‘Oxalys and the New World’: in its latest CD recording, Oxalys delves into American masterpieces for chamber music ensemble. From Pulitzer Prize laureate Aaron Copland with his nature fresco Appalachian Spring to Minimal Music icon John Adams’ mythical Shaker Loops and jazz idol Wynton Marsalis’ funky and groovin’ Meeelaan. Three unknown facets of a flourishing and inspiring musical culture, as always virtuosically captured by Oxalys, the jewel of our Belgian chamber music ensembles.

Booklet: EN, FR, NL, DE

In 1959, two composers wrote nonets: Nino Rota’s melodic Nonetto, on which he would continue to work for almost 20 years, and Bohuslav Martinů’s farewell chamber music piece, a nonet, which he composed as a last piece to satisfy his longing for his homeland.

Eisler did not compose his nonet in his native country either, but arrived in Mexico in 1941 as a refugee from the Nazis. There he wrote the music for John Steinbeck’s documentary film The Forgotten Village, which served as the inspiration for his Nonet No. 2.

With this CD, the ensemble Oxalys presents us with the opportunity to rediscover these three nonets – three masterpieces by key protagonists of 20th century music history.

Booklet: EN, FR, DE, NL

Jean Cras was born in France, in the Breton city of Brest, in 1879 and died there in 1932; he was successful in reconciling his twin passions for the sea and for music throughout his life.
Cras liked to associate free melody with strictness of form and was also greatly influenced by his native land as well as by the exotic destinations that he discovered during his voyages.
Jean Cras made a significant contribution to the French chamber music repertoire. The quality of his mature works is not only exceptionally high, but they also possess naturalness of manner, charm, and lyricism. His compositions were greatly appreciated by audiences and were generally first performed in Paris shortly after their completion.
The Belgian Ensemble Oxalys with Belgian soprano Sophie Karthäuser as a guest present here three superb quintets that were composed during the 1920s.

Booklet: FR, EN, DE, NL

Gustav Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde during the summer of 1908 in his holiday house in Toblach. The superb landscapes of the Dolomites brought him the repose he had sorely lacked during the particularly agitated and tragic year of 1907. The work forms a perfect symbiosis of two genres–Lied and symphony, a fusion that Mahler had been pursuing all his life. He brought together all the expressive means in his possession in order to create a personal and specific world. Mahler himself declared that “ forme a symphony means building a world with all existing technical means.”

Booklet: FR, EN, DE, NL

Lyrics: EN, DE

In France, the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas’s Manifeste symboliste is often seen as the cornerstone of twentieth-century modernity, and it is Pierre Boulez who is generally attributed with having determined its musical pendant, the first performance of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), in which he senses the breath of innovation and a new approach to time in music.

Starting with Debussy’s penultimate work, the Sonata for flute, viola and harp, Oxalys wanted, with this recording, to shed light on a musical scene that on the one hand respected and extended this symbolist tradition and on the other used it as a base for the pursuit of new means of expression.

Booklet: EN, FR, NL, DE

Lyrics: EN, FR, DE, NL