Antoine Reicha: Symphonies Concertantes Gli Angeli Genève & Stephan MacLeod

• Antoine Reicha (1770 - 1836): Symphonie concertante pour flûte, violon et orchestre:
• 1 Symphonie concertante pour flûte, violon et orchestre: I. Allegro 16:04
• 2 Symphonie concertante pour flûte, violon et orchestre: II. Andante 05:45
• 3 Symphonie concertante pour flûte, violon et orchestre: III. Rondo. Allegro – Andante - Allegro 08:48
• Symphonie concertante pour deux violoncelles et orchestre:
• 4 Symphonie concertante pour deux violoncelles et orchestre: I. Allegro non troppo 22:54
• 5 Symphonie concertante pour deux violoncelles et orchestre: II. Largo 07:39
• 6 Symphonie concertante pour deux violoncelles et orchestre: III. Moderato 10:01
• Total Runtime 01:11:11

Info zu Antoine Reicha: Symphonies Concertantes

The two Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Flute and for two Cellos by Antoine Reicha show an astonishing balance between innovation and reflection. They bear witness to an outstanding virtuosity and art of composition, which revolutionise forms through spectacular, enthusiasm-provoking lines of execution and through novelties of writing that impact their deeper structures. A composer who established a link between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Vienna and Paris, Joseph Haydn and César Franck (one of the last among his many pupils), Reicha can no longer be reduced to his theoretical and didactic dimension alone: his extensive work, still too little known, continues to surprise us.

When you look closely and without preconceived ideas at Anton Reicha’s compositions, and measure their quality and originality, you wonder why his work has met such a strange and unusual fate in the history of music: why did such an inventive and obviously gifted composer not receive some of the fame granted to some of his contemporaries? Was Beethoven’s genius so overwhelming that it cast most of his contemporaries into the shadows, especially a composer like Reicha, who was born the same year as him? Or was it because Reicha, not very gifted at promoting his works, gave up fighting for them to be performed and published? Did he finally give up any quest for recognition for his compositions in favour of his work as a theorist, which had a real impact in his day, composing relentlessly but without feeling the need to be performed?

This fascinating and uncommon story of exceptional music written partly for oneself surprisingly echoed our recording project of the two Sinfonia Concertante. We were indeed confronted with opposing winds. While the two works were to be recorded together in March 2020 following a concert in Geneva, we only could perform the first one while on the next day, the Covid-19 pandemic had taken over European border control, as well as concert halls and recording studios, so that it seemed that our project would never come to fruition. Reicha was silenced again.

The Sinfonia Concertante for two Cellos was recorded in June 2020, on the occasion of a concert with a modified programme, the staging of which was something of a miracle, given the context of the pandemic. Through the coincidence of confinement and calendar, for most of the musicians of Gli Angeli Genève, the last concert before the heavy curtain of the coronavirus fell was the one in March, and the first after three months of silence the one in June. For our reunion, we had to work with masks on and maintain a very unusual distance between the members of the orchestra - there was no question of a single music stand for two violinists for example; but we could make music again, start practising our profession again.

We will all remain marked, in this strange year, by the nature of this long break, which we opened and then closed with Reicha’s music.

Alexis Kossenko, flute
Chouchane Siranossian, violin
Christophe Coin, cello
Davit Melkonyan, cello
Gli Angeli Genève
Stephan MacLeod, conductor

Gli Angeli Geneve
was founded in 2005 by Stephan MacLeod. A formation of varying size, playing on period instruments (or copies thereof), the ensemble is made up of musicians who have careers in the field of baroque music, but who are not only active in this field: they do not play solely early music. Their eclecticism guarantees the vitality of their enthusiasm. It is also a driving force behind their curiosity.

Right from the beginning of a musical adventure that for several years concentrated solely on live performances of the complete Bach Cantatas in Geneva, with three concerts per season, Gli Angeli Genève has been the setting for encounters between some of the most famous singers and instrumentalists of the international baroque scene and young graduates of the High Schools of Music of Basel, Lyon, Lausanne and Geneva.

