Correspondances: Enescu | Ravel | Scott

"Correspondances" recreates a unique conversation between the music of Cyril Scott, George Enescu and Maurice Ravel. This conversation takes place through the medium of sound poems to create a reality which is perhaps more perfect than our own. This vision of art is, however, rooted in a specific zeitgeist, and in contemporary currents within the visual and literary arts - including Symbolism and Impressionism. The works recorded here display a common musical language - a language whose syntax springs directly out of Wagner's deconstruction of tonal harmony, further elaborated by Debussy's free experimentations with timbre, sound and touch. In the latter's art, the fluid harmonic language creates the sense of a series of vivid pictorial images - but these images also suggest a further intangible element beyond the realm of sense impressions, an intuition of the 'Symbol', a key which can unlock the inner content of appearances, an idea which played a crucial role in the artistic discourse of the time. Ravel, Enescu and Scott were unequivocally children of their times, but perhaps what is truly fascinating to performer and listener lies in disclosing the individual response of each composer to this artistic milieu.