Les Dissonances

David Grimal, Les Dissonances – Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No.1 & Symphony No.5 (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 5, 2023 · Comments off

Les Dissonances made its first recordings for Ambroise-Naïve, the critical success of which led to the birth of its own label in March 2014.
To celebrate its 10 anniversary, the orchestra’s new Shostakovich album, recorded live at the Opéra de Dijon, is presented complete with an extended tribute piece by Xavier Phillips in memory of his mentor, Mstislav Rostropovich, dedicatee of Shostakovich’s two cello concertos. It follows the label’s high production and design values, offering the disc as part of a hardbound book containing detailed programme notes, Phillips’ essay, artist biographies and monochrome photographs.
“My memories are of an immensely gifted pedagogue, whose advice could be very diverse in nature. With me his approach wasn’t really focused on the instrumental dimension. It was above all a way of talking about music, with images, impressions, sensations, anecdotes. He shed new light, he showed you things, he made you think”. –Xavier Phillips

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Alexandre Gattet, Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Mozart: Oboe Concerto & ‘Gran Partita’ (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 6, 2023 · Comments off

Oboe Concerto in C major K314: All his life, Mozart (1756 – 1791) was an indefatigable traveller, especially during his childhood and youth. On 22 September 1777 he left Salzburg with his mother, en route for Augsburg, Mannheim and then Paris, with a view to obtaining a secure position and a regular income. The first reference to the Oboe Concerto appears in a letter from Leopold Mozart to his son dated 15 October 1777: ‘. . . if you had a copy of your oboe concerto, Perwein might enable you to make an honest penny in Wallerstein.’ The oboist Perwein had left the service of Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg to take up a post in Wallerstein; his departure had led to the engagement in April 1777 of an Italian virtuoso, Giuseppe Ferlendis, for whom this concerto was initially conceived.

On 4 November Mozart answered his father. During his stay in Mannheim, he had discovered among the members of one of the nest orchestras of the day a small community of outstanding musicians who were to become his friends, including the Konzertmeister Cannabich and the first oboe Ramm. Mozart related that he had made the acquaintance of the oboist, ‘who plays very well and has a delightfully pure tone. I have made him a present of my oboe concerto . . . and the fellow is quite crazy with delight. I played this concerto to him today on the pianoforte at Cannabich’s, and although everybody knew that I was the composer, it was very well received! Nobody said that it was not well composed, because the people here do not understand such matters . . .’ (The last sentence is of course sarcastically intended.)

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Les Dissonances & David Grimal – Chausson, Ravel, Enescu (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 23, 2023 · Comments off

The works of George Enescu, a Romanian composer nurtured on the musical traditions of his country, also has deep roots in the French musical world of the early twentieth century. This disc explores that twofold ancestry, which made Enescu, an outstandingly charismatic personality, a veritable bridge between Romania and France.

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Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Beethoven: Violin Concerto & 7th Symphony (2010) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · December 8, 2022 · Comments off

„Faced with such an enormous choice of recordings of the Beethoven concerto, this one at least has a unique selling point in new cadenzas composed for David Grimal by Brice Pauset. Although they remain within the bounds of propriety, that for the first movement is unusual in its inclusion at its mid-point of an orchestral role with solo piano. Otherwise the performance, taken from a Dijon concert in 2010, is a rewardingly fresh reading of the printed score. Maybe the central Larghetto is a little slow, but the whole account has an unhurried feel, and Grimal’s long lyric lines are shaped with beauty and much affection.“ (David Denton, theStrad)

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Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Piazzolla, Vivaldi: Les quatre saisons (2010) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 17, 2022 · Comments off

