Olivier Fortin

Lucile Boulanger, Pierre Simon, Olivier Fortin – The Golden Hour (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 20, 2024 · Comments off

We are around the time of the Regency, at the political crossroads between Louis XIV and Louis XV. The viola da gamba was enjoying its last hours of glory in France, while the violin was beginning to take centre stage. The Golden Hour, which generally refers to the periods after sunrise and before sunset when the light changes, evokes here those years of convergence, even confrontation, between a viola da gamba in the twilight of its life and a violin at the dawn of its soloist destiny.

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Olivier Fortin, Julien Martin – Bach Transcriptions (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 21, 2023 · Comments off

“Johann Sebastian Bach used the recorder in two Brandenburg concertos and some twenty cantatas and oratorios, but alas, he left us no sonata with harpsichord,” say Julien Martin and Olivier Fortin. Arranging chamber music for a variety of instrumental ensembles was a widespread practice in the eighteenth century. Bach himself seems to have created a number of works that did not necessarily require the use of a specific instrument. Here Julien Martin and Olivier Fortin, musical partners for many years, present the Sonata in F major, originally written for transverse flute and continuo, transcriptions of the Trio Sonata for organ No. 3 in E minor , the Partita for violin No. 2 in G minor, and the Chorale ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’, whose extensive ornamental flourishes elongate and transform the chorale melody to the point of rendering it unrecognisable.

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Robert Smith, Israel Golani, Joshua Cheatham, Olivier Fortin – La Gracieuse: Pièces de Viole by Marin Marais (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 3, 2023 · Comments off

Robert Smith, Israel Golani, Joshua Cheatham, Olivier Fortin – La Gracieuse: Pièces de Viole by Marin Marais (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:11 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Resonus Classics

Critically acclaimed Amsterdam-based viola da gamba player, Robert Smith returns to Resonus to present a stunning programme of suites by the French Baroque composer Marin Marais, a prolific writer for the instrument. Selected from across Marais five volumes of Pièces de Viole, the album presents some of Marais most striking and characterful works, which are brought sensationally to life by Smith and his outstanding ensemble. Brought together specially for this recording, the group features harpsichordist Olivier Fortin, viola da gamba player Joshua Cheatham, and theorbo player and Baroque guitarist Israel Golani.

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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Legrenzi: La morte del cor penitente (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 3, 2023 · Comments off

A highly prolific composer, Giovanni Legrenzi practised his art in oratorios and other works for the church, as well as in opera and chamber music. In fact he explored all the musical genres of his period, taking over the baton handed on by Gabrieli and Monteverdi, and enjoying an enviable reputation among his contemporaries. Better known during his lifetime (1626-1690) for his operas rather than for his religious music, Legrenzi was widely admired and copied all over Europe.

Of his eight known oratorios, only three have survived, including this gem: La morte del cor penitente (The Death of the Repentant Heart), a chamber oratorio probably composed in 1671. The theme is the spiritual development of the Sinner, the central figure of the work, who must pay his debt to God to save his immortal soul. The oratorio’s text provides a whole vivid universe of ‘affects’ (emotions) relating to spiritual torments and temptations. In his pilgrimage from the Cross to the heavenly light, beset by the competing voices of Sin and Hope, the Sinner duly makes his repentance, and finally achieves redemption.

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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Bach & Bernier: Routes du café (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 10, 2023 · Comments off

The history of coffee is fascinating! From the opening of the first establishments in Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century to the appearance and diffusion of the drink in Europe in the following century, coffee and coffee houses were highly fashionable. Two composers devoted a cantata to the topic. Gottfried Zimmermann opened his famous coffee house in Leipzig in 1715 and organised concerts there. Around 1735, Bach composed his famous cantata Schweigt still, plaudert nicht, which was probably performed there. It depicts the humorous dispute between a father and his daughter over her consumption of coffee. In Paris, Nicolas Bernier’s cantata Le Caffé (1664-1734) praised the beverage and its many virtues. The ‘Coffee Road’ Olivier Fortin has mapped out here makes a detour to London around 1660, where the composer Matthew Locke frequented the Turk’s Head Coffee House and promoted a string fantasia. Fortin has chosen to organise this album like a fasil, a ‘suite of pieces’ in traditional Ottoman music, with taqsims (improvisations) interspersed among the compositions and played on such instruments as the ney flute, the Arab violin and the yayli tanbur.

