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2021/22, a cultural season unlike any other, brings the 30th anniversary of Cypres. Musical renewal and reinvention is of the essence for any record label in today’s environment. An enterprising spirit; a constant quest for newly composed works; firm roots in the local musical landscape; representation of prestigious names and advocacy of young talent: all these are elements that constitute our particular creative formula. Now that we are 30 years old we can confidently take pleasure in sharing our musical philosophy with you. This first recording of our anniversary season provides a showcase for two gifted sisters who go back a long way with Cypres. Their joy in performing together is palpable as they present a programme that is original in its conception, intimate and deeply touching. This album contains a number of pieces that evoke memories – the musical equivalent of photos in a box in the attic. Some are original compositions for this instruments set, others have been arranged by the two sisters for the occasion. What would Frédéric Chopin have thought when he heard this arrangement of his Etude No. 7, Op. 25 sounding like a dialogue between cello and harp? This music is the very essence of life: a subtle sway of memories, flashes of light, tears, death and smiles. © Cyprès

The new Trio Ernest attempts to make a splash here with its cheeky buried-in-the-score graphics and unconventional Haydn All-Stars title, which doesn't make more than a little bit of sense, but the program and playing can stand on their own. Trio Ernest offers some late Haydn trios, all hanging right at the point where the piano trio was emerging as an independent genre, along with works that show the lasting influence of Haydn's chamber music. The players are right that this influence is a bit overlooked, showing up in works as diverse as a Brahms song (here transcribed for piano trio) and Ravel's little Menuet sur le nom de Haydn, with its musical realization of the letters of Haydn's name. Also included is Lieber Joseph! by composer Jacqueline Fonteyn, a work composed in a modernist idiom in which Haydn's melodic shapes and motifs are nevertheless easily recognizable. Trio Ernest has committed to including a work by a female composer in each concert, and this one bodes well for their ability to find interesting material and perform it convincingly. The Haydn trios themselves are imbued with the high spirits that are essential to a successful Haydn performance. With clear sound from the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, this release announces an important new presence in the crowded piano trio scene.© James Manheim /TiVo

To celebrate his 60th birthday Decca Classics gave Jean-Yves Thibaudet "carte blanche" to choose a very personal selection of music he has never recorded before. Including Dario Marianelli commissioned Pride and Prejudice - Suite to build on 97m streams for Dawn, Thibaudet's own transcriptions of Disney's When You Wish Upon a Star and Barber's Adagio for Strings. © Decca Classics

Fiançailles pour rire (roughly, Betrothal for Kicks) is the title of a set of short songs composed in 1939 by Francis Poulenc and included in this recital by soprano Natalie Dessay and her exquisite accompanist Philippe Cassard. That group of songs, and the extremely stylized graphics of the album, correspond well enough to the implications of the title, but for the most part the program is not especially lighthearted. What you get here is a little survey of French songs, mostly not so well known, concluding with Heni Duparc, the earliest composer and the one all the others imitated despite the slenderness of his surviving output. Those songs make a luminous finale, but Dessay's way with a text and her realizations of the characters contained in the songs by Fauré, Chabrier, and Chausson make the entire program compelling. The composers of these songs probably had a purer voice in mind, and Dessay's fascinating instrument, agile but with a bit of gravel in it by now, is unorthodox. It is never less than compelling, however, and about the superb Erato/Warner Bros. sound, from the superbly appropriate Salle Colonne in Paris, there will be little dispute. Highly recommended, especially for La Dessay's numerous devotees.© TiVo

