Paavo Järvi's recording of the Fauré Requiem is notable for its balance of a sumptuous orchestral and choral sound with a chaste and dignified interpretation of the score. The strings of Orchestre de Paris in particular sound gorgeous, and Choeur de l'Orchestre de Paris sings with marvelous dynamic variety; in the opening movement, the chorus seems to emerge gradually out of near-silence, yet the group can produce a terrifyingly large sound in the Libera me. Counter tenor Philippe Jaroussky and baritone Matthias Goerne are outstanding in the solo movements, investing the meditative music with deep feeling. The Pie Jesu is sometimes sung by a woman and sometimes by a boy soprano, and Jaroussky's performance has some elements of both: the purity of a boy's voice but with the musical maturity of an adult singer. The album is generously filled out with four other choral or orchestral pieces. The lovely Cantique de Jean Racine and Pavane for orchestra and mixed choir are frequently paired with the Requiem. Elégie for cello and orchestra, premiered by Pablo Casals, and played with elegance here by Eric Picard, fits beautifully with the contemplative tone of the album. Super flumina Babylonis for mixed choir and orchestra is a student work, recorded here for the first time. It's more overtly emotional than the other repertoire on the album, as is appropriate for the text, and may lack the subtlety of the later pieces, but it's an attractive, skillfully crafted work that stands on its own merits and deserves broader exposure. The sound of the live recording is exceptionally warm and resonant, yet still detailed.© TiVo

The music of Airat Ichmouratov is becoming increasingly popular, and here, he hits the big time with a recording on the major Chandos label, one which hit classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2023. He is also a klezmer clarinetist, but none of these varied strands of his background shows up much in this pair of concertos, one for viola (he wrote it for the doctoral recital of the violinist here, Elvira Misbachova, and romance flowered), and one, later, for piano. Instead, the music is late Romantic in style. What sets Ichmouratov apart from his sizable group of competitors in this area is a strongly evocative, cinematic quality to his music. He has apparently never written film scores, and there is no evidence that he knows the works of John Williams and the like, but it is an occupation he might try sometime. Sample the calm string serenade of the slow movement, evocative of the resolution of a long conflict, with the piano entering after a considerable time in a high range at a clockwork pace, unfolding what sounds like a distant memory that gathers intensity as the movement proceeds. Much of the music is episodic in the manner of a film score; the Viola Concerto is a bit more oriented toward traditional concerto form, but the soloist is given a great variety of utterances. Chandos' sound from LSO St. Luke's is a bit remote and tends to swallow up pianist Jean-Philippe Sylvestre, but both soloists are sympathetic to the music. Listeners who favor neo-Romantic styles may not be familiar with Ichmouratov, but it seems a good bet that they will be hearing his name frequently going forward. © James Manheim /TiVo

Not just anyone can enter the sophisticated, discreet and secretive world of Gabriel Fauré's Barcarolles. French pianist Jean-Philippe Collard has been keeping out of the spotlight for far too long, so his return to both the stage and the recording studio (with his new label La Dolce Volta) is a welcome sight. His comeback sees him return to his first musical love: the composer Fauré, whose Barcarolles cycle he had already recorded, along with his complete piano music, chamber music and a selection of melodies with Frederica von Stade.Over time, Collard’s sound has become simpler, lighter, with a freshness and spontaneity that only comes with musical maturity. The story behind this new recording is a funny one: one day whilst driving his car, Jean-Philippe Collard just so happened to be listening to the radio when a pianist performing the Première Barcarolle started playing. He didn’t care much for the interpretation and hated the performers constant changes in tempo... so you can imagine his dismay when the radio host announced that it was, in fact, Collard’s own recording from 1970... that was the moment he knew he had to work on this cycle again and propose a new and improved version.This second version was recorded in 2020 in the beautiful Arsenal Concert Hall, which is known for its remarkable acoustics. Exactly fifty years after his first recording, Jean-Philippe Collard’s vision for the solo piano version of the Barcarolles and Ballad has now been perfected. It’s been stripped back to basics and exudes the kind of naturalness that, paradoxically, could only ever have been attained through thorough analysis of the written music, its constant modulations and skilful superimposition of melody. Jean-Phillipe Collard has evidently gone through it all with a fine-toothed comb and, consequently, he’s given the world a chance to listen to the very best of what he has to offer. © François Hudry/Qobuz

