Elegiac Dance

SKU: HL.1423350

ISBN 9798350121230. UPC: 196288200062.

Sensu al concert hall level solo work for piano, composed by Iranian composer Mehran Rouhani, which combines the composer's ties with his homeland with his deep understanding of Western music and romantic notions.

SKU: FA.MFCD014PN

8.27 x 11.69 inches.

Fetes galantes was actually planned as a hybrid opera-ballet to a libretto by Debussy's friend Louis Laloy. For this, Laloy arranged selected poetry by Paul Verlaine into three tableaux, replacing an earlier (unstarted) Debussyan project with Charles Morice entitled Crimen amoris. During his last productive summer of 1915, Debussy set a sequence from the start of the first tableau, 'Les Masques', involving stanzas 1 and 3 of the opening song for Mezzetin in Verlaine's comedy Les Uns et les autres. The action is set in a park a la Watteau late one summer afternoon as Mezzetin attempts to entertain a group of nonchalant masqueraders with only the aid of his voice and a mandolin.

This appears to have been prefaced by a slower, elegiac introduction reminiscent of the opening of the comtemporary Cello Sonata and it leads to a danced minuet by the masqued dancers which has clear echoes of the piano piece L'Isle Joyeuse (1904). Following Laloy's scenario, the mas-queraders then sing extracts from Verlaine's 'A la promenade' (from Fetes galantes itself). The minuet returns at greater length before being cut short by a chilly gust of wind, after which the park returns to its orginal state (and music) as though nothing had really happened.

SKU: HL.14030980

ISBN 9788759871973. 12.0x16.0x0.285 inches.

Score available: KP00250 The composer writes: 'Even when I was writing Adieu, I knew that I wished to write Angel's Music. The title existed in an incomplete form in my mind and gradually more and more ideas and a few outlines became clear. The actual work on Angel's Music was started in Rome, where I spent the autumn of 1987 staying at The Danish Academy. Whether this stay has influenced the quartet or not is impossible to say. however, it is true to say that, in the Roman churches I visited, I saw countless angels playing in the top of frescoes and altars. Without these angels, together with the many crackled-gold paintings in this city and my general fascination with the Italian renaissance painter Fra Angelico, (in fact there are only a few paintings by him in Rome, but even his name..!) I am not sure my quartet would have been what it is. Anyway I do feel that there is a bit of Italy in the piece. The angels apart there are, in the short rhythmic agitating part of the quartet, reminiscences of the Italian medieval Trotto dance, and in the most expressive part of the piece there are flashes of Puccini-like music. From the very beginning of my work on the quartet, the distant, extremely muted sound in the high register which opens the piece, was on my mind. A sound satiated with a dense heterophonic and polyphonic texture of elegiac melody and vibrating trills. I imagined that little songs (maybe angel songs) could be created in this density, these songs constantly echoing themselves. Gradually as this sound got a more and more concrete musical and instrumental form, I felt, that not only should the little songs be created, played and die out in an echo, but also that the general pattern of the quartet should give the feeling of music which, from the distance, is getting closer and closer, culminates and at last disappears like an echo. Related to this, the general pattern of Angel's Music is divided into three: a pre-echo, culmination and echo.. The relationship between the three part is 5: 6: 4. The reason why I can say this precisely and prosaically is that it was necessary to me to mark the overall guidelines before I started to compose. I had to do this in order to enable the relationships to crawl from the general pattern almost fractionally into the smallest cells of the music, or more correctly; crawl from the small cells into the general pattern.'.

SKU: FA.MFCD007PN

8.27 x 11.69 inches.

Debussy's friendship with the versatile poet and playwright Gabriel Mourey began in 1899, and in July 1907 Mourey offered Debussy a libretto based on Le roman de Tristan - Joseph Bedier's adaptation of a twelfth-century Breton romance by the Anglo-Norman poet known as Thomas - which had recently been published in Paris. Debussy enthusiastically outlined the four-act plot to Victor Segalen that October, and the main differences from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde are that none of the action takes place in Cornwall and that Isolde of the White Hands is found guilty of cuckolding King Marc with Tristan, who has to rescue her from the leper colony in which she is abandoned in Act 1. She also betrays him when he goes mad at the end.

The idea of a Tristan that restored its 'legendary character' and had no connections with Wagner, appealed to Debussy, who was extremely moved by the circumstances of Tristan's death. Even if he thought that Mourey's poetry was 'not very lyrical and many passages do not exactly invite music', he did work on the libretto and the music that summer and sent his publisher, Jacques Durand, 'one of the 363 themes for the Roman de Tristan' in a letter sent from Pourville on 23 August, 1907. The present prelude grows from this theme, together with the poignant Breton folksong Le Faucon. After a short atmospheric introduction, Debussy's dance-like theme (which is definitely not a leitmotif) gradually gains momentum and after it reaches its ecstatic climax, representing the transient happiness of the lovers, it dissolves into an expressive coda and an elegiac close (all growing from Debussy's opening, off-stage trumpet calls), leaving us with the ultimate tragedy of their ill-fated affair.

Unfortunat ely, Mourey's actual libretto has been lost and the project eventually foundered because Bedier's cousin, Louis Artus, wanted Debussy to use the scenario he had prepared and copyrighted for the stage, and would not allow him to proceed with Mourey's version. Debussy, it need hardly be said, would never have dreamed of collaborating with the author of the vaudeville hit La culotte (The pants)!

SKU: TM.13349SET

Marche Slave, Andante Cantabile (String Quartet No. 2), Dance of the Flowers (Nutcracker), Barcarolle, Mazurka (Swan Lake), Chanson triste, Larghetto elegiaco (Serenade), Russian Dance (Nutcracker), Waltz (Swan Lake), Cradle Song, Andante non troppo (Serenade). P/C in set.