Dialogue
Released by Alpha Classics, the latest album featuring the NFM Choir directed by Lionel Sow, with a programme of Penderecki and two outstanding, 20th-century French composers.
Dialogue
Released by Alpha Classics, the latest album featuring the NFM Choir directed by Lionel Sow, with a programme of Penderecki and two outstanding, 20th-century French composers.
Album premiere: 8.05.2026
Publisher: National Forum of Music, Alpha Classics
Performers:
Lionel Sow - conductor
NFM Choir
The programme of this recording derives from an idea I have nurtured ever since the beginning of my work with the NFM Choir. European history reminds us that a dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe has not always been easy – and indeed sometimes impossible. However, the musical imagination enables the forging of links across the physical borders erected by history. This project outlines a purely artistic dialogue between the world of Krzysztof Penderecki and the French music of the 20th century. While taking different artistic paths, these composers nevertheless explore common territory: the memory of Christian sacred music and the use of modal writing, as well as a limitless expansion of tonality to the point where it is suspended or even entirely dissolves. Here the dialogue is neither one of chronology, nor of style in the strictest sense: rather, it takes place in the ear of the listener, the intimately shared sound of one and the same musical continent, spanned by tensions, but also by obvious affinities.
Lionel Sow