French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau left behind an extraordinary wealth of orchestral music, but little to none of it is of the stand-alone variety, scattered as it is throughout his 18 operas and 13 ballets left to posterity, in whole or in part. Conductor Marc Minkowski has elected to redress the imbalance by compiling 17 of Rameau's best orchestral moments into Une Symphonie Imaginaire, an "imaginary symphony" performed by period instrument ensemble Les Musiciens du Louvre and issued on compact discs by Archiv Produktion. This type of montage of related bits and pieces from various scores morphed, if you will, into a single work is a time-honored tradition, particularly as it relates to Baroque music; for example, Sir John Barbirolli's Suite for wind & strings arranged from bits and pieces of Henry Purcell or Sir Hamilton Harty's arrangements from Handel. Yet Une Symphonie Imaginaire is a world away from the Baroque boom of the 1930s.The sequence of pieces here, drawn from the operas Zaïs, Les Fêtes d'Hébe, Dardanus, Le Temple de la Gloire, Les Boréades, and Hippolyte & Aricie; the ballets La Naissance d'Osiris and Platée; and a contemporary arrangement of the Rameau's keyboard piece La Poule, is mainly intended for this album and not for use in concert. Minkowski does not attempt to assert that his "symphony" drawn from Rameau's music is anything that the composer himself may have devised -- in Rameau's time, the symphony itself was a mere baby, little more than a fancy name for an opera overture. Much of Rameau's music is eccentric and utilizes revolutionary techniques for this era, particularly in fracturing individual lines within the orchestra in order to provide a fragmented, disjunctive quality to the texture. The "Prelude to Act V" of Les Boréades sounds almost like a Baroque overture as reorganized by John Cage. The anonymous arrangement of La Poule is an outstanding character piece and quite unusual for any orchestral music of the mid-eighteenth century.Overall, Une Symphonie Imaginaire is splendidly well played and sequenced in a fast-moving order, although music-by-the-yard fanatics may find the 56-minute running time too stingy. This Hybrid CD version is to be preferred over the standard CD release, as the latter suffers from an intermittent high end, whereas the Hybrid CD accurately represents this superb Archiv recording for what it is with no dropouts or other sonic anomalies.© TiVo

Bertrand de Billy's live 2011 performance of Dialogues des Carmélites at Theater an der Wien is notable for the vigor of his conducting and his dramatic highlighting of the score's contrasts, which have rarely sounded so stark and tension-filled. He doesn't stint on conveying the music's generous lushness, in scenes such as the first, which is characterized by the composer's typically suave Gallic urbanity in its depiction of Blanche's aristocratic family. What comes as a revelation, though, are the outbursts of Stravinskian ruggedness in the orchestration and harmonies that de Billy does nothing to soften, which are especially evident in the orchestral interludes between scenes. His rhythmic control is crisp and precise, and points up the score's evocations of Baroque French opera, but he also gives the music plenty of room to breathe. The ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien delivers the drama of de Billy's vision with urgency and plays the more lyrical sections with limpid, sumptuous tone. The vocal casting is not consistently persuasive. Sally Matthews' voice is large and her vibrato is more pronounced than that of the rest of the cast, making her Blanche a far-from-typical characterization. The fact that her voice is so powerful in relation to the voices of the other singers makes for an imbalance that's at odds with the premise that Blanche is the opera's most timorous and tentative character. In a more vocally distinguished ensemble she could be highly effective because her characterization is intensely personal and deeply felt. Here, though, the other singers simply pale in comparison. The roles of the other nuns are sung without much distinctiveness, except for Hendrickje van Kerckhove's warm, luminous Sister Constance. Yann Beuron is strong and sympathetic as Blanche's brother, Le Chevalier de la Force. The sound is generally full, detailed, and clean, but the theatrical realism of the live performance doesn't compensate for the variability of balance and volume as the singers move around the stage. The excellent orchestral playing and fine choral singing by the Arnold Schoenberg Chor, and especially de Billy's assured, insightful conducting make this a recording that anyone who loves the opera will want to hear, but it would not make the best introduction for newcomers. © TiVo

This second Chandos album of orchestral works by Airat Ichmouratov features three works united by an ear for bold orchestral colour, a dramatic sense of form, and a firm dedication to tonality. The ‘Youth’ Overture was dedicated to the recording’s performers, the Orchestre de la Francophonie and its founder, Jean-Phillippe Tremblay, on the occasion of their fifteenth anniversary, and was premiered in July 2016. The ‘Maslenitsa’ Overture, premiered in 2013, portrays the week prior to Lent and represents an array of carnival-like festivities, including folk dances, disguises, troika rides, ice sculptures, and blini. First performed in 2017, the Symphony in A minor seeks to recreate the vitality of Longueuil, a city on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, from its beginnings as an outpost of New France (only the foundations of Fort Longueuil remain) to the present day. The symphony features Ichmouratov’s trademark descriptive eclecticism – especially in the second movement in which we hear children playing in parks, adults on the street engaged in boisterous debate, traffic noises, and the sound of a trumpet from a nightclub. All three works are world premiere recordings. © Chandos

Late in his career, Jean-Philippe Rameau was celebrated for his colorful operas and ballets, but prior to these successes, his fame rested on his Traité de l'harmonie (1722) and a series of keyboard pieces which were published over the years as three suites. These works have been frequently played on harpsichord and piano, though among contemporary scholarly performances, the harpsichord is increasingly favored for recordings. Steven Devine's 2018 set of the complete keyboard music on Resonus offers the Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (1705/06), the Pièces de clavessin (1724), and the Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin (1726/27), plus a smattering of free-standing miniatures, including the Menuet en rondeau, the Cinq pièces, La Dauphine, Air pour Zéphire (in a transcription by Devine), and Rameau's keyboard reduction of the overture, airs, and dances from the opera Les Indes galantes (1735/36). This three-disc set is comprehensive and the most thorough presentation of Rameau's keyboard music available on CD, except for the omission of the questionable Les petits marteaux. Devine's playing is impeccable and faithful to historical practices, and the sound of the double-manual harpsichord, a modern copy of an instrument by Andreas Ruckers, is robust and closely recorded. Highly recommended.© TiVo