Au Suivant! by Flex Ensemble

Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré

Flex Ensemble

Au Suivant!

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085531615
Catnr: AVI 8553161
Release date: 08 March 2019
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085531615

Catalogue number
AVI 8553161

Release date
08 March 2019

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

AU SUIVANT!
Ravel . Fauré und Chansons für Klavierquartett

“Our second album (En suivant! = Next!) highlights three different genres of French music: A youthful work by Fauré, written in the late romantic piano quartet tradition, character pieces by Ravel in a new arrangement for piano quartet and an eclectic mix of contemporary interpretations of French Chansons from Claude Le Jeune up to Georges Brassens.
It all began with Fauré… his C minor Piano Quartet is one of the earliest works that we learned as an ensemble. We immediately formed a personal connection to the quartet, perhaps one of Fauré's most popular chamber music works. With its emotional core, instrumental colour, flowing but clear form, and the fascinating story behind its creation, we embraced the challenge of exploring our sound and furthering our comprehension of French musical literature.

Some years later we received an unexpected gift: The first movement of Ravel's Ma Mère l´Oye arranged for piano quartet by our friend Shintaro Sakabe. “Try it,” he said, “I think it might work”. ………..
But the idea that brought everything together for this recording was Project Chanson……….
(Excerpt from the Booklet Notes of the ensemble)

Artist(s)

Flex Ensemble

Known for their musically refined and highly energetic performances, the Flex Ensemble has been thrilling audiences with programs ranging from Classical and Romantic piano quartet repertoire to modern presentations featuring work by preeminent composers of our time, including Márton Illés and Gérard Pesson. They regularly collaborate with prominent artists such as Wolfgang Güttler, Oliver Wille, and Albrecht Mayer. The group founded the annual Chamber Music Fest Rheinhessen in 2014 as well as the imPULS concert series in Hannover in 2016, and they continue to serve as artistic directors for both. The Flex Ensemble was awarded 1st Prize and the Special Prize for Interpretation at the International Schumann Chamber Music Award in Frankfurt in 2013. They were also winners of the Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award 2015 in Lugano and the recipient...

They regularly collaborate with prominent artists such as Wolfgang Güttler, Oliver Wille, and Albrecht Mayer.

The group founded the annual Chamber Music Fest Rheinhessen in 2014 as well as the imPULS concert series in Hannover in 2016, and they continue to serve as artistic directors for both.

The Flex Ensemble was awarded 1st Prize and the Special Prize for Interpretation at the International Schumann Chamber Music Award in Frankfurt in 2013. They were also winners of the Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award 2015 in Lugano and the recipient of awards at the Kiejstut Bacewicz International Chamber Music Competition in Łód ´z and the Premio Trio di Trieste.
The Flex Ensemble has appeared at venues such as the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Beijing Performing Arts Center, and festivals such as the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker and the Heidelberger Frühling. Their performances have been broadcasted live on German radio (SWR and NDR Kultur) and Dutch radio (Radio 4). In 2014 their debut CD The Arrival of Night was released by GENUIN Classics, and in 2019 Au Suivant was released on CAvi-music in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

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Composer(s)

Maurice Ravel

Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer who is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the Conservatoire Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. He made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
As a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas, and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies and only one religious work. Many of his works exist in two versions: a first, piano score and a later orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

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Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was a French Romantic composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Nocturnes for piano and the songs Après un rêve and Clair de lune. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

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