This recording was conceived with my long-time friend and marvellous pianist Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden — our musical partnership goes back more than twenty years — and it was made in these times when the world is sinking further into violence and hatred every day. Beethoven and Rolland, those great pacifists and humanists, are therefore the patrons of this recording of the complete works of Beethoven for cello and piano; their frequent calls for brotherhood through music resonate all the more strongly today.

Ann Cnop has been passionate about music from a very young age. At the age of 7, she is inseparable from her violin and already feels at home on a stage. She spent her teenage years at the Mechelen City Conservatory where she took violin lessons with Frans Vos and chamber music lessons with Florent Van de Vondel.

Antonio Vivaldi had his own cello specialist for part of his tenure at the Ospedale della Pietà, and there were several other virtuoso cellists in his orbit. His six sonatas for cello and continuo, of an unknown date of composition, are surprisingly simple technically and may have been intended as teaching pieces at the Ospedale. Most Baroque cellists and viol players, as well as quite a few performers on the modern cello, have recorded them, but this set by Dutch-Swiss cellist Roel Dieltiens stands out as dramatic and adventurous.

Giacomo Sarcuni, a forgotten genius Giacomo Sarcuni… a name that probably means nothing to you, although he achieved considerable fame as a composer and music teacher in Naples during the 18th century. His life and career had never been the subject of research until quite recently; all that was known of him was that he was mentioned as maestro di cappella of the Archdiocese of Naples in Frederick Aquilina’s Benigno Zarafa and the Neapolitan Galant Style. His name is not included in the major music encyclopaedias and his manuscripts have never been the subject of archival research.

Karel Steylaerts Karel Steylaerts studied at first with Luc Tooten in Brussels and later at the Brussels Conservatoire with Carlo Schmitz and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne with Maria Kliegel. As a member of the European Community Youth Orchestra he had the privilege to work under great conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein and Antal Dorati. That’s where his great love for the symphonic orchestra arose. He was a prize winner of the 1990 Tenuto competition. In that same year he founded the Tröndlin Pianoforte Trio with whom he made several recordings playing on period instruments for the labels Koch- Discover and Etcetera Records. He has been Principal Cellist of the “Beethoven Academie” for many years. Since 2008 Karel Steylaerts is Principal Cellist at the Brussels Philharmonic. In 2006 he founded “TrioFenix”, a string trio with whom he is regularly invited to perform in many national and international festivals.Their recordings for the label Fuga Libera are highly-praised. Since 2017, he has been associated with the Queen Elisabeth Competition for cello. He accompanies candidates in their first round playing Boccherini sonatas.

It’s impossible to imagine a musical training without Bach, from children’s music academies to conservatories. Bach is here to stay. When I started teaching children in the 1970s, quite a few of my colleagues were making fruitless attempts to (partially) replace Bach with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. The children, however, had very little if any enthusiasm for Bartók’s music and their teachers eventually had to back down. Bartók, with all due respect, was no match for Bach.

It is quite possible that Friedrich Burgmüller (1806 - 1874) wrote his etudes in imitation of Chopin’s fiendishly difficult but wonderful works. An experienced teacher resident in Paris, he would have rightly noticed that there was a scarcity of music that would be of interest to beginning pianists — the etudes by Czerny, Cramer or Pozzoli are useful but one-sided, both technically and musically. It was a stroke of genius on his part to fill this gap with his op. 100 and 109, as these pieces cover just about the entire range of pianistic difficulties. La Candeur, in all its simplicity, is a fine exercise for the beginning pianist in legato playing, speed, harmony, musicality, phrasing, and tone weighting. The even better-known Arabesque etc., on the other hand, develops speed in both hands, wrist movement, wide leaps and independence of the hands. A student rarely has the impression that he is practicing a study, as all of these pieces contain musical challenges that parallel their technical difficulties. The atmospheric titles Burgmüller provided for these works make his intentions even clearer: their musical aspect is at least as important, if not more so, than the purely technical.

Antwerp, city of harpsichords Antwerp, around the middle of the 17th century. Music issues from an imposing house on the Meir. Inside the house, paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, Vermeer and Tintoretto hang everywhere. A small but international group seated close to the fireplace is listening to a concert arranged especially for them. Francisca Duarte (1619-1678), who lives in the house, plays one of the many Ruckers-Couchet harpsichords and virginals owned by the Duarte family. She has chosen the music carefully: there are works from old collections of manuscripts compiled for and by the Duarte family, including music by John Bull and arrangements of dances and songs, as well as new repertoire by harpsichord virtuosos such as Jacques Champion de Chambonnières and Johann Jakob Froberger who have shared their recent compositions with the family. One of the guests, Béatrix de Cusance, noted in a letter ‘Dear Francisca lets us hear unusual and extraordinary things. She plays a thousand times better from day to day’. Francisca’s father Gaspar, and her sister Leonora frequently perform with her; he is a lutenist and she is a singer. Heavenly music continues to resound in Antwerp until well after midnight.

