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Claire Chevallier plays the music of Erik Satie on a period Erard Piano

Chevallier has gained many plaudits for her recordings with Jos van Immerseel and Anima Eterna, including the BBC Music Magazine Award nominated recording of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand.

A genuinely new approach to these popular works.

Claire Chevallier writes in the sleevenote:

Jean Cocteau said of Satie (whom he saw every morning for a long period of his life): ‘He inherited a grave eccentricity from his Scottish ancestry. . . . Egotistical, cruel, obsessive, he would listen to nothing that did not conform to his dogma and would fly into furious rages with anything that disturbed it. Egotistical, because he thought only of his music. Cruel, because he defended his music. Obsessive, because he polished his music. And his music was tender. And so he was, too, in his own way. . . . He cleaned himself with pumice stone. He never used water. At a time when music surged forth in floods, recognising Debussy’s genius but fearful of his despotism (they remained on friendly but quarrelsome terms right up to the end), he turned his back on the latter’s school and became, at the Schola Cantorum, the odd sort of Socrates we knew. ‘There he pumiced, defied, smoothed himself, and forged the little orifice through which his exquisite force needed only to flow from its source.’

When I chanced on this passage from Cocteau shortly after the recording, I felt this text summed up my impressions of those few days in front of the microphones when I had played Satie on my 1905 Érard. This superb piano regulated to cope with high volume and works that ‘surge forth in floods’ (such as Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand, ZZT060901) offered me the rich sonority of a cathedral on legs (especially for Les Sonneries de la Rose+Croix and the Ogives), but thereby showed me what Satie had resisted: it showed me in practice the paradox I required for his music. This paradox nourished each note of an inner universe equivalent to Satie’s egotistical, cruel, obsessive struggle to reach a goal of which he remains the sole master universe were opening up before me. In fact, all this music requires a total reduction of resources, a knifeedge playing style, a refusal of effect, and the most touching thing is that this leads us to Cocteau’s extraordinary conclusion: Satie’s music is tender. But it is a tenderness of an almost indecipherable purity . . .‘Precious’, as Satie would have said . . . Claire Chevallier - 10 May 2008

This double album offers a portrait of the violinist Amandine Beyer drawn from the recordings she has made for ZZT.

The first CD selects highlights from her chamber repertoire, including works by Jean-Féry Rebel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Nicola Matteis, and Robert de Visée. The second is devoted to the concerto, with compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and Arcangelo Corelli. This programme is an ideal introduction to the multiple facets of Amandine Beyer’s talent and to the grace and joie de vivre of her music-making. It also provides an opportunity to discover one of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi op.6, a preview of the complete set to be released on ZZT in the autumn of 2013.

Vincent Peirani and François Salque, coming from two very different environments and musical traditions, have gradually developed languages and pathways of their own, involving written and improvised music as well as experimentations, from one concert to another. Their first disc, Est, was devoted to the traditional music of central Europe. This time their guiding thread is the music of South America, and more especially the universe of Astor Piazzolla. Their two sonorities, as magnificent as they are different, intertwine and interlace amid the melodic and rhythmic undulations of the pieces, sometimes adapted, sometimes created by Vincent Peirani, Jocelyn Mienniel, and Tomás Gubitsch.

This programme does full justice to the modernity of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1561-1613), covering both his sacred music and his madrigals. It reproduces all the subtlety and chromaticism of his music, strictly respecting the temperament used in the composer’s time.

An added attraction of this disc is that it alternates the Prince’s works with the music of his contemporary Ascanio Maione, scored for harp, harpsichord and organ.

A timely commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of Carlo Gesualdo, this recording showcases the outstanding artistry of the ensemble Concerto Soave and its director Jean-Marc Aymes.

The Russian pianist Yury Martynov presents here the second volume of the complete recording he has undertaken of the cycle of the Beethoven symphonies as transcribed for the piano by Franz Liszt. For both the pianist and his listeners, this recording constitutes a genuine adventure, combining the creative genius of Beethoven, the inspired vision of these works of the composer and pianist Franz Liszt, and a piano with the same sonic resources as were available to Liszt.

Here is what Liszt had to say about the piano as a medium of transcription: ‘In the compass of its seven octaves, it can produce, with only a few exceptions, all the characteristics, all the combinations, all the most learned compositional figures, and leaves the orchestra no other advantages than those . . . of diversity of timbre and massed effects.’ For these two symphonies, Yury Martynov has chosen the same Érard piano of 1837 on which he recorded the first volume of this series.

That CD – Symphonies nos.6 and 2 / ZZT301 – received a particularly warm welcome from the press (‘Choc’ de Classica, May 2012).

This is the union of two ZZT artists for a disc that includes an original work (the Sonata in D major) and transcriptions for two pianos.

Recorded on two historic instruments from the collection of Edwin Beunk, this disc is an operatic and symphonic conversation. It is also the illustration of the highly fruitful collaboration of two singular pianists as well as a new recording with Yury Martynov, who earned a 'Choc' de Classica for his Beethoven-Liszt disc.

After discs devoted to Ravel and Poulenc (ZZT060901 & ZZT110403 - critical and popular successes, the latter measured in sales), Jos van Immerseel returns to French music, tackling Debussy and his most famous orchestral works.

This he does brilliantly well, of course, relying on historic instruments with the aim of blending a singular vision of these scores with a highly rigorous approach.

After a long war, Soliman, the Turkish emperor, and Tamasse, the Persian sophi, decide to seal the peace between their two countries and, to this end, exchange hostages. The preliminary treaty stipulates that, in order to make this alliance more solid, Tamasse will wed Zanaida, Soliman's daughter. Meanwhile, the sophi falls in love with Osira, a Persian hostage sent by the emperor.

The future Turkish bride arrives in Isfahan with a magnificent retinue. This is where the action of this opera begins, the plot skilfully mixing Tamasse's infidelity, Zanaida's magnanimity, the ambition of Roselane and Osira, and Mustafa's honesty. A particularly appealing opera by the fourth and last of Johann Sebastian's sons whose life was atypical for a Bach, carrying out his career not in Germany but in Italy and England.

After a recording of The Four Seasons that was awarded several distinctions (ZZT080803), Amandine Beyer and her ensemble come back to Vivaldi with a selection of concerti.

The beginning of collaboration between ZZT, Emmanuel Krivine and the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, with an exceptional guest: Karine Deshayes.

This disc brings together some of Maurice Ravel's most popular scores, in particular the Bolero, and Karine Deshayes gives a highly moving interpretation of Shéhérazade, in the tradition of the great Régine Crespin, which the latter had mentioned herself.