tiré des meilleurs autheurs, and our transcription for two harpsichords of the pieces for three viols found in the Lille Manuscript, as a nod to the family practice of the Forquerays (transcription was a very widespread practice at the time).

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Michèle Dévérité, Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez – The Forquerays, or the Torments of the Soul, Vol. 1 (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Michèle Dévérité, Kaori Uemura, Ricardo Rodriguez – The Forquerays, or the Torments of the Soul, Vol. 1 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 02:05:14 minutes | 1,46 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The Forqueray family, father and son: thereupon hangs a dark tale. The father, Antoine (1672-1745), famous composer and gamba player, a musicien ordinaire de la chambre du roy from 1689, developed such a furious jealousy of his son Jean-Baptiste (1699-1782) that he had him thrown in jail at the age of 20. Only the intervention of his friends won the young virtuoso his freedom, and finally he succeeded his father as a musicien ordinaire de la chambre du roy in 1742, when his father was no longer in a position to object. In 1747, Jean-Baptiste won the privilege of publishing 29 of his father’s pieces for viol da gamba and three of his own pieces; he also published a transcription of these same pieces for harpsichord. It is these works that Michèle Dévérité is offering us on the harpsichord, joined by Kaori Uemuraon the viol da gamba and Ryo Terakado on the viola for the ensemble pieces. A magnificent undertaking, which, two and a half centuries after the break between the two Forquerays, brings them back together in the most striking manner. To complement the second volume, we are also treated to several works dedicated to the Forquerays, by Charles François Clément, Louis-Antoine Dornel, Claude François… uh, sorry: Claude-François Rameau, the son (another father-and-son pair), and two modern composers.

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Kaori Uemura – Yuu: Gentleness and Melancholy (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Kaori Uemura – Yuu: Gentleness and Melancholy (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:06 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ramée

‘Music for a while / Shall all your cares beguile’ : in this famous song, Purcell invokes the power of music to soothe – at least temporarily – our pain and suffering. But do we really want to be soothed? Or do we prefer to cultivate our melancholy, in the company of Michel Lambert: ‘No, I sing not to charm away my sadness, but rather to maintain it’? In the St. John Passion, Bach associates the funereal sweetness of the viol with the death of Christ. Like him, many other composers have chosen the instrument to evoke mourning.

The pieces recorded on this album form a frame of melancholy music, just as the Japanese character 優(Yuu) expresses the gentleness of ‘a person who stands next to someone who is sad’. Through the vector of these melancholy pieces, the Japanese gambist Kaori Uemura makes her viol sing to maintain, but also to console sadness.

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