Sonja Leutwyler / Astrid Leutwyler / Benjamin Engeli HYMNE À LA BEAUTÈ

Hymne à la beauté' brings together rarely heard gems of chamber music in delightful arrangements for voice, violin and piano, passionately performed by the aspiring and outstanding Swiss artists Sonja Leutwyler (mezzo soprano), Astrid Leutwyler (violin) and Benjamin Engeli (piano). This programme of discoveries features captivating works by Louis Spohr, Johannes Brahms, Charles Ives, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Petyrek, Czesaw Marek and Ottorino Respighi. On a special commission for this CD, the Swiss composer Martin Wettstein has composed the piece 'Hymne à la beauté (hymn to beauty)' for mezzo soprano, violin and piano after a poem by Charles Baudelaire.

Andrew Rangell FROM THE EARLY 20TH...

Andrew Rangell, who has previously recorded J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Eastern European folk music for the Steinway & Sons label, now turns his attention to composers of the early 20th century for his latest album release.

The centerpiece of the album is Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, whose “monumental cussedness, tenderness, and imaginative daring epitomize the character and gifts of its Yankee creator,” in Rangell’s words. Rangell makes the work his own through several idiosyncratic executional decisions, including playing on piano the optional viola part at the end of the “Emerson” movement; using his own forearm instead of a block of wood for the black-key tone clusters in “Hawthorne”; and in “Thoreau,” whistling the optional flute solo. “I hope there may be, in this species of self-reliance, something of Emerson,” writes Rangell.

Framing the Concord Sonata are three shorter works from Ives’ contemporaries, including the final piano works of Arnold Schoenberg and Carl Nielsen; and George Enescu’s “Carillon Nocturne,” written at the same time as the Concord, and which Rangell sees as a spiritual counterpart to Ives’ “Thoreau” meditation.