La Dolce Volta

This is the story of two young musicians who met during the Coronavirus lockdown, of all things. Daniel Hope invited the French violist Adrien La Marca to appear on his Arte programme "Hope@home" last December. For the first time, his duo partner was the German-Greek pianist Danae Dörken. And already the idea was born: why not work together on a new project that transcends the frontiers of countries and musical genres? The result was a new programme featuring classical music, French traditional music, film music and chansons, which the pair have now recorded... At the heart of the recording are the Albumblätter of the Bohemian-German composer Hans Sitt, a violist and contemporary of Johannes Brahms. These "album leaves" are masterpieces of salon music that are far too rarely found in concert programmes. Alongside them are other little gems by Antonín Dvořák, Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky and Brahms himself, but also French delicacies by Francis Poulenc and Erik Satie. More modern repertory is represented by Frank Bridge, Nadia Boulanger and Philip Glass. The two famous chansons, Hubert Giraud’s Sous le ciel de Paris and of course Aznavour’s La Bohème, exude a special charm. An album offering profundity, surprising associations, yet also a typically "bohemian" light-heartedness that enabled the two artists – but not only them! – to forget the dreariness of concert-deprived times. © La Dolce Volta

"One day I dreamt of snow, lots of snow. The flakes looked like bubbles, and fell to the ground instead of rising to the sky as bubbles do. In the distance, I saw an isolated house, lost in the immensity of this subdued landscape. Then I realised the house was my childhood home. Memories and dreams intermingled and I heard music. As a child in Romania, I was cradled by the music of Mozart and the cimbalom that accompanies the dances of the Dobruja region; as a teenager I discovered the pieces of Chopin and Debussy, indelibly linked with my teachers of that time. As a young concert pianist, my knowledge was enriched by new images of travel. First of all in France, my adoptive homeland, then in Europe, in America, and finally in Armenia by way of China. Wonderful memories of communion with other musicians... I had a dream and that dream became a fabulous reality, a celebration. As I sit on the sofa in my living room, beside a crackling fire, my friends enter one after the other and come up to me. Some of them I have known for a long time, others are friends made only recently. Glasses are served, filled with a nectar, an ambrosia worthy of the gods. The bubbles loosen tongues, the stories take flight and mingle. The stories told here permit us to share and exchange our experiences. Their lives have sometimes been cruel as well as sweet, but they all continue to vibrate in music, to dance the waltz or the tango". © Dana Ciocarlie/La Dolce Volta

Being in his sixties gives Jean-Marc Luisada a quiet serenity that he puts to good use in Schubert's final Sonata in B flat major, D. 960. It's a work which he sees as the culmination of a whole life, Schubert's of course, but maybe also of the French pianist's career. This is an artist who really knows how to bring out all the desolate melancholy from Schubert's material, probably by mixing in his own personal life experiences and his own questions. A film buff, Luisada is a veritable encyclopaedia of the Seventh Art. He compares Schubert to certain shots by Ozu or Robert Bresson, who are also capable of expressing the same "feeling of immobility, the sensation of eternity" that he works into his musical performance.To the expression of deep sorrow in this final work by Schubert, Luisada contrasts the Sonata in C major, D. 840 'Reliquie', in which he finds both a continuity with Haydn's Variations in F minor and 'a climate of frightful sadness' contrasting with 'an angelic luminosity'. Jean-Marc Luisada plays the only two movements from it left by Schubert himself, and omits the version which was completed by his teacher Paul Badura-Skoda.For the pianist, this incompleteness, such a constant presence in Schubert's works, is not a sign of impotence. Rather, he considers that the composer had 'already said what was essential by revealing the suffering of the moment'. Jean-Marc Luisada highlights the interplay of opposites in this recording, made in the beautiful Salle de l'Arsenal in Metz at the end of winter 2021, when France was under a renewed lockdown due to the global pandemic. Paradoxically, this step back into the interior seems to have helped this most perceptive artist to open up and enjoy greater freedom and inspiration. © François Hudry/Qobuz

At the end of 1822, Schubert learnt that he had contracted a venereal disease. His hopes were "dashed", friendship and love became "torture". He threw all his energy into his work and embarked on the most profound portion of his oeuvre. This was the period of the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, followed in 1824 by the "Rosamunde" Quartet, the Arpeggione Sonata and "The Death and the Maiden" Quartet. He left more and more works unfinished, but everything he did complete now took on a new dimension. His quartets are no longer for "accompanied first violin": they gain in expressiveness, power and symphonic richness. The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, "Rosamunde", was the only one printed and performed in public during Schubert’s lifetime. It is a work uttered in a murmur, with its tremolos, its unison melodies, its modulations. This string quartet is deeply touching in its confidences devoid of vehemence or drama. A nocturnal hymn to yearning, it is fragile and should be performed neither too desolately nor too lightly, always playing on the ambiguity between dewdrops and tears. The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor D810, "Death and the Maiden", is a work dictated by despair. Schubert concurs with Mozart’s remark that death is humanity’s best friend. He composed his quartet in D minor, the key of the Mozart Requiem. The highly dramatic first movement is a struggle for life. In the second movement, Death is accepted. The drama returns in the third movement, now tinged with irony. And the work ends with a Dance of Death, a Presto in the form of a tarantella (the Italian dance invented to cure the bite of the tarantula). The final chord affirms D minor. There is no doubt about the tragic outcome. © La Dolce Volta

