This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance - hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 - acted and sung by the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise, who rise to all its challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, 'Almost a century after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of its subversive power.'

For the sixth volume of this series devoted to Mozart performances by the young generation of soloists, the pianist Roman Borisov, who won First Prize at the Kissinger KlavierOlymp in 2022 when he was the youngest participant in the competition, has recorded the Concertos K413 and K415 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. The French oboist Gabriel Pidoux, winner of the ‘Revelation’ award at the Victoires de la Musique Classique 2020, who recorded his first solo album for Alpha in 2022 (Romance, Alpha789), presents the famous Concerto K314, with the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, conducted as always by Howard Griffiths.

Composer Guillaume Roussel has written the original music for the film Couleurs de l’incendie directed by and featuring Clovis Cornillac with co-stars Léa Drucker, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alice Isaaz and Olivier Gourmet. The film is based on the novel by Pierre Lemaitre, who received the Prix Goncourt for his book Au revoir là-haut. The movie adaptation of the latter by Albert Dupontel in 2017 (See You Up There) was a huge success and won several Césars. In Couleurs de l’Incendie, Fanny Ardant plays the role of a heroic opera singer; her singing voice in the film is that of the soprano Sandrine Piau. In addition to the music by Guillaume Roussel (who, among other things, wrote the soundtrack for Cédric Jimenez’s film Bac Nord), we hear Verdi, Saint-Saëns and other classics from the French repertoire, including Plaisir d’amour.

“What if a woman wrote the song?”This question drives a recital of songs by female composers performed by soprano Golda Schultz and pianist Jonathan Ware. Opening with works by Clara Schumann and Emilie Mayer (including her setting of the ballad Erlkönig), this recital weaves stories of women’s experience with fantastic tales of powerful sirens like the Lorelei. The great American-British violist and composer Rebecca Clarke’s arresting William Blake settings offer a woman’s perspective on texts also set by Benjamin Britten. Devotional works from Nadia Boulanger reveal a compositional master in her own right, in addition to her legendary status as pedagogue to innumerable greats including Aaron Copland and Daniel Barenboim. "This be Her Verse", a song cycle by poet-librettist Lila Palmer and composer Kathleen Tagg was directly commissioned by the artists to conclude the programme and add an important contribution to the repertory.

La Fondation Orpheum, qui soutient les jeunes musiciens depuis plus de trente ans, s’est associée à Alpha Classics pour une série d’enregistrements consacrés aux concertos de Mozart, tous instruments confondus. Les meilleurs solistes de la jeune génération ont été sélectionnés sous la direction artistique d‘Howard Griffiths, chef mozartien reconnu, qui considère que jouer sa musique, c’est comme « se regarder dans un miroir : on entend si tout est en place, musicalité, intonation, rythme, phrasé »… Ces albums immortaliseront ce test implacable et révéleront les grands virtuoses de demain.

Brahms est l’un des premiers compositeurs à écrire pour deux violons, deux altos et deux violoncelles, il montrera la voie à Dvořák, Tchaïkovski, Korngold ou encore Schönberg. Ses deux Sextuors sont des œuvres de jeunesse, composées en 1860 et en 1865. Le Second est de « la même veine joyeuse » que le Premier, écrit Brahms à son éditeur. Pourtant, la vie du compositeur est sombre à cette époque, sa mère décède brutalement et sa relation sentimentale avec la soprano Agathe von Siebold est un échec ; le premier mouvement du Sextuor s’ouvre d’ailleurs sur un motif à l’alto dont les notes sont la-sol-la-ré-si-mi, soit AGADHE en allemand… Les Belcea ont fait appel à leurs amis Tabea Zimmermann et Jean-Guihen Queyras pour enregistrer ces sommets de la musique de chambre à l’issue d’une tournée de concerts dans quelques-unes des principales salles d’Europe.