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- Michelangelo Merisi,
dit Le Caravage (1571-1610)
Le Joueur de luth
Huile sur toile - 94 x 119 cm
Saint-Petersbourg, Musée de l’Hermitage
Photo : Wikimedia (domaine public) - See the image in its page
La Tribune de l’Art is only interested in the plastic arts (paintings, drawings, sculptures, decorative arts...), architecture and heritage, over a precise period (from the Middle Ages to the 1930s) and a field reduced to Western art. Music, in particular, is not included, as it is too broad a field for which we are not sufficiently competent.
The fact remains that "classical" art and music as such are very closely related. Most musicians were friends with artists, belonged to the same intellectual circles, had the same patrons. The painters painted their portraits, created the sets for the operas... The Prix de Rome for music winners stayed in Italy with the other artists. Along with the writers, who should not be forgotten, all gravitated in the same spheres. The styles sometimes came together or responded to each other: we speak of impressionist music, for example, with Debussy. And art lovers are often also music lovers.
This is why when Qobuz, a music listening platform (streaming in English) well known to music lovers, contacted us to propose a partnership, we accepted enthusiastically, considering, as they do, that the readers of La Tribune de l’Art and the subscribers to their site share common interests. One of the advantages of Qobuz is that it offers the best possible sound quality, as you would get in a recording studio; by associating it with a good stereo system, it allows you to listen to the music in the best possible conditions (but you can obviously also enjoy it from a simple smartphone). Although we are mainly interested in classical music, the platform also includes all genres of music. Whether you also listen to jazz, pop, variety or any other musical genre, Qobuz offers you just about everything you like. Its editorial content is also a significant advantage which, combined with the recommendations it offers, makes it possible to discover an infinite amount of music, whether classical or not.
This partnership will be offered in several ways. We will start with an offer to subscribers of La Tribune de l’Art: they will be able to benefit from two free months of Qobuz to discover the platform and decide if they want to subscribe. To do this, if you are a subscriber to La Tribune de l’Art, all you have to do is send us your request to this email address (qobuz@latribunedelart.com) and we will send you a code and a link that will allow you to create these two months of free trial at Qobuz.
In addition, we will regularly create playlists that you can listen to on Qobuz and which may or may not be related to artistic activity. As we love nothing more than to highlight little-known artists, our first playlist will allow you to discover musicians you may not know, with works that we feel are particularly remarkable. We only include complete works: no more than a painting can be understood with only a detail, a composition must be heard with only one movement. We will not dwell on the versions: most of these works have not been recorded much, and we do not have the time - nor necessarily the ear - to distinguish between the interpretations. There is nothing to stop you from choosing a different one, depending on your taste.
In this first playlist - of which you can get an idea thanks to the player below - we hope you will like :
– Théodore Gouvy’s String Quintet No. 6. This composer, born German into a French family on the border of the two countries in Saarland (two of his elder brothers were French), studied in Paris where he was unable to enter the Conservatoire because of his nationality (he was finally naturalised French in 1851 at the age of thirty-two). Some attribute the oblivion into which he fell to his culture, which was divided between the two countries: too German for the French, and too French for the Germans... In any case, it is incomprehensible, as his recorded work (there are still many scores that are not) is remarkable. Fortunately, in recent years, thanks to the Institut Théodore Gouvy created in 1995, to the Festival International Théodore Gouvy of which it is one of the organisers with the city of Hombourg-Haut, and also to the Palazetto Bru-Zane in Venice which has published a book-disc (including this quintet), this composer has come out of the shadow. We will be offering other works by him in future playlists.
– Emilie Mayer’s Symphony No. 5. We do not include this composer because she is a woman. Simply because this German woman is, in our opinion, one of the best unknown musicians we have discovered recently. As with Gouvy, with Émilie Mayer almost everything is excellent. We will start with this symphony (but we recommend all of them), undoubtedly one of the most beautiful romantic symphonies.
– The String Quartet No. 1 by Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga. Value does not wait for the number of years: rarely has this adage been truer than for this Spanish composer, who died just before his twentieth birthday, succeeded in composing three string quartets, including this one, composed when he was only seventeen. On discovering this meteor, one is torn between the joy of listening to his work and the regret of what was lost with his more than early death.
– Rued Langgaard’s Symphony No. 1. If we cannot speak of the rest of this composer’s works (we have not yet listened to them), his first symphony is undoubtedly a masterpiece, of rare power, and again composed by a very young man, since he was only nineteen when he wrote it. Four movements, no less than 44 minutes of music, nothing of which leaves one indifferent.
– The Sonata for violin and piano No. 1 by Joseph Joachim Raff. Gouvy was Franco-German, Raff is German-Swiss. He was very close to Liszt but is himself a remarkable composer, equally at home in symphonic and chamber music. This sonata for violin and piano does not pale in comparison with the best examples of the genre. Raff, like his predecessors, is truly a musician to be rediscovered.
If you are a subscriber to La Tribune de l’Art and would like to subscribe to Qobuz with the two-month free trial offer (instead of one month), you can do so by sending us your name to this email address (qobuz@latribunedelart.com): we will send you back a link and a code that will allow you to benefit from it.