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Vox Luminis, Lionel Meunier, Ensemble Masques, Olivier Fortin – Buxtehude: Abendmusiken (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 16, 2022 · Comments off

Vox Luminis, Lionel Meunier, Ensemble Masques, Olivier Fortin - Buxtehude: Abendmusiken (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Vox Luminis, Lionel Meunier, Ensemble Masques, Olivier Fortin – Buxtehude: Abendmusiken (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:25:12 minutes | 1,54 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

The Abendmusiken were a legendary concert series organised by Buxtehude in Lübeck. Even Johann Sebastian Bach travelled a long way to attend these concerts of sacred and instrumental music and met the master Dietrich Buxtehude, the most famous organist in Europe. To mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, Vox Luminis and the Ensemble Masques have come together to perform a programme of cantatas (Gott hilf mir, denn das Wasser geht mir bis an die Seele, BuxWV 34 | Befiehl dem Engel, dass er komm, BuxWV 10 | Jesu, meine Freude, BuxWV 60 | Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr, BuxWV 41) and instrumental pieces (Sonatas BuxWV 255 and 261). The recording assembles leading specialists of this repertory, with the expert voices of Vox Luminis combining with the vitality of the instrumentalists of Ensemble Masques.
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Ensemble Masques & Olivier Fortin – Bach: Ouvertures-Suites (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 28, 2022 · Comments off

The orchestral suite, sometimes simply called ‘overture’ because of the imposing dimensions of its opening movement, enjoyed great popularity in the early eighteenth century, especially in central Germany. Bach had discovered the genre in his youth and cultivated it until his late period in Leipzig. This recording assembles his four overture-suites, including the famous Suite no.2 BWV 1067, which belongs among the late works. Numerous copying errors in the instrumental parts suggest that this piece was originally written a tone lower – in A minor – and therefore probably for a solo instrument other than the transverse flute: in the present recording, this first version, reconstructed from the clues mentioned above, is performed with solo oboe.

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Olivier Fortin, Emmanuel Frankenberg, Ensemble Masques – Bach: Concertos for Two Harpsichords (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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

The practice of composing for two keyboard instruments, very common in the illustrious Bach family, naturally achieved its apotheosis with Johann Sebastian, whose three concertos for two harpsichords are performed here by Olivier Fortin and Emmanuel Frankenberg with the Ensemble Masques. These works, particularly the Concerto in C minor, are among the composer’s most admired. They suggest a conception of the concerto specific to Bach: rather than a dialogue between several individual entities, the piece presents a subtle intertwining of melodic lines and blurs the distinction between solo and tutti parts by making them respond to and quote each other, thus illustrating the principle of harmony dear to the composer. Finally, the recording on two harpsichords of the Prelude and Fugue BWV 552, originally composed for organ, is in keeping with the nineteenth-century tradition of transposing Bach’s works with the aim of giving their refined polyphony greater clarity.

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Olivier Fortin – Couperin: L’art de toucher le clavecin (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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

“The harpsichord is perfect as to it compass, and brilliant in itself, but as it is impossible to swell out or diminish the volume of its sound, I shall always feel grateful to any who, by the exercise of infinite art supported by fine taste, contrive to render this instrument capable of expression”, writes Couperin himself in the foreword to his 1713 Premier livre de pièces de clavecin. If we discount the ornamentations which litter the world, Couperin’s music is not a “virtuoso” music, as Scarlatti’s can be, for example. Sometimes taking on a descriptive style, or going in for imitation or portrait, it requires a singular sense of expression: that very “expression” that the composer talks about here. In Art de toucher le clavecin, Couperin offers us precious information on how to interpret and play his music in particular, and French music of the period in general; an artist who aims to respect Couperin’s intentions will find indispensable lessons here. That being said, a fear of stepping outside the bounds set by the author, and a too-minute attention to every detail could rob the works of their vitality and fluency. “As there is a great distance from grammar to declamation, so there is an infinitely greater one between the tablature and good playing style.” Or, in other words, freedom within limits! That is the attitude that Olivier Fortin brings to this fine range of works from the great Couperin, drawn from various of his Livres de clavecin and L’Art de toucher le clavecin. As for the instrument being played, it is a “real fake”, made in 1984 by the manufacturer Martin Skowroneck based on a Hemsch (that is, 18th century French), but signed with the name of the Rouen artistan Nicholas Lefebvre, none of whose instruments survive to the present day, and which was built in 1755. Skowroneck’s aim was to prove to Gustav Leonhardt that it was still possible to build a harpsichord that was perfectly identical to one of the old style, and it seems that Leonhardt was taken with his attempt. Even the material’s ageing was completely artificial! But it is no less of a splendid instrument for all that, and moreover, splendidly recorded, which is not all that common in the harpsichord repertoire.

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