Vanessa Wagner

Vanessa Wagner – Les heures immobiles (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 26:56 minutes | 230 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © InFiné

Les Heures Immobiles, a title inspired by the aphorisms of Henri Michaux, is the new 6-track album from pianist Vanessa Wagner, recorded during an intimate session in December 2022 at the TAP in Poitiers. This mini album brings together compositions by artists Vanessa has not yet explored like Kate Moore and Laurel Halo, and composers she is familiar with such as Philip Glass, Bryce Dessner, and Meredith Monk. It completes the already abundant exploration of a repertoire that Vanessa Wagner has been working on since her albums Inland (2019), Study of the Invisible (2021), and Mirrored (end of 2022).

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Vanessa Wagner – Mirrored (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 44:28 minutes | 766 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © InFiné

French pianist Vanessa Wagner collects solo piano studies of graceful minimalism and rare finesse for new album Mirrored.

Quickly following March 2022’s Study of the Invisible album, Vanessa Wagner returns with a new collection of work that paints in many colours. The application of shadow in Mirrored evokes haunting poignancy; the care and delicateness of its negative space leaves room for undulating melodic motifs to ebb and flow; its bold splashes of luminescence are striking and rich.

And while the album collates re-interpretations of works by composers as varied as Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Moondog, Leo Ferré and Camille Pepin, the potency and effect of the collection as a whole reflects only Vanessa Wagner and the extraordinary breadth of her abilities.

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Vanessa Wagner – Ravel: Piano Works (5.1 Edition) (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:14 minutes | 2,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Aparté

„Pavane pour une infante défunte“, an early work, takes us into the world of dance that perfumes the musical world of Ravel. „Gaspard de la nuit“ in the French Romantic tradition, is a triptych inspired by three of Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-ballads: Ondine, the water nymph; Le Gibet (Gallows), paints a gruesome picture of „a bell tolling from the walls of a city, beneath the skyline, and the body of a hanged man, reddened by the setting sun“; Scarbo, depicts the night-time mischief of a mocking dwarf. We return to the dance with the bold‚ “Valses nobles et sentimentales“, a series of waltzes written in 1911. Finally, „Ma Mère l’Oye“ (Mother Goose), shows Ravel’s affection for his childhood days. Vanessa Wagner brings out the modernity of these scores, their sudden movements of violence, their moments of ineffable sweetness. She plays with rigour, intensity and a velvet touch.

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Vanessa Wagner – Liszt, Pärt (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:32 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © La Dolce Volta

Performing and recording the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses is a real initiatory journey, which runs the gamut from extreme austerity to supreme ecstasy. I played these pieces a fair number of times before I recorded them. It’s music that requires a long period of maturation, because, over and above virtuosity, it demands an inner development on the part of the interpreter, an almost philosophical voyage of introspection.

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Vanessa Wagner – Inland (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:01:03 minutes | 556 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © InFiné

The title of this new album by Vanessa Wagner refers to John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape (1939), one of the first works to use electronic devices. After all, when Cage wrote his manifesto The Future of Music in the late 1930s, he already knew that the merging of written and electronic music would bear exquisite fruits. The album is the lone protuberance from 2016 album Statea, on which Wagner, alongside producer Murcof (she on the piano, him manning the machines), reinterpreted pieces from the fathers of minimalism: Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, or John Cage. The same secret conversation between the artist, the piano, and contemporary music is now continuing on Inland. Making more with less, the album turns long harmonies into multicolored prisms, miniature detailed embroidery, sighs and breaths, syncopated or restrained chants. In this brave new world, sounds exist for themselves, and silence comes to life.

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Vanessa Wagner – Study of the Invisible (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:04 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © InFiné

The neoclassical sphere will persist, and will not – it seems – get rid of its desire for nebulous post-Chopin melancholy. And from her beautiful show with Murcof, the pianist Vanessa Wagner had favored very nostalgic sounds and shades. Unlike her many competitors in the post-Brian Eno universe (in Music for Airports mode), Vanessa Wagner, above all a pianist dedicated to classical and modern repertoires, knows that emotion also goes through nuance. If the pieces present here are far from being all inexhaustible (Glass, Studies n ° 16 and 6; or the hardly bearable Lullaby (Song for Octave) by Bryce Dessner), she brings a variety of touch and a very comforting sitting in the keyboard.
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