Entrevisions

In 2016 Sarah Defrise unearthed more than twenty unpublished songs by Joseph Jongen (1873-1953), some of them preserved amongst the composer's private papers. Such a discovery is an important event in the Belgian musical landscape. This young soprano now offers the first complete recording of these songs, of which this constitutes the first volume. We have chosen to focus on works from both the composer's youth and his maturity. This album therefore presents an unpublished cycle of setting of poems by Armand Silvestre (1892), the famous cycle op. 25 (1902), from which the first song had always previously been missing, and a selection of later songs dating from 1909 to 1928. Jongen's sensitive and subtle art is carried by the intelligent and luminous performance by the duo formed by Sarah with the English pianist Craig White.