Amour (love) 2024

NOW is going back to the 1970s to proudly present the next instalment in our ongoing ‘Yearbook’ series – with 80 tracks across 4 CDs, celebrating a magnificently diverse year of Pop singles… NOW – Yearbook 1977.

Johnny Hallyday Fils d'Huguette Clerc (1920-2006) et d'un père belge Léon Smet (1908-1989), Jean-Philippe Smet - alias Johnny Hallyday - voit le jour le 15 juin 1943 à la Cité Malesherbes à Paris. Quelques mois après sa naissance, son père quitte le foyer, obligeant sa mère à reprendre une activité professionnelle. Le bébé est alors confié à sa tante paternelle, Hélène Mar, qui l'élève avec l'aide de ses filles Menen et Desta.

The fashionable literary salons of Paris were centres of experimentation in the refined art of conversation that expressed an idealised vision of love as well as a most poetic depiction of aristocratic society. The women who founded these salons, such as the Marquise de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudery, exerted a considerable influence on social culture and its fashion for preciosite, creating a poetic style whose inevitably plaintive accents would swiftly lead lovers who frequented such salons down the winding paths of the pays de Tendre. "The true character of those who love is composed of tenderness and plaintiveness", according to Abbe Charles Cotin – and music was employed as a means of expressing every nuance of amorous feeling that many poets of the style galant took great pains to depict. The musicians who were most in vogue would then take their galant verses and set them to song in the form of airs serieux, a genre which dominated all secular French music for most of the reign of Louis XIV. This album, a world premiere recording, is devoted to the airs serieux of Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, a scion of one of the most prestigious families of French musicians of the 17th century.

Dans cet album, Frédéric François revisite ses plus grands succès, offrant aux auditeurs une compilation de ses chansons les plus emblématiques. Avec sa voix chaleureuse et ses mélodies entraînantes, Frédéric François transporte son public à travers des décennies de musique romantique et passionnée. Les 19 morceaux sélectionnés sont une célébration de l'amour, de la nostalgie et de l'émotion, reflétant le talent intemporel de l'artiste. En bonus, l'album inclut deux versions studio inédites : "Mon cœur te dit je t'aime" et "Je t'aime à l'italienne", qui enrichissent encore cette collection de succès intemporels.

In their first release on harmonia mundi, Gustavo Gimeno and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra offer us a dazzling reading of the Turangalîla- Symphonie.

French composer Olivier Messiaen was famously synesthetic, “hearing” colors as harmony and seeing colors in sound. The Turangalîla-symphonie summed up the composer’s passions for nature, birdsong, Catholicism, Eastern philosophy, music, and romantic love as embodied in the legend of Tristan and Isolde; in this concert, Andris Nelsons leads this work that the BSO premiered in 1949 under Leonard Bernstein’s baton. The brilliant Yuja Wang takes on the work’s hefty piano part and Cécile Lartigau performs on the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. Turangalîla was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky.

A keystone in the modern chanson genre, French cabaret singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour entertained the world for close to 75 years. In the early '50s, he often opened for Edith Piaf, and composed several songs for her, thus beginning a solid reputation as both a gifted writer and a unique song stylist. Aznavour had a special talent for writing and singing from unusual points of view, creating personal and compassionate character studies that expanded the emotional range of the typical pop ballad. He also acted in dozens of films, most famously Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. Aznavour continued to perform and record music until just before his death in 2018. His status as the quintessential French popular culture icon was something of an irony for a man who identified himself most closely with his Armenian heritage. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian, his French roots derived from the fact that his family fled the threat of massacre by the Turks – his father was a singer and sometime restauranteur, while his mother was an actress and part-time seamstress.