21 Adele

Adele Live in New York City was Adele's one-night-only show at Radio City Music Hall, which took place on November 17, 2015. The show was directed by Beth McCarthy-Miller and broadcast on NBC on December 14, 2015. Jimmy Fallon served as the host, while Adele, Jonathan Dickins, and Lorne Michaels served as its executive producers.

In drama as well as in musical theater, the monologue is often used to express and illustrate the smallest nuances of emotions - even those that cannot or should not be expressed. In this recording, mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus and her piano accompanist Adele D'Aronzo devote themselves to this very interesting aspect of opera and song culture. Using selected works by Donizetti, Respighi, Rossini, Zingarelli, Viardot and Wagner as examples, the diverse narrative and expressive approaches of the monologue are exemplified.

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff. Both of them have drawn on their New York childhoods: ‘Long Time Ago’ weaves together the threads of our lives’ says Susan. Adèle continues: ‘The musical journey is immense, from the central repertory of American music – Barber, Copland, Ives – to cabaret songs (Heggie and Bolcom), with a detour by way of England: Britten, Vaughan Williams … For example, Jake Heggie’s Amor describes the journey across the city of faux-naif sex maniac. The police, the ice cream vendor, the gospel choir all shout “AMORI” when they see him. Samuel Barber’s Solitary Hotel is like an Edward Hopper painting in music, Aaron Copland’s At the River invites pilgrims to the church meeting: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river” … The programme unfolds like a wheel, a cycle that traverses the cardinal points of life.’

Adele Sebastian was an Afro American jazz flutist and singer, active from the early 70s (when she was still a teenager) until her untimely death at the age of 27 (!) in 1983 from a kidney failure. In fact she had been depending on monthly dialysis to stay alive for years. She lived through and for the music and you can hear it on her only solo album “Desert Fairy Princess” which was first issued in 1981. The mostly acoustic instrumentation brings a very natural and therefore rather retrospective sound considering the year the album was recorded. Adele and her band pull it off right from the start as if it had been 1966 and it was time for a revolution to shake the dust from the old time jazz. In a perfect way she mixes classic American vocal jazz elements with playful and more free passages, Latin music and tribal African sounds…