Maude Gratton

Maude Gratton, Emmanuel Jacques – George Onslow: Sonates pour violoncelle et piano, Op. 16 (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 27, 2023 · Comments off

Following in the footsteps of Mozart and Haydn, George Onslow invented a middle way between the French and German heritages. Although he was nicknamed ‘the French Beethoven’, Maude Gratton and Emmanuel Jacques give us the opportunity, in these three sonatas for piano and cello, the opportunity to discover the true personality of this composer whose music, with its highly individual colours, combines very operatic lyricism and theatricality, purely French elegance, rhythmic vitality, and dazzling virtuosity..

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Maude Gratton, Baptiste Lopez – Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonatas No. 3, No. 7 & No. 10 (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 27, 2023 · Comments off

With these three sonatas for piano and violin, Baptiste Lopez and Maude Gratton give us an overview of fifteen years in Beethoven’s life; the joie de vivre of the impetuous young composer, still strongly influenced by Classical forms, gradually gives way to a violent aesthetic break, the eccentricity of which was decried by contemporary critics. If, in Beethoven’s view, music confronts humanity with the difficulties of our condition, it also enables us to overcome them; the composer himself transcended his battle against deafness by finding in it the profundity of a creative force.

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Maude Gratton – Bach: Leipzig Organ Works (1723-1750) (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 27, 2023 · Comments off

The talented organist and harpsichordist Maude Gratton is an artist constantly seeking perfection. A graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, she trained with such great masters as Pierre Hantaï (harpsichord) and Louis Robilliard (organ), as well as with Olivier Baumont, Blandine Rannou, Kenneth Weiss, Michel Bouvard, Olivier Latry, and Olivier Trachier.

It was quite natural that Philippe Herreweghe, concerned with promoting the talent of promising young musicians, should invite her to record an album in the ‘Amis de Phi’ (Friends of Phi) collection. On this disc, the young organist has chosen an ideal programme for demonstrating her art, proposing an intelligent panorama of organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach: between the Preludes and Fugues in E minor and E flat major, BWV 548 and 552, Jesus Christus, unser Heiland, BWV 665, the Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’, BWV 769, and the Organ Sonata no. 4, BWV 528, come and discover well-known and less well-known pieces by the Kantor of Leipzig.

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Le Banquet Céleste, Damien Guillon & Maude Gratton – Bach: Cantatas BWV 169 & 82 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 19, 2023 · Comments off

Following his recording of J. S. Bach’s solo cantatas for alto BWV 35 and 170 (issued in 2009), countertenor Damien Guillon has continued his work of research and interpretation, devoting a second album to the Cantata BWV 169 for alto solo and to the famous BWV 82 Ich habe genug ; though better known in its 1727 version for bass, from 1735 onwards it was also performed by an alto voice. To complement this cantata programme, organist Maude Gratton performs Bach’s Prelude and Fugue BWV 543, as well as the chorales Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, BWV 662, BWV 663 & BWV 664.

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Damien Guillon, Le Banquet Céleste, Maude Gratton – Trinitatis: Bach Cantatas (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 28, 2023 · Comments off

Ever since the foundation of his ensemble in 2009, Damien Guillon has been forging ahead in the (re) discovery of J. S. Bach’s cantatas. ‘Trinitatis’ is devoted to three cantatas for the season after Trinity, for which Le Banquet Céleste has assembled its most seasoned members. Three very different works in which Bach expresses in various ways the emotion that the subject of the prescribed Gospel for the day stirred in him.

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Sophie Gent, Maude Gratton, Ricercar Consort, Philippe Pierlot – Biber: Imitatio (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 3, 2022 · Comments off

Sophie Gent, Maude Gratton, Ricercar Consort, Philippe Pierlot - Biber: Imitatio (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

At the end of the Thirty Years War, the support of the Viennese Imperial Court allowed the emergence of an extraordinarily talented generation of musicians speaking with virtuosity, humour and depth. Schmelzer, Biber and Kerll were at the forefront. For Carnival festivities where music has pride of place they regale us with earthy works that mimic the sounds of nature and everyday life. They also had to meet the taste of Emperor Leopold I, who particularly appreciated imitative counterpoint, and for whom they composed these sonatas which have the power to elevate the soul and spirit.
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Maude Gratton, Il Convito – Bach, W.F.: Concertos pour clavecin et cordes (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 22, 2022 · Comments off

Maude Gratton, Il Convito - Bach, W.F.: Concertos pour clavecin et cordes (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

The image of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710– 84) most widely prevalent in our time is that of an eldest son as it were haunted by the memory of his father but who, nevertheless, crippled by gambling and drinking debts, was obliged to sell his share of the precious inheritance constituted by Johann Sebastian’s manuscripts. Yet he was also one of the first composers to carve out a ‘freelance’ existence, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart some years after him. And there is another characteristic of Wilhelm Friedemann that in its way prefigures the Romantic composers. Carl Friedrich Zelter, later to be one of Felix Mendelssohn’s teachers, wrote to Goethe: ‘As a composer, he had the tic douloureux of being original, of getting away from his father and his brothers, and thereby came to write in a petty, fussy, sterile way.’ Overshadowed by his father and his two more famous brothers, the ‘London Bach’ Johann Christian and the ‘Berlin Bach’ Carl Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann gives the impression of an unstable figure, capricious in character, who left an output that is admittedly interesting, in particular where his works for solo keyboard are concerned, but in the end fairly sparse.
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Bruno Cocset & Maude Gratton – Beethoven: Sonatas for Fortepiano and Cello, Vol. 1 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 26, 2022 · Comments off

Bruno Cocset, an eminent ambassador of the Baroque cello, here makes a teenage dream come true: to record the Beethoven sonatas. ‘When we rediscover it from the inside, this music overwhelms us: its art of the mise en abyme, its ability to deviate from the formal scheme, to dare to go as far as the uncontrolled surge of frenzy or the break in tempo. On the part of a champion of the metronome (Beethoven took a hand in its creation), this imperious seizure of freedom creates immeasurable spaces, thrusting performer and listener into unknown, unforeseen depths. The piano and the cello are bound together throughout the narrative by a fertile, pungent, exhilarating complementarity.’ At the fortepiano, a longstanding musical partner, Maude Gratton, plays two different instruments, chosen according to the character of each sonata: a Viennese piano after Johann Andreas Stein and an original John Broadwood from 1822, a model that circulated in Vienna and which Beethoven himself played. In order to tackle this repertory at the cusp of Classicism and Romanticism, Bruno Cocset commissioned a new cello from another faithful partner.

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