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Louis Lortie, Hélène Mercier – Debussy: Piano Duets (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:24 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Regular duet and two-piano partners, Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie have returned to the studio for this all-Debussy programme. The album features duets written by the composer himself – such as the Petite Suite, the Six Épigraphes antiques, and the Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire, as well as a number of arrangements of his solo piano pieces (the Première Arabesque, La Fille aux cheveux de lin, and the Ballade slave). The album ends with André Caplet’s monumental arrangement of Debussy’s best-known orchestral work, La Mer. Stripping the work of its orchestral colours, this two-piano version allows the listener to appreciate more easily Debussy’s ground-breaking harmonic innovation. The album was recorded in the concert hall at Snape Maltings, in Suffolk, using a pair of Bösendorfer 280 VC grand pianos.
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Truls Mørk, Louis Lortie, Hélène Mercier, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Neemi Järvi – Saint-Saëns: Cello Concertos Nos. 1 & 2; The Carnival of the Animals; Africa; Wedding-cake (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:26 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos Records
The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Neeme Jrvi present this unusual collection of popular works by Saint-Sans, for orchestra and piano or cello.
Truls Mrk, this season Artist in Residence with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, is the soloist in the two contrasted cello concertos. His ‘seemingly flawless technical command’ is tested in the suave, expressive, famous No. 1 as well as in the many taxing solo passages, huge leaps, and double-stopping flourishes of No. 2.
The indefatigable duo Louis Lortie and Hlne Mercier join in the posthumously published Carnival of the Animals, after a highly successful recording of Concertos by Poulenc with Edward Gardner, Disc of the Week in The Sunday Times. They offer the original version, which features a glass harmonica (normally substituted by a glockenspiel). Louis Lortie is also the soloist in the entertaining fantasia Africa, which incorporates folk tunes of the different countries in which it was composed and which is brought off with consummate zest, as well as in the most characteristic and probably challenging of the composer’s keyboard pieces, the Caprice-Valse Wedding-cake, written for the second wedding of the composer’s virtuosic pianist friend Caroline Montigny-Rmaury.
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Cyprien Katsaris & Hélène Mercier – Brahms: 21 Hungarian Dances & 16 Waltzes for Piano Four Hands (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:36 minutes | 580 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
“Exceedingly satisfied with our musical collaboration on our Brahms/Schumann recording, I suggested to Helene Mercier that we take on the complete cycles of Brahms’s 21 Hungarian Dances and 16 Waltzes, Op.39, which, unlike me, she had already played in concert.
It was extremely important to both of us that the gypsy spirit was to the fore in the Hungarian Dances, likewise Viennese elegance in the Waltzes. I must humbly acknowledge how impressed I was by my Quebecoise partner’s level of understanding of this very distinctive music. All her musical suggestions that broke with the usual rules made sense, and we tried never to lose sight of the improvisatory character symbolising the freedom of the Gypsies.” (Cyprien Katsaris)
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Alain Lefèvre, Hélène Mercier – Mathieu: Concerto de Québec & Works for 2 Pianos (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:27 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Canadian pianist Alain Lefèvre has long championed the music of pianist-composer André Mathieu (1929-1968). As a child prodigy, Mathieu caused a sensation as ‘the Canadian Mozart’ in New York and Paris (where he studied with Yves Nat and Arthur Honegger), but he eventually died in poverty at the age of just 39. On this album, Lefèvre and fellow pianist Hélène Mercier play three works written by Mathieu in the 1940s. “André Mathieu’s music it has its own place in the history of composition,” says Lefèvre. “It has been described as Romantic, and obviously was out of step with its own age, but does that really matter today?”
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