5CD-BOX: Brahms / Fauré / Haydn - Accentus
Accentus, Laurence Equilbey, and Naïve: it's a story that goes back a long way now, a story of fidelity and diversity. Fidelity in our artis-tic companionship, since accentus was one of the first ensembles to join Naïve when the label was created in 1999. Diversity, because our shared artistic trajectory has been shaped by a wide variety of repertoires and projects. First of all there was Pascal Dusapin's Requiem[s], an ongoing success that has reached far beyond the contemporary sphere; then a magnificent programme of a cappella Poulenc; then the bombshell of Transcriptions, which is both the group's and the label's bestseller to date. After an excursion into Schoenberg with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the year 2003 was marked by Brahms's German Requiem in its version with piano. In 2005 came the first recording with orchestra under the direction of Laurence Equilbey (Haydn's Seven Last Words). Since then, our projects have embraced music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, key repertoire works (the Fauré Requiem), rarely re-corded monuments like Richard Strauss's masterpieces for a cap-pella choir, a DVD of the Transcriptions, a concert of Christmas mu-sic for CD and television in 2009, Rachmaninoff, Dvorák, Mendels-sohn... Eighteen recordings so far, eighteen documents that have made a lasting impact on the discography of a genre that accentus and Laurence Equilbey have greatly contributed to make more widely known, and indeed popular. Happy Birthday to all the artists who participated in the adventure of the first twenty years, and let's meet up again very soon to unveil all the new projects for the next twenty.