SALES TEXT
Cellist Beatriz Blanco and pianist Federico Bosco follow the success of their first Odradek album with Of Love and War, a sumptuous programme of music by Nadia Boulanger, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Webern, Hindemith and Fauré, featuring mezzo-soprano Solenn’ Lavanant-Linke.

Of Love and War, partly inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s novel Days and Nights of Love and War, draws parallels between the isolation and pent-up passions of wartime and the experiences of the current pandemic. Much of this repertoire was composed around the time of the First World War, but also embraces broader themes of beginnings and endings, night and day, love and loss. 

Nadia Boulanger is celebrated as a teacher of great composers, but was a composer in her own right; her Three Pieces occupy a similar soundworld to that of Debussy, whose Cello Sonata is at the heart of the programme, and Fauré, whose song Les berceaux we hear in an arrangement for cello and piano. There are works by Webern that show us ‘before and after’ his early lessons with Schoenberg: the Zwei Stücke für Cello und Klavier of 1899, written when Webern was only 16, and the Drei Kleine Stücke, Op. 11 and Cello Sonata, both dating from 1914. The album discovers a softer side to Hindemith in his richly Romantic Three Pieces, Op. 8, and the whole recital is framed by glorious songs by Strauss and Debussy, performed by Solenn’ Lavanant-Linke.

13 - GABRIEL FAURE - Les Berceaux From 3 Songs, Op. 23, No. 1

Chopin: 12 Études, Opp. 10 & 25 - Trois Nouvelles Études

12 Études, Op.10: No. 3 in E Major, Tristesse

"Siciliano" from Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major - Johann Sebastian Bach

02 Track 02  Sergei Prokofiev Toccata, Op. 11 (1891 - 1953)

Petite Suite

Petite Suite - Alexander Borodin Orchestrated

Requiem, Op. 48 - Pie Jesu

Gabriel Fauré, composer
Ryan Dodge, arranger
Trevor Nuckols, horn
David Ball, organ

When Gabriel Fauré sat down to write what he at first called his Petit Requiem in 1887, he could not have helped but think of settings by three of the nineteenth century’s most illustrious composers: Hector Berlioz (1837), Giuseppe Verdi (1874), and Johannes Brahms (1868). Two of these – by Berlioz and Verdi – are on an enormous scale and pack overwhelming dramatic punch. The kinder, gentler Deutsches Requiem by Brahms, composed following the death of his mother, is an outlier, avoiding altogether the Latin liturgical texts with its images of hell and eternal damnation and focusing more on the notions of release from suffering and eternal life.

Fauré’s approach is something of a hybrid, freely excerpting texts from the Requiem Mass and other liturgies according to his own aesthetic. In a 1902 interview, Fauré, who spent his career as an organist, said his goal was “to stray from the established path after all those years accompanying funerals! I’d had them up to here. I wanted to do something different.”

First performed in Paris’s Madeleine Church at the 1888 funeral of architect Joseph Lesoufaché, Fauré’s Petit Requiem initially used only the tender closing section, Pie Jesu, from the predominantly “fire and brimstone” Sequence (Dies irae, dies illa…) which evokes the “day of wrath, day of doom,” the “righteous Judge of vengeance” and “all of nature quaking” at the blast of the trumpet.

“Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest,” Faure said, shortly after completing the first of several versions he would write over a fifteen-year period.

Fauré’s original version, from 1888, was scored for a choir of about 40, accompanied by a small orchestra of solo violin, divided violas, divided cellos and basses, harp, timpani and organ. The use of lower strings with no brass was clearly intended to emphasize the gentle, comforting nature of the piece. When Fauré got around to preparing the score for publication in 1893, he made several revisions, adding portions from the liturgical Offertoire and the Libera me, which had begun life several years earlier as a separate work for baritone solo. He also added parts for two bassoons, four horns and two trumpets.

In the late 1890s Fauré’s publisher convinced the composer to expand the orchestration further to include full symphony orchestra. Although it seems to have rubbed against the grain, Fauré agreed and issued a third version, published in 1901, that was popular for much of the 20th century. However, in the 1970s and 1980s several Fauré scholars along with the English composer/conductor John Rutter worked to reconstruct Fauré’s original 1893 orchestration. This version is considered by many to be closest to Fauré’s original intent, although Fauré himself never renounced the larger version for full orchestra, stating that it was appropriate for certain “concert” situations.

Gabriel Fauré: Requiem, Op. 48 - Pie Jesu, arr. Ryan Dodge｜Trevor Nuckols, David Ball (Live)

2 - 07 Prelude In G Flat Major, Op. 23, No. 10 – Sergei Rachmaninoff

Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor, No.4 Op.23, III. Allegro molto.
With Charles Castleman, violin.

QPw '11 Disc 1

Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor, No.4 Op.23, III. Allegro molto

Sergei Rachmaninoff - Prelude in A-flat major, Op. 23, No. 8,(1903)
Allegro vivace
Đặng Thái Sơn - Piano
Live recording - Sala Cecília Meirelles - Rio de Janeiro - August 22 1998
Illustration - Odilon Redon

Sergei Rachmaninoff - Preludes, op.  23 - No. 8 in A♭ major  - Live - Đặng Thái Sơn - Rio - 1998

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1SEBIvLOIY

2 - 07 Prelude In G Flat Major, Op. 23, No. 10 – Sergei Rachmaninoff

Hanway M

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