Banat

As always with André, ‘WONDERFUL WORLD’ is a brilliant product, bringing you a fabulous summer evening concert in