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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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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Daniel Müller-Schott, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin & Alexandre Bloch – Four Visions of France (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:48 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Orfeo
It is not by chance that luminous textures and sensual orchestral colors are considered essential features of French music. Its history features great names renowned for their art of instrumentation and sensitive use of timbres, who include the composers of the cello concertos on this recording: Camille Saint-Sa”ens, whose instrumentation technique always combines color with transparency, ‘Edouard Lalo, who was highly esteemed by Claude Debussy for the wealth of color in his works, and Arthur Honegger, who painted striking soundscapes not only in his Cello Concerto but in his works without a large orchestra as well. Often it is the fine shadings and delicate transitions that characterize the tone colors of French music and are responsible for its delightful charm. Daniel M”uller-Schott – Opus Klassik award winner 2019 – appealingly combines five works from the French sound kaleidoscope on his newest album with the DSO Berlin and Alexandre Bloch ‘Four Visions of France’.
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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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