It's a real godsend to be able to discover the ballet Narcissus and Echo by Nicolaï Tcherepnine, an all-too-forgotten composer today. Yet he is one of the young Russians, such as Rachmaninov, Glazunov, Medtner or Taneïev, who succeeded their great elders in the Group of Five and Tchaikovsky. He inherited an exceptional orchestral skill from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, before teaching himself at the St Petersburg Conservatory where he had Sergei Prokofiev as a student.Appointed as a conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre before the October Revolution, Nicolaï Tcherepnine conducted the inaugural season of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909. It was for Serge de Diaghilev that he composed his ballet Narcissus and Echo, which was hastily premiered in 1911 in place of Daphnis and Chloe, whose composition Ravel had not finished in time. Danced by Nijinsky in a choreography by Fokine and the Bakst sets planned for Daphnis, the work seemed boring to the Parisian public. It was an unjust judgment, since this sparkling score deserves much more than to simply be forgotten.Dance générale, Bacchanal in a dreamy Greece, here we are in the same universe as Ravel, one adorned with a colourful and magical orchestration, and whose use of a choir further reinforces - in a rather disturbing way - its closeness to Ravel's future ballet. It was certainly a kind of stagnation that may have confused the audience, accustomed at the time to the wild rhythms of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and the young Stravinsky.The beautiful recording of Łukasz Borowicz is a timely reminder of the music of this great Russian composer who lived in Paris where he died in 1945, leaving behind a large number of stage compositions (operas and ballets), symphonic music, chamber music, vocal works and piano works. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The selections on Luiza Borac's second volume of George Enescu's piano music show how versatile a composer he was. Like many of his contemporaries, such as Ravel and Stravinsky, he absorbed and adapted a variety of traditional forms and of compositional styles to create a diverse, if small, body of works that deserves greater attention outside of his homeland. The Prelude and Fugue are neo-Baroque in form and even in articulation, but translucent harmonies suffuse the music. In the Prelude this is done mainly through the use of long, sustained pedal tones over which the hands play repetitive figures in scalar motion. The Fugue's legato subject gently swings and almost sings, like a Bach Sicilienne. The Nocturne has the ABA structure of most traditional nocturnes, but it is a 20-minute behemoth with a stormy central section that calls for strength and virtuosity in between outer sections made up of improvisation-like, meditative ideas that send ripples into the ether. The Scherzo's humor is even more devilishly Lisztian in its outer sections than the Nocturne's middle, whereas its middle is more light-filled. The brief Pièce sur le nom de Fauré has a novel origin, explained in the notes, but even though it is based on a specific series of notes repeated several times, it also has those translucent colors of the Prelude and the Nocturne. The Piano Sonatas No. 1 and No. 3 (there never was a Sonata No. 2), are where Enescu's love of Romanian folk music is most evident, and yet it is so carefully blended in that it is only revealed by the occasional skipping rhythm or an ornament or snippet of song-like melody. The sonatas are very similar in nature to the Nocturne: meandering in tonality, musing, and seemingly improvised. Sonata No. 1 is unsettled and atmospheric, using the different tonalities as much as tempo and articulation to generate emotion. The movements of Sonata No. 3 seem to be an inversion of those of No. 1. The outer movements are animated, while the middle movement is meditative. It also has a brighter outlook, with fanciful, little ornaments that suggest bird song and a glorious finale. In all of these Borac sounds completely at ease with the music, no matter how technically challenging it can be. She is attuned to all the variations of its changeability, no matter how small, never forceably or artifically applying the minutest alterations of colors and dynamics. There does, however, seem to be a little more room in Enescu's music to play with rubato without losing momentum or emoting too much. What's missing from the recording is a warmer or less flattened sound, which would make Borac's performance in the grander moments of Enescu's writing more spellbinding to hear. © TiVo

The listener seeing the title "Souvenirs" on this release by cellist Gautier Capuçon might expect a program of encores, mostly French, with composers like Saint-Saëns prominent in the mix. Saint-Saëns is there, but the three-CD program opens with the magnificently sober Bach Suite No. 1 for solo cello, BWV 1007, and continues with the spiky, virtuosic Cello Sonata, Op. 8, of Kodály. What's happening is that Capuçon has combined new recordings of the Bach and Kodály, and of works by Henri Dutilleux and Javier Martínez Campos, with a sort of greatest-hits collection of his recordings over 20 years for the Erato label, including chamber music and concertos. It's a rather unwieldy set with little to unify it beyond Capuçon's presence. But there are lots of attractive stops along the way, beginning with the unusually warm, lyrical reading of the Bach G major cello suite. One is also reminded at several points of Capuçon's skills as a chamber player as he melts into the texture. Capuçon fans will find plenty of souvenirs here, but the thing is that the collection will offer enjoyable listening to newcomers as well.© TiVo