The title of this collection "Présences lointaines" (Distant Presences) pays homage to the great philosopher and musician Vladimir Jankélévitch, for whom music is still the best and perhaps only path to eternal life. Indeed, Loth’s wife hardens to stone as she turns toward the past and the future slips away, dissolving into a polyphonic fog. But the present, through the miracle of recording, brings to us Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, the flamboyant musical cousin of François Couperin, and Antoine Mariotte, who may not have been familiar to Jankélévitch, but whose inspired, romantic verve, passion in the French manner, and passages of Lisztian fiorature laid over the beautiful cantilenas of his Nocturne, would have earned his admiration. It is with Didier Rotella’s homage to Ravel that the future appears on the horizon, and in it we encounter the passion and outbursts of virtuosity, so quintessentially Ravelian, that envelop a mysterious and concealed musical fabric. © Françoise Thinat, founder of the "Galaxie-Y" Fund, which supports this Solstice recording