Anne+ 2021

The Who‘s 1967 album The Who Sell Out will be reissued as a seven-disc super deluxe edition box set in April. The album was originally planned by Pete Townshend and the band’s managers (Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp) as a loose concept album with jingles and commercials linking the songs. This approach was partly because the record label were demanding a new record and Townshend felt as if he didn’t have enough songs!

Unable to find the right words for a friend in need, French film composer Anne Chmelewsky turns instead to music’s power to express the inexpressible. Here, in the unusual ensemble of trombone, strings, harp, vibraphone and piano, she creates exquisite beauty, coloured by a tender, almost otherworldly playfulness. Each instrument adds its magic: Harp, for instance, lends “Presque Valse” a beguiling innocence, while pulsing vibraphone gives an underlying urgency to “Ru”. In perhaps Chmelewsky’s most enticing track, “Jessica’s Escape”, lush strings and trombone inspire feelings of hope and warmth. In fact, you’ll find comfort and solace in every gorgeous track here.

Other than the piano, there were few instruments on which Chopin focused his attention, which makes this album featuring cellist Anne Gastinel something of a rarity - all the more so in the hands of this iconic French cellist and her partner Claire Désert, veterans of countless concerts and recordings over several decades. Their united voice - as always, remote from the chorus of the mundane and the media-fixated - is a subtle, inspired cantilena.

This recording is a tribute to the chromatic harp, which, with its rich colours and theatrical effects, was perfectly tuned to the impressionist and art nouveau atmosphere of the turn of the 20th century. Geoffrey Gordon's Jeux de Création is inspired by music from the 1920s, using both traditional and extended techniques, drawing on themes by Milhaud and Debussy to portray the past and present. Reflecting this aesthetic, the other works in this programme include the artistry of Ravel and Fauré, the quasi-orchestral effects of Debussy's Danses, and Caplet's sensuous and spectacular Divertissements.