Chantal Dionne - Romances - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In her New York orchestral debut with conductor Philippe Entremont, Anna Petrova was praised for her Inchultra-smooth playing styleInch [New York Fine Arts Examiner]. She is an assistant professor of piano at the University of Louisville, KY, holds a PhD in musicology from the Manhattan School of Music, and performs frequently as a soloist and chamber musician. The album presents the music of four composers Sergey Rachmaninoff, Sergey Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, and Pancho Vladigerov. Three Russians and one Bulgarian, the music of whom spans a total of 50 years, from 1892 to 1942. InchThe heart is an ancestral metaphor... For example, it has been sometimes thought as the secret seat of courage or of intelligence; or as a hiding place for emotions; or as a breakable, fragile and precious object that we treasure; as a place from which sincere feelings emanate; as the locus of romantic desire; as the deep, summarizing content of a person... Also, in many languages, the word InchheartInch comes from either the Latin root cor/cordis, or from the Greek root kardia. That is, Spanish (corazon), French (coeur), and Italian (cuore), to give an example, take the Latin root, while German (Herz) and English (heart) take the Greek one (kardia). But what is most important for my present purposes here, and what these two roots share amongst each other, is their connection to the Indo-European root kr, which has the original sense of Inchvibrating.Inch Indeed, the two consonants sound like that when pronounced together, like a gentle vibration. Krrr... In this very sense, too, a heart is a vibrating object, a vibrating, secret, treasured place - just like I wanted the piano and my playing of it to be in this album - a dear object that secretly vibrates with the sounds of my music.Inch (Anna Petrova)

T was in the second half of the sixteenth century that the guitar became fashionable in France it was the instrument of the people, whereas the lute was associated with the intellectuals and the nobility. Henry Grenerin became a page (choirboy) in the Musique du Roi in 1641 and went on to invent a new way of playing the instrument and offer it music full of 'freedom, mystery and ardour', says Bruno Helstroffer. In the very first recording devoted to Grenerin's music, Bruno revives this unjustly forgotten composer and makes the most of his long experience as both Baroque musician and exponent of today's music. He became fascinated by this seventeenth-century composer, and his investigations led him to the Left Bank of the Seine, opposite the Louvre Palace, where Henry's grandfather was a fisherman, hence the punning title L'âme-son [French hameçon = 'fish-hook', âme-son = 'soul of sound']. A saga that has also generated a book and a stage show about Grenerin - the first in the line of 'guitar heroes' that was to lead to Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix!

L'infinito is Giacomo Leopardi's famous and emblematic poem. The choice of this poem as the sole textualmaterial for the composition of this set of vocal pieces was dictated as much by the evident musicality ofLeopardi's verses as by the immense dreamlike openness of his imagination.The musicality of this language, the tonic accents specific to Italian, of course, but also the rhythm providedby the particular scansion of these fifteen verses.The multiplicity and diversity of the themes addressed by Leopardi, in only 15 verses, offer the composer arange of perspectives, paths to follow, and characters to explore, such that the challenge required diversity inthe vocal treatment as well (since this is only a question of song, without instrumental intervention). This alsojustified the formal division into several pieces, each treating an aspect of the poem, sometimes fragmented,in a particular mode of vocal expression. After exploring registers ranging from simple declamation to thegreatest vocal virtuosity, from the extremely low to the very high, from one single voice to several, the workconcludes with nothing but the singers' respiration (breathing) recordedin an anechoic chamber thebody'sown rustling, now voiceless, expressing itself solely through breath. This music was originally written for thechoreographic performance entitled 'Sanguine,' choreographed by Nadine Hernu.P.M.