Internationally acclaimed since the release in 2009 and 2010 of its first two CDs, which won numerous critical awards, the ensemble now gives seven or eight concerts per season in Geneva, as part of its Complete Bach Cantatas on the one hand, a series of annual concerts at the Victoria Hall on the other, and since September 2017 in a new complete series dedicated to Haydn’s Symphonies. The ensemble is equally in demand in Switzerland and abroad for performances not only of Bach, but also Tallis, Josquin, Schein, Schütz, Johann Christoph Bach, Weckmann, Buxtehude, Rosenmüller, Haydn, Mozart and others. In recent seasons, Gli Angeli Genève has been in residence at the Utrecht Festival and the Thüringer Bachwochen, and has also performed in Basel, Zurich, Lucerne, Barcelona, Nürnberg, Bremen, Stuttgart, Brussels, Milan, Wroclaw, Paris, Ottawa, Vancouver, Amsterdam and The Hague. Gli Angeli Genève is a regular guest at the Festival de Saintes, Utrecht festival, the Musikfest in Bremen or the Bach Festival in Vancouver. The ensemble made its debut in 2017 at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva and in 2019 at the KKL in Lucerne.

Gli Angeli Genève’s recording Sacred Music of the 17th century in Wroclaw won the ICMA prize for best vocal baroque music recording of the year in 2019.

Stephan MacLeod
is a conductor and a singer. Born in Geneva, he’s the founder and artistic director of Gli Angeli Genève, an ensemble that specializes in repertoires from the 17th to the 19th century on period instruments, he now conducts between 40 and 50 concerts per year worldwide, a growing number of which as guest conductor with “modern” orchestras. He is also happily pursuing his singing career and teaches singing at the Haute Ecole de musique de Lausanne (HeMU).

In 2020, he will conduct and record the world premiere of Antonin Reicha’s Sinfonia Concertante for two cellos and orchestra with cellists Christophe Coin and Davit Melkonyan and Gli Angeli Genève, several Haydn symphonies and Mozart concert arias, Bach’s St. John Passion in Oslo with Barokkanerne, the St. Matthew Passion with the Philharmonic Zuidnederland, the b-minor mass on tour in France and Switzerland with Gli Angeli Genève and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on tour on the west coast of the United States and Canada in December, with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra.

Stephan MacLeod studied the violin and the piano before turning to singing, which he first studied at the Conservatoire de Genève, then with Kurt Moll at the Cologne Musikhochschule and finally with Gary Magby at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne. His singing career began during his studies in Germany through a fruitful collaboration with Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln. It was then that the doors of the oratorio world opened to him and he’s regularly singing ever since on the most important stages around the world under the direction of conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Jordi Savall, Frieder Bernius, Franz Brüggen, Masaaki Suzuki, Michel Corboz, Gustav Leonhardt, Christophe Coin, Konrad Junghänel, Hans-Christoph Rademann, Sigiswald Kuijken, Vaclav Luks, Philippe Pierlot, Helmut Rilling, Rudolf Lutz, Raphael Pichon, Paul Van Nevel or Jos Van Immerseel, as well as with Daniel Harding or Jesus Lopez Cobos.

A singer in love with song and melody, he gives many recitals but has also been heard on opera stages, including productions by La Monnaie in Bruxelles, La Fenice in Venice, and also on the opera stages of Geneva, Toulouse, Nîmes, Bordeaux, Cologne, Potsdam, Freiburg, Girona etc.

Since 2005 and in parallel with his singing career, he has also devoted himself to conducting and is the founder of the Ensemble Gli Angeli Genève, which has been reaping the benefits of significant international recognition in recent years.

Since 2013, he has been a singing teacher at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne and shares his career between teaching, his commitments as a singer, his ensemble, and invitations to conduct – particularly Bach – more and more frequently. He regularly conducts the musicians of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, but also the Philharmonie Zudnederland, the Nederlandse Bachvereniging, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, etc.

Stephan MacLeod’s discography includes more than 90 CDs, many of them critically acclaimed.

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