Kevin Juillerat and Cedric Pescia – Kevin Juillerat: Dämmerung (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 48:06 minutes | 677 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © NEOS Music
Dämmerung is a true odyssey of sound and drama. It is the exploration of a new piano, transformed through various preparations and enhanced by an electronic device that literally turns it into a speaker. The work is the result of a collaboration lasting several years between the French-Swiss pianist Cédric Pescia and the Swiss composer Kevin Juillerat. It was written in 2020 during a 6-month artist residency in Berlin and premiered on May 20, 2022 in Lausanne (CH).
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Philippe Cassard, Natalie Dessay, Cedric Pescia, Orchestre National de Bretagne – Mozart à l’opéra (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:40 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © La Dolce Volta
The voice! The voice which, even if absent from the score, insinuates itself between the two hands of a pianist playing Mozart. In this music, all is dialogue, mingled avowals and passions, on the threshold of the opera house. All Mozart’s forms are nurtured by the same source, that of vocal melody. “I like an aria to be as precisely tailored to a singer as a well-cut suit”, he declared when he composed an aria. And what an aria this one is! Ch’io mi scordi di te! The keyboard enters into dialogue with the soloist. And then we leave the world of the aria for that of the concerto, unless it be an imaginary sonata…
Directed from the piano by Philippe Cassard, the Concerto No. 22 borrows the same “suit”. Here is a piece of “wordless theatre”, composed at the period of Le nozze di Figaro, which portrays first drama, then meditation, and finally carefree joy. The divine spectacle continues with the Fantasia, KV 475, which foreshadows the worlds of Beethoven and Schubert, with their cries and whispers and things unsaid.
Let us complete these imaginary dialogues with the finest of the sonatas for piano four hands, KV 497. Two voices in unison, enamoured of beauty.
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Philippe Cassard, Cedric Pescia – Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 transcribed for 2 Pianos by Franz Liszt (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:07:47 minutes | 604 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © La Dolce Volta
While any of Liszt’s superb transcriptions of Beethoven’s first eight symphonies is a challenge for the pianist, the two-piano arrangement of the Ninth is at once spellbinding and a formidable test. This remarkable synthesis of soloists, chorus and orchestra presents a powerful structure that condenses all the fearsome difficulties of ensemble playing for the two pianists. This version by Philippe Cassard and Cédric Pescia displays extraordinary nobility, truth and grandeur, with the epic sweep ideally suited to the “Ode to Joy”.
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Nurit Stark, Cédric Pescia – Bloch: The Sonatas for Violin & Piano, Piano Sonata (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:13 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Claves Records
Nigh on 60 years after his death, the Swiss composer, born in 1880 of Jewish origin, naturalized American in 1924, remains relatively little known by the general public and music lovers alike. Yet his music, full of lyricism, drama, virtuosity, poetry, has all it takes to please. His language combines tonality, bitonality, atonality, elements inherited from the Jewish musical tradition as well as allusions to movie style American music.
A couple in life as well as on stage, Nurit Stark and Cédric Pescia are literally captivated by Bloch’s music and personality. Between them, they combine the composer’s origin and nationality. In a programme that unites the two Violin and Piano Sonatas and the Piano Sonata, they passionately promote works where calmness alternates with hysteria and folklore with mysticism.
According to Bloch, the programme of both Violin and Piano Sonatas, composed in 1920 and 1924 respectively, is as simple as can be: the first shows the world “as it is, with the violent opposition of primordial and blind forces” and the second depicts it “as it should be, according to our dreams”.
This dichotomy is at the heart of the rare and amazing Sonata for Piano solo (written close to Geneva in 1935): the 2nd movement idyll “Pastorale” is framed by two sombre, violent and martial movements, which forewarn of horrors to come. – Claves Records
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Cédric Pescia & Gregorio Zanon – Gregorio Zanon: Works for Solo Piano (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:49:56 minutes | 1,60 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Claves Records
It’s been twenty years since the first public performance of Gregorio Zanon’s music. It was in 1999, in Geneva. The pianist Xavier Dami, who had encouraged Zanon’s early attempts at composition and helped him understand the expressive resources of the instrument, was at the piano performing Prayer Suite.
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Cédric Pescia – Bach, J.S.: Die Kunst der Fuge (L’art de la fugue) (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:39:11 minutes | 1,52 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Aeon/Outhere Music France
Harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt said that Bach had written his Art of Fugue for himself, without thought of performing it on any instrument in particular. In the presence of a speculative work, every musician is free to chisel the perfect lines of polyphony as he or she chooses. Up to the final canon, which continues to pose the question of its incompletion. It is the Franco-Swiss pianist Cédric Pescia, with his subtle, understated playing, who will make this sublime score sing. But he will do so on an untempered piano, which is hardly banal! After a first æon disc devoted to Cage, which created a tremendous stir, Cédric Pescia deploys a low-key art in Bach, a sense of rhythm combined with a rubato of extreme subtlety and an inventiveness in the phrasings and ornaments, both flowing and sharp, that have no equivalent in the discography. Such relief, such life!
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