Eugène Ysaÿe was one of the leading figures in the violin world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a source of inspiration for subsequent generations. He played in his era a role comparable to that of Niccolò Paganini. Towards the end of his life, he composed these six sonatas for solo violin, which look back to the past, reflect his present and open towards the future. It is worth noting the total and all too rare fidelity to both the letter and the spirit of the text in these performances. David Grimal displays the full maturity of his playing: he has made his own the very essence of each movement, with its architecture and its specific gestures. His transcendental yet invariably humble technique works wonders. The widest imaginable palette of colours, accents and dynamics bestows musical truth on this album, recorded in July 2019. © La Dolce Volta

The works of George Enescu, a Romanian composer nurtured on the musical traditions of his country, also has deep roots in the French musical world of the early twentieth century. This disc explores that twofold ancestry, which made Enescu, an outstandingly charismatic personality, a veritable bridge between Romania and France. "George Enescu was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary musicians I have met in my life, along with Béla Bartók" : these words were spoken by Lord Yehudi Menuhin outside his cabin door on the Mermoz when David Grimal met him more than twenty-five years ago. "I remember that, at the mention of George Enescu’s name, Menuhin seemed almost like the child prodigy he had been more than seventy years before. His eyes lit up with admiration and gratitude for the man who had been his mentor" (David Grimal). For Enescu was like a shooting star, traversing the century in a constant voyage between his Romanian roots and France, his adopted country. A classmate of Ravel’s in the counterpoint class at the Paris Conservatoire and an ardent advocate of Chausson’s Poème, Enescu is the very symbol of the musician as humanist. The Caprice roumain, completed by Cornel Tåranu, is probably his least-known masterpiece, a work unique in the history of the violin concerto. It is flanked by Ravel’s Tzigane and Chausson’s Poème, providing a rounded portrait of the close cultural relationship between France and Romania. © La Dolce Volta

Olivier Latry is organist titulaire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and he has responded creatively to the destruction of its organ by fire in 2019 with a series of imaginative releases. None is finer than Liszt: Inspirations, which applies the 6,055 pipes and 91 stops of the new Rieger organ at the Philharmonie de Paris Concert Hall to Liszt's rather neglected organ music. There are technical details here that will be of interest to organists and those who love them; for the general listener, this is a real thrill. The big works in the Bachian genres of Fantasia and Fugue and chorale variation are impressive enough, with the arcane realms the organ enters in the nearly 30-minute Fantasia and Fugue on the Chorale Ad nos, ad salutarem undam (try the Un poco più de moto section) having a spooky, futuristic feel. None of this music is terribly commonly heard, and Saint François d'Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux, an orchestral work transcribed by Saint-Saëns, is a real revelation; Latry indicates that his realization was influenced by the sounds of Messiaen's works about birds, but it also seems possible that this work itself influenced Messiaen. Liszt's excessive spirit seems perfectly matched to this powerful instrument and to the confident, even brash playing of Latry. A marvelous organ album that will reward all, even if audiophiles will have the most fun. © TiVo

Philippe Cassard, Anne Gastinel and David Grimal present these two Beethovenian masterpieces. The chosen approach is one of colour and generosity. On this astonishing disc we meet a Beethoven come down from his pedestal, who is human and even jovial. Where so many others offer rigidity of discourse and fussy sonorities, the three musicians illuminate these metaphysical pages with the finesse, freshness and grace of the aquarellist. © La Dolce Volta

Few music lovers are aware of the importance and originality of Brahms’s three piano quartets, yet the composer completely reinvented the genre. These works contain some of his most profound inspirations, demonstrating both the orchestral power of his scoring and his interiority. They probably provided fertile ground for his ‘symphonic’ imagination, judging by the uncommon force and creative power with which it is expressed throughout these three scores. The members of the Quatuor Hermès and Geoffroy Couteau have completely grasped the nature of this music, and serve it with the requisite authority and tenderness in an outstandingly committed interpretation. © La Dolce Volta

The two Sonatas for cello and piano constitute works of great significance in Brahms’s output. Powerfully lyrical, a realm of pure interiority, they provide a glimpse of his youthful period as well as his high maturity. These summits of chamber music, with their protean humanity, call for complementarity and osmosis on the part of their interpreters. Raphaël Perraud and Geoffroy Couteau establish a skilfully matured balance. Gentleness and impetuosity, melancholy and frenzy, meditation and elation are combined in inflections of eloquent spontaneity. The fantastical aspect of this epic combat between cello and piano never ceases to gain in profundity and lyricism in the course of their performances. © La Dolce Volta

At just 25 years of age, pianist Théo Fouchenneret boldly presents a Beethoven programme of extreme variety with the "Waldstein" Sonata, No. 21, which, with its massive textures and dynamic contrasts, seems to want to rival the sound of the orchestra, whereas No. 29, "Hammerklavier", is marked by its savage onslaughts. In these works which pianists generally tackle very late in their career, Théo Fouchenneret displays astonishing authority. The power of his playing, full-toned and intense, invites us into a genuine, marvellously expressive interpretation with an astonishing range of timbres. © La Dolce Volta