I had always been attracted by baroque music — I still remember how I felt when I first heard recordings of Bach’s cantatas by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt — and I began my training in baroque oboe when I was a student at the Conservatoire Supérieur of Lyon; since then I have shared my life with the baroque recorder player and oboist Héloïse Gaillard. Given my knowledge of baroque interpretation, this project’s particular challenge was to find a way to play in period style on modern instruments. This was a great challenge for myself and for the virtuoso musicians who surrounded me for this recording; knowing the requirements of the style, we all took part in meticulous work on ornamentation, articulation and messa di voce as well as in a more general study of musical rhetoric to develop coherence and expression. For variety of timbre, I decided not only to include works for violin but also to alternate bassoon and cello for the continuo, depending on the work concerned. Our recording was made in the Amuz church in the historical heart of Antwerp; it was an intense moment of pleasure and exchange for the entire ensemble that I hope will be felt by our listeners as well. Eric Speller

If we want to explain the idea behind this CD, we have to go back to the moment three years ago when we decided to set the project up. As a duo made up of a lutenist and a singer, it was practically guaranteed that one day we would come into contact with John Dowland’s music, and the many lute songs that have been published in various editions in particular. For us, however, things happened in reverse: we found each other as musicians through our common interest in his songs. On this, our first CD, we look back and try to identify the elements in his music that so appealed to us during those three years — not only through his own work, but also through music by his contemporaries and works by more modern chansonniers. As a duo we have built up a small collection of such works over time, and it’s because of this that we decided to record songs by composers with a variety of nationalities, backgrounds and personalities, as well as from totally different periods; these works nonetheless come together perfectly in a programme thanks to their musical, textual and thematic similarities.

There was no shortage of Flemish migrants in Paris in the first half of the 18th century. They were often skilled craftsmen, attracted by the largest market for luxury goods in Europe in what had been an era of peace, stability and economic development since the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The Flemish migrants followed an age-old pattern, as they tended to live in the same neighbourhoods and to seek out each other’s company in various cafés and associations. Some of these were artists: Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was born in Valenciennes in French Flanders before moving to Paris, where he profited from his Flemish heritage and became one of the most influential painters in 18th century France . Joseph Suvée (1743-1807), a painter from Bruges, entered and won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1771; Jacques-Louis David was one of that year’s unsuccessful candidates. What was true for painters was also true for musicians. Hébert Leemans, was originally a citizen of Bruges, as was his contemporary Suvée; they both moved to the French capital at approximately the same time. Leemans was then to play a significant role in the development of the early French symphonic style.

Above the album worked the EnAccord String Quartet - Various Composers: Visions, and his release took place on 2021. The album has got songs with a total duration of more than an hour. A compilation is a compilation of original music.

"The remarkable life of Paul Verlaine, one of the most widely read French poets, was our reason for embarking on an intense concert tour through Flanders in 2020. His immortal poetry served as a rich source of inspiration for composers such as Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure and Reynaldo Hahn.Our concert programme with his wonderfully beautiful poems in colourful musical settings from the late 19th century fin-de-siecle and later Impressionism became so close to our hearts that we took the decision to immortalise it on CD.Werner Van Mechelen has a great predilection for the song repertoire, performing not only the great cycles by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, but also many works outside the usual repertoire. Pianists with whom he has collaborated include Jozef de Beenhouwer, Lucas Blondeel, Florestan Bataillie and Eric Schneider.Florestan Bataillie is much in demand as a freelance artist whose appearances include concerts with the Spectra Ensemble and the Flanders Symphony Orchestra.

John Blow (1649-1708) wordt beschouwd als de centrale figuur in het Engelse muziekleven van de tweede helft van de 17de en begin van de 18de eeuw. Onder zijn leerlingen bevinden zich Jeremiah Clarke (ca. 1674-1707), William Croft (1678-1727), en Henry Purcell (1659-1695). Blows enige theaterwerk, Venus and Adonis, stond model voor Purcells beroemde semi-opera Dido and Aeneas. Vandaag geniet Purcell grote populariteit maar Blow, blijft ten onrechte in de schaduw staan. Het ensemble Les Goûts-Authentiques plaats John Blow daarom op de voorgrond op deze tweede cd met Engelse muziek – eerder verscheen ook bij Etcetera: In Vain the Am’rous Flute / Songs, Grounds & Instrumental Pieces by Purcell & Co / KTC 1694. Kort na de val van het regime van Cromwell keerde Koning Karel II in 1660 terug uit ballingschap en installeerde aan het Engelse hof een aantal kunstenaars en musici afkomstig van het continent. De wisselwerking die hieruit ontstond, zorgde voor het ontstaan van de typische Engelse barokstijl met zowel Franse als Italiaanse invloeden.

Nicolas Chédeville (Serez 1705 - Paris 1782) was the youngest of three instrumentalists from a branch of the Hotteterre family, known for its major role in the manufacturing of wind instruments as well as for its famous musicians active at the court of Versailles. Pierre Chédeville, the older, died in 1725. The two brothers Esprit-Philippe (known as «the older» after the death of Pierre) and Nicolas (called «the youngest») played oboe in royal musical circles but are especially renowned as players and makers of musettes, as well as composers and arrangers for their favourite instrument. Both brothers enjoyed permanent posts as hautbois de la chambre and musettes ordinaires in the Royal Academy of Music, and Nicolas taught musette to the Royal children, and in particular to princess Victoire of France to whom he dedicated three of his works. His compositions highlight particularly well the specific resources of the musette for which he also transcribed pieces by Italian composers, including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and La Follia.