MDG's multi-award-winning Les Six anthology series showcases the entire spectrum of an epoch. This installment is dedicated to Louis Durey, the eccentric outsider of Le Groupe des Six. Holger Falk's incredibly agile baritone and tremendous tonal range accompanied by Steffen Schleiermacher's sensitivity, verve and virtuosity on the piano yet again take the benchmark up a notch in art song excellence.

Hommage à Erik Satie is like an ironic theatre scene in a song: Charlie Chaplin makes an appearance, as well as screaming fish, eavesdropping elephants, some well-behaved musicians practising diminished chords; even an enchanting virtuoso piano cadenza... Musically, it is oriented towards Satie's Style dépouillé, with some rhythms having wafted over from Stravinsky.

Louis Durey was the first French composer to study the music of Arnold Schoenberg intensively. In Deux Lieder romantiques, based on poems by Heinrich Heine, Durey layers increasingly shrill chords which unfold above an inexorable E flat pedal, which in their structure of fourths certainly seem like an echo of Schoenberg's music.

In the song cycle Vergers set to Rilke's enigmatic poems, Durey goes harmonically and melodically far beyond his earlier compositions with enigmatic, ambiguous music reminiscent of Schoenberg, Messiaen, or even Philip Glass. The independence of the vocal part and the piano accompaniment is striking: both seem to move in separate harmonic and melodic worlds which only occasionally intersect.