Napoléon Coste
Napoléon Coste's guitar music carries French Romantic drama and song: programmatic fantasies that send soldiers to war and bring them home in triumph, beside short romances and cantilènes of quiet, flowing melody.
Le Départ is deeply programmatic, inspired by the Siege of Sebastopol. Its first half holds the melancholy of leaving loved ones and the agitation of what lies ahead; the return opens in a marche triomphale and swells through grandiose gestures into a virtuosic coda. Beside that narrative sweep sit Consolazione and Les Regrets, tender romances without words, the brief Marche, and the mountain airs of Le Montagnard. His arrangement of Schubert's Ständchen keeps the same lyrical ease. The writing sits as naturally in flute or oboe and guitar chamber settings as on the solo instrument, full of pleasing harmonies and melodic warmth.
Compositions by Napoléon Coste appear on
Images
Prudence Davis, Jeffrey Crellin and Peter Lynch in French salon and Impressionist chamber music for flute, oboe and guitar: Fauré and Ravel pavanes, Giuliani’s Serenade, Coste miniatures, Ponce’s Sonata III, Debussy’s Syrinx and Rêverie, and Duarte folk settings.
Impulses
This programme gathers music that inspired Hamish Strathdee during his years in Canberra, Darmstadt and Hamburg from 2013 to 2022. Titled Impulses, it is a small selection from his repertoire: works that carried a strong artistic charge for the guitarist.