Francois-Frederic Guy

François-Frederic Guy – Secret Garden (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:52:32 minutes | 1,69 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © La Dolce Volta

A dream has come true: François-Frédéric Guy has recorded music by Chopin for the first time, recalling the colors and scents of his childhood. The instrument, built by Pleyel in 1905 and restored by Pianos Balleron, produces an enchanting splendor of tone color in the magnificent acoustics of the Arsenal in Metz and under the expert hands of the pianist. Guy also bows to the master pianists of the early 20th century with this recording.

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François-Frédéric Guy – Montalbetti: Solos, a Personal Diary in Music (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:42 minutes | 693 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

This album of ‘solos’ for various different instruments constitutes the composer’s ‘personal diary’ over some twenty-five years. Eric Montalbetti, who was artistic director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France from 1996 to 2014, long kept his music a secret, composing for himself, as if he were keeping a diary. Yet he had been composing since the age of eleven, while also learning the piano and the organ. He was taught by Paul Méfano and Michaël Levinas, and attended masterclasses with George Benjamin and Magnus Lindberg. In 1990 he received prizes from the Sacem and the Menuhin Foundation for his Violin Sonata. He seeks in music a language capable of expressing our most varied emotions: vital energy, interrogation, anxiety, mourning, rage, hope, prayer, love, gratitude. Trois études après Kandinsky for piano, Esprit tendre for oboe (a tribute to Helen and Elliott Carter), the Sonata for solo violin in four movements, a Suite for cello, five Formants for solo clarinet, and La Prière de l’Ange gardien for solo horn make up this program, which is performed by some of the finest soloists on the current French scene.

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François-Frédéric Guy – En Pièces: Music by Marc Monnet (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:44 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Odradek Records

Marc Monnet’s extraordinary musical life has been auspicious from the start: he studied with Kagel and Stockhausen in Cologne, gained attention at the Darmstadt summer school and was awarded a residency at the Villa Medici. The first book of En pièces (2007) is dedicated to François-Frédéric Guy, who premiered the entire collection at the Strasbourg Musica Festival in 2012. A long artistic companionship and a real friendship bind these two artists. François-Frédéric Guy has praised Monnet’s dazzling ability “to push piano techniques to their extreme”, as well as his “freedom of tone”, and his “Schumannian” inspiration in music of “whimsical, even fantastic, and unclassifiable character”.

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François-Frédéric Guy – Brahms: Complete Piano Sonatas (5.1 Edition) (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:35:44 minutes | 5,72 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Evidence

Brahms is one of François-Frederic Guy’s favourite composer, he has accompanied him all his life, the first work that he performed in public was his First Concerto. The Brahms Project is, above all, conceived as an amorous dictionary of the composer and not an exhaustive complete recording. It is organised around the piano, the veritable common denominator of an original itinerary combining chamber music, the Lied, the concertos and solo piano works. It proposes to take the listener on a journey to the heart of German Romanticism. Far from being presented as distinct bodies covering his entire creative life like Beethoven, Brahms’s works with piano turn from sonatas into ballads, from variations into Klavierstücke, and include trios, quartets, quintet and concertos in keeping with his evolution, with form adapting to the novelty and richness of his intoxicating melodic inspiration. This seeming disparity is found in the works’ dimensions. The three great, formidable sonatas, along with the two piano concertos are imposing monuments, whereas the Klavierstücke of the last period are presented as confidences, not to say intimate confessions. This piano, in turn abrupt and lilting, melodic and symphonic, is of such boldness and originality that it led Robert Schumann, upon hearing the first sketches of Brahms’s sonatas, to hail ‘the new prophet of German music!’

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François-Frédéric Guy – Brahms: Complete Piano Sonatas (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:35:44 minutes | 774 MB | Genre: Classical, Romantic Era, Piano
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Evidence

Brahms is one of François-Frederic Guy’s favourite composer, he has accompanied him all his life, the first work that he performed in public was his First Concerto. The Brahms Project is, above all, conceived as an amorous dictionary of the composer and not an exhaustive complete recording. It is organised around the piano, the veritable common denominator of an original itinerary combining chamber music, the Lied, the concertos and solo piano works. It proposes to take the listener on a journey to the heart of German Romanticism. Far from being presented as distinct bodies covering his entire creative life like Beethoven, Brahms’s works with piano turn from sonatas into ballads, from variations into Klavierstücke, and include trios, quartets, quintet and concertos in keeping with his evolution, with form adapting to the novelty and richness of his intoxicating melodic inspiration. This seeming disparity is found in the works’ dimensions. The three great, formidable sonatas, along with the two piano concertos are imposing monuments, whereas the Klavierstücke of the last period are presented as confidences, not to say intimate confessions. This piano, in turn abrupt and lilting, melodic and symphonic, is of such boldness and originality that it led Robert Schumann, upon hearing the first sketches of Brahms’s sonatas, to hail ‘the new prophet of German music!’

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François-Frédéric Guy – Debussy & Murail: Révolutions (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:52 minutes | 1008 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © La Dolce Volta

“To link Debussy with the compositions of Tristan Murail is to place musical evolution in a historical logic of sonic upheavals”, says the pianist François-Frédéric Guy. Fascinated by idioms that revolutionise music, today he takes us on a journey between two immensely creative figures. At a distance of more than a century, Claude Debussy and Tristan Murail reveal the same concern for precision in writing and preservation of freedom of thought. The works assembled in this album metamorphose colours and spaces: they offer unprecedented poetic imagination, constantly expanding dreamlike worlds. The impression that remains on the listener’s memory is above all one of astonishing and intense emotion.
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François-Frédéric Guy – En Pièces Music by Marc Monnet (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:35 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Odradek Records

Marc Monnet’s extraordinary musical life has been auspicious from the start: he studied with Kagel and Stockhausen in Cologne, gained attention at the Darmstadt summer school and was awarded a residency at the Villa Medici. The first book of En pièces (2007) is dedicated to François-Frédéric Guy, who premiered the entire collection at the Strasbourg Musica Festival in 2012. A long artistic companionship and a real friendship bind these two artists. François-Frédéric Guy has praised Monnet’s dazzling ability “to push piano techniques to their extreme”, as well as his “freedom of tone”, and his “Schumannian” inspiration in music of “whimsical, even fantastic, and unclassifiable character”.

(more…)