The year 2012 marks the tercentenary of the birth of Frederick the Great, whose political and military glory has often relegated his musical talent to the status of a mere hobby. But Frederick II was not only the key personality of Berlin musical life for the whole of the 18th century – as is shown by the works of the composers presented on this CD, all of whom worked at his court at some point in their careers – but also an excellent flautist who left posterity a number of fine flute sonatas from his own pen.
These lively, idiomatic and sometimes witty performances show CPE Bach’s harpsichord songs, early precursors of the Romantic Lied, to be far more than museum pieces, from the Three Different Attempts at a Single Song for Hexameters through to a Fantasy in C minor with Hamlet’s Monologue.
My lover Saint John 1 is a French song from 1942 which was a huge success. Realistic love song recounting the next day without a girl for a seductive, lyrics by Leo Agel and music of Emile Carrara on a musette waltz rhythm. Françoise Hardy is the debut studio album by the pop singer Françoise Hardy French. It was released in November 1962 in France. Like Many of Hardy's albums Earlier, It was released with no title, except for her name on the cover. Claude Nougaro, born September 9, 1929 in Toulouse and died March 4, 2004 in Paris, was a French poet and singer-songwriter. A great lover of jazz, Latin and African music, playing words with the French language, uniting French songs and rhythms.
What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.
"…Gold closes out on a fantastic note with "Verschwende Deine Jugend," a full-on destructive beast in the "Der Mussolini" mode, and "Greif Nach den Sternen," a steady-paced, almost anthemic number with the trademark D.A.F. blend of brusqueness still intact."