…Been working on a discography of the French label Cybelia, prodded on by reader Arnaud.
Cybelia was a small French label, run by Argentinian-French violinist Eric Alberti and in operation from the end of the LP era (1982) to 1995, and they were valuable for releasing works by composers (predominantly French) that were (both the works and composers) rarer and more obscure then than now – but many still are: Albert Roussel’s Violin Sonatas, String Trio and seldom recorded First Symphony, chamber music by Arthur Honegger including his Violin Sonatas, Florent Schmitt’s Piano Music and ballets Oriane et le Prince d’amour and Antoine et Cléopâtre (conducted by Leif Segerstam), André Jolivet’s Piano Sonatas and String Trio, the works for guitar and the piano music of Henri Sauguet, the complete string quartets of Milhaud, and composers like George Migot, Jean Cras, Charles Koechlin (including a premiere recording of his Jungle Book cycle, conducted by Leif Segerstam), Paul Le Flem, Roger-Ducasse, Gabriel Dupont, Dynam Victor and Raphaël Fumet, Guy Ropartz, André Caplet, Charles Tournemire… Alberti’s tastes in contemporary music were apparently very conservative, championing composers like Jean Françaix, Jacques Bondon, Edmund Pendelton, Pierre Ancelin, Roger Calmel, Aubert Lemeland – not the cutting edge. Other than the very bizarre meditation / space / Buddhist-inspired music by the obscure Guy Besançon (an organist and painter who also goes by the name Bezançon) and some of the operas listed below, the only CD of truly “avant-garde” instrumental music released by Cybelia was by Alberti’s fellow Argentinian-French compatriot José Luis Campana. Not all of the early LPs were reissued to CD, regrettably. After the label’s demise some of those recording were reissued by Marco Polo and its budget-price subsidiary Naxos, and somes others by the French Integral Classic.
Cybelia also released operas by Marcel Landowski (Montségur), Charles Chaynes (Blood Wedding after Llorca), André Bon (The Abduction of Persephone) and Renaud Gagneux (Orphée). But one of their greatest feats was in 1988, with the first-ever publication of Messiaen’s late opera Saint François d’Assise, with the artistic forces of the creation at the Paris Opera in November 1983 (including Christiane Eda-Pierre, José van Dam, conducted by Seiji Ozwa).
My projected discography includes Cybelia’s LPs as well. There are gaps in the label numbering sequence on my listing, for which I have found no releases, and I think (but can’t certify) that there were never any. For instance, Cybelia’s first LP was label-numbered CY 609, and the next one CY 629. What about the twenty in between, or the eight before 609? I conjecture that Cybelia was back then distributed by whoever, who used the full numbering sequence but different alphabetical prefixes to indicate the label (CY for Cybelia). But this is mere conjecture.
To solve the riddle and a few others, I thought of getting in touch with Alberti, if he was still around. Indeed, he seems to be: he’s got a website, https://www.ericalberti.com/, with a bio and a short history of the label (https://www.ericalberti.com/info/ , in French only), and where one learns that Alberti now seems active… in astrology. Okay… A very reclusive astrologer it seems, as there is no contact form on the website. There is a login link where one can set up an account by sending a request, which I take to be a sort of trial race to select only the elect few – and it seems I’m not one of them, as I have received no response. There’s a Facebook account for an Eric Alberti who, based on the indistinct profile photo seems to be an elderly violinist, but the account is entirely inactive. So I guess I’ll have to trace my way through the riddles of Cybelia’s discography alone.
Anyway, what prompted me to return to the discography, other than the encouragement of Arnaud, is that I found one of Cybelia’s CD releases for cheap on eBay: Pierre Ancelin’s Passion Play Filius Hominis on CY 853. I didn’t expect too much of the music (or rather: expected it to be disapointingly conservative) and enjoyed it more than I expected. It is fitting that I recently reviewed a number of recording of Arthur Honegger’s La Danse des Morts on a libretto by French playright and poet Paul Claudel, and of Frank Martin’s valedictory Requiem, as Ancelin’s Filius Hominis evoked a Danse des Morts that would have been set to music by Martin.
Getting back to Cybelia prompted me to re-post here three Cybelia or Cybelia-derived reviews from over ten years ago: the José Luis Campana program mentioned above, on CY 894, the bizarre world-music meets Buddha meditation CD of Guy Besançon on CY 859, and Georges Migot’s Le Zodiaque – Twelve Concert Studies by Jacqueline Eymar, a double-CD published not by Cybelia but by Integral Classic in 2005, INT 221.144, but deriving from two old LPs published in 1959-1960 by the French label Lumen, and reissued to LP by Cybelia in 1984 on CY 665-666 – Alberti’s interest in astrology is obviously not recent. The latter review I had not, at the time, been able to publish on Amazon.com, as the CD wasn’t listed back then (I later established a seller account on Amazon.com, not to sell anything but to be able to create pages of the CDs I wanted to review and that weren’t already listed). So I published it in French on Amazon.fr. I’ve reposted here the English version.
Finally, as I was perusing the discograhy of Georges Migot (1891-1976), one of those obscure French composers championed in its days by Cybelia, I chanced on another Migot CD on Integral Classic and this one an original recording from 1999, of chamber music pieces with harp and woodwinds, INT 221.108. Written between 1924 and 1962 and ranging from tributes to Debussy’s Sonata for Flute Viola and Harp to the insouciant bonhomie associated to pre-war “musique française”, they are nowhere “cutting edge”, but charming nonethless. At the end of that review I’ve added a discography of Migot releases on Cybelia and Integral.