Released on February 27, 2026 by Alpha classics – Running time: 78min.

About this album

For her new recording, which she has named “Or” (light), cellist Sonia Wieder Atherton has imagined a narrative in two stages, “like freeze-frames, like incursions into time”: first Couperin’s Les leçons de ténèbres or the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. Prophecy is the time of the future. Before the destruction and the tears: “we hear the song of the prophet who mourns, but the possibility that it won’t happen still exists”.

Then comes “our time”: “with his dramatic force, Vivaldi brings us face to face with our present. He says, ‘It’s here now. “Sonia chose several opera excerpts as well as two violin concertos.

She transcribed most of the pieces on this program, for solo cello or for two cellos and two voices, which she plays herself. She also imagined bridges to other lights, those of Mahut’s percussion and Marius Atherton’s electric guitar and MS20 synthesizer.