This recording by French violinist David Grimal and the chamber orchestra Les Dissonances has a specific goal in mind: proceeds from its sale benefit the homeless through microcredit projects, and the group has performed live concerts for homeless audiences on the street. This unique enterprise should give buyers a strong incentive to purchase the album on its own, but what of the musical content in itself? There are lots of recordings of the Vivaldi Four Seasons violin concertos paired with the Cuatro estaciónes porteñas, or Four Seasons of the Port City (Buenos Aires), tangos by Astor Piazzolla, but this one is unusual in several respects. One is that the Piazzolla works are presented in the “arrangements” by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, which are really closer to recompositions than arrangements. Desyatnikov transforms the works into violin-and-orchestra pieces, which is really foreign to their essence. On top of that, he adds quotations from the Vivaldi concertos; his versions are specifically designed for performance in this combination. Grimal and Les Dissonances add a new wrinkle of their own: instead of having the Piazzolla/Desyatnikov seasons follow the Vivaldi concertos, they put the Piazzolla first. This actually works pretty well; the Piazzolla/Desyatnikov pieces, with their suggestions of motives from the Vivaldi, work well as introductions. The group doesn’t quite have the nerve to lead with Piazzolla/Desyatnikov, though, so there’s one tango (Primavera porteña) left over at the end. That disturbs the symmetry of the whole, and the Vivaldi performances, with their mushy sense of tempo, are no great shakes. None of this detracts from the originality of the whole project, in both social and musical terms.

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Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Brahms: Symphony No. 4 & Violin Concerto (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 10, 2022 · Comments off

Les Dissonances, David Grimal - Brahms: Symphony No. 4 & Violin Concerto (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

World premiere: the Fourth Symphony of Brahms without a conductor. Les Dissonances reinvent the musical practice through a participatory organization where all share the same artistic standards. Violin and orchestra are one, the interpretation of the work being carried both by solar violin David Grimal and intense listening to the structure of the work by all the musicians. The unique sound of this record is based on the use of period instruments by Les Dissonances, all brilliant soloists from major European orchestras.
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Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Beethoven: Symphony No. 3; Schubert: Symphony No. 8 (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 26, 2022 · Comments off

Les Dissonances, David Grimal - Beethoven: Symphony No. 3; Schubert: Symphony No. 8 (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

Les Dissonances, David Grimal – Beethoven: Symphony No. 3; Schubert: Symphony No. 8 (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:09:31 minutes | 679 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Les Dissonances

Symphony no.3 in E flat major op.55, ’Eroica’: During the summer of 1802 in Heiligenstadt, Beethoven sketched, among other works, his Third Symphony, the composition of which took him a year. On 26 August 1804, he wrote to his publisher Härtel to announce the dispatch of ‘a new grand symphony’: ‘The title of the symphony is really Bonaparte . . . – I think that it will interest the musical public.’ Beethoven had long passionately admired the Consul Bonaparte, but he was to hate the Emperor Napoleon I equally passionately when he learnt of his coronation on 2 December 1804. His pupil Ferdinand Ries portrays the scene: ‘He ew into a rage and cried out: “He too is nothing but an ordinary man!” . . . He went to the table, seized the title page from the top, tore it up completely and threw [the score] on the floor.’ And so the work became a ‘Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man’, acquiring the subtitle ‘Eroica’ for posterity.

At the first performance on 7 April 1805, the work impressed the audience with its extraordinary dimensions for the time in terms of duration and breadth, especially the opening Allegro con brio in sonata form, the recapitulation of which is announced by a dramatic dissonance between the strings and the horns. The Marcia funebre widens the palette for the expression of feeling, from the affliction of the theme in the minor mode to the brighter mood generated by the modulations into the major. The Finale is no longer content to play the role of a brief, lively conclusion, but leads us through a rich itinerary of variations on a theme that Beethoven took from his ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (The Creatures of Prometheus). Yet the first listeners rejected the work, which they deemed too long and muddled, reproaching it for the very thing that has subsequently gained it its renown: for disturbing the ambient Classicism and throwing the gates of the Romantic era wide open.

Symphony no.8 in B minor D759, ’Unfinished’: In 1823, Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828) received the Diploma of Honour from the Styrian Music Society of Graz. In return, he sent his friend Josef Hüttenbrenner, a member of the society, a new work dedicated to it and dated 30 October 1822. Passing from Josef’s hands to those of his brother Anselm, the manuscript lay forgotten in a bottom drawer until it resurfaced in March 1860. Josef Hüttenbrenner mentioned in a letter to the musician Johann Herbeck that his brother ‘possessed a treasure in Schubert’s in B minor symphony, which we consider the equal of the great C major Symphony, his instrumental swansong, and of any of Beethoven’s symphonies – only it is unfinished’. It is to Herbeck that we owe the resurrection of the work and its first performance in 1865.
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