Orchestre National de Lille, Alexandre Bloch and Amihai Grosz – Bartók: Concerto pour orchestre – Concerto pour alto (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:30 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Exiled in the United States since October 1940, Bela Bartok was short of money and worn out by leukaemia. Nevertheless, a few weeks’ respite from the disease in August 1943 enabled him to fulfil a commission from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. For a fee of a thousand dollars, he quickly wrote the Concerto for Orchestra, which was to be premiered at Boston’s Symphony Hall on 1 December 1944. Koussevitzky was very enthusiastic about the Concerto, even describing it as ‘the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’. It was the success of this score that prompted the violist William Primrose to ask the Hungarian composer to write a work for him. Bartok had little experience of the instrument and was only convinced when he heard the soloist perform the Walton Concerto on the radio. The score was initially planned in four movements, but the composer’s death reduced it to three. Amihai Grosz (a founder member of the Jerusalem Quartet, now principal viola of the Berliner Philharmoniker) joins the Orchestre National de Lille and Alexandre Bloch for this recording.
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Julie Fuchs, Orchestre National de Lille, Samuel Jean – Yes! (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:59 minutes | 969 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
Hailed for her “generous temperament” and “agile and radiant voice”, French soprano Julie Fuchs is a rising star in the operatic world.
Named Opera Artist of the Year at the Victoires de la Musique Awards and 2nd prize winner in Operalia 2013, Ms Fuchs has an exclusive long-term contract with Universal/Deutsche Grammophon, with whom she recorded her first solo disc of French Arias with the Orchestre National de Lille in 2015: “Yes” will be released on the 11th of September 2015, with a second disc planned for 2016.
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Cyrille Dubois, Orchestre National de Lille & Pierre Dumoussaud – So Romantique ! (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:44 minutes | 1,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
‘So Romantique !’ illustrates the ‘profoundly sentimental’ side of French opera from the 1830s to the 1900s, which gradually came to be judged overwrought and was condemned to partial oblivion. ‘I am convinced that this is because the principals of interpretation were lost’, says the tenor Cyrille Dubois. ‘I have therefore put together this programme, which gives pride of place to rarities while highlighting the theatrical character and the use of registers so emblematic of the French ténor de grâce , in the hope of restoring this precious French heritage to its former glory.’ The sleuthing skills of the Palazzetto Bru Zane have assembled these treasures by Bizet, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Auber, Halévy, Donizetti, Thomas and Delibes, the less well-known Godard, Dubois and Silver, and the virtually unknown Luce-Varlet and Clapisson. With the Orchestre National de Lille conducted by Pierre Dumoussaud, the French tenor deploys the full range of his artistry, the impressive high notes, the luminous tone and the graceful phrasing that is ‘so Cyrille’!
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Véronique Gens, Orchestre National de Lille & Alexandre Bloch – Poulenc: La voix humaine (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:45 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Véronique Gens’s version of La Voix humaine has been eagerly awaited! This ‘lyric tragedy in one act’ might have been written for her, so ideally suited are her feeling for language and her dramatic intensity to Poulenc’s monologue on a text by Jean Cocteau, composed in 1958. This is a far cry from the ‘light’ Poulenc of the 1920s. Cocteau paid him the highest compliment: ‘Dear Francis, you have fixed, once and for all, the way to speak my text.’
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Orchestre National de Lille, Darrell Ang – Dutilleux: Symphony No. 2 ‘Le double’; Timbres, espace, mouvement; Mystère de l’instant (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:34 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Henri Dutilleux’s perfectionism resulted in a distinctive and individual musical language of rare poetry and invention. The interplay of stereophonic and polyrhythmic effects and jazzy brass writing in Symphony No. 2 ‘Le Double’ forms, in the composer’s own words, ‘a musical play of mirrors and of contrasting colours’, while Timbres, espaces, mouvement is Dutilleux’s response to Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, a ‘longing for the infinity of nature’. The series of snapshots in Mystère de l’instant evokes fleeting and almost magical moments in time, its cumulative power indicative of a consummate composer at the height of his powers.
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Orchestre National de Lille & Darrell Ang – Pierné: Ramuntcho & Cydalise et le chèvre-pied Suites (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:36 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Composer, conductor and organist Gabriel Pierné wrote in a wide variety of genres, from operas to pieces for solo piano. His orchestral music for the stage shows the utmost refinement and clarity as well as wit and charm in the finest French tradition. His colourful and evocative score for Ramuntcho is rich in Basque flavour with zortzico dance rhythms and village dances, all beautifully textured. Set in the 18th century, the ballet Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied reveals the full range of his inventive scoring, which remains chamber music-like in its finesse.
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Orchestre National de Lille & Alexandre Bloch – Ravel & Attahir: Valse, Rapsodie espagnole & Adh-Dhor (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:02 minutes | 884 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Alexandre Bloch juxtaposes two French composers on this disc. First of all, Maurice Ravel, with the Rapsodie espagnole, his first major work for orchestra alone, written at the age of thirty-two, and La Valse, premiered thirteen years later and which he himself described as a ‘fantastical and fatal whirlwind’. And then Benjamin Attahir, born in Toulouse in 1989, one of the most gifted and prominent composers of the new generation. Commissioned by the Orchestre National de Lille and recorded here for the first time, it is a concerto for serpent that showcases the splendid sound of this low wind instrument, a member of the brass family even though it is made of wood covered in leather. ‘Adh Dhohr is part of a cycle I wanted to write focusing on the Salah, the daily rhythm of Muslim devotion’, says Benjamin Attahir. ‘This piece refers to the noon prayer, when the sun is at its zenith . . . The musical form is constructed around this “zenithal” moment and unfolds concentrically around it. (…) I wanted – as in oriental music – to return to the strictest monophony, which is a rather unusual project in concertante music. Soloist and orchestra share a single voice between them.’
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Orchestre National de Lille, Alexandre Bloch – Mahler: Symphony No. 7 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:14 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Alexandre Bloch, who has been Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lille since 2016, has chosen to devote a whole season of concerts to Mahler’s symphonies. The Seventh (1904-05) is the most rarely recorded of the cycle – unjustly, because this work later nicknamed ‘Song of the Night’ testifies as clearly as its companions to the metaphysical grandiloquence that haunted Mahler during its gestation. From the gloomy Adagio of the first movement to the thundering Rondo that concludes the work, Alexandre Bloch and his orchestra lead us from the anguish of twilight to the ecstasies of dawn.
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Annelien Van Wauwe, Orchestre National de Lille & Alexandre Bloch – Belle époque (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:48 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe revives the golden glow of a bygone age on her PENTATONE debut album Belle époque, together with the Orchestre National de Lille and its music director Alexandre Bloch. The programme is built around treasures of French turn-of-thecentury music such as Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie, Pierné’s Canzonetta and Widor’s Introduction et Rondo (the latter two in arrangements by Jelle Tassyns). Belle époque also offers works that display a spiritual kinship to the age, such as Brahms’s first clarinet sonata, arranged by Luciano Berio, and a world-premiere recording of Parisbased contemporary composer Manfred Trojahn (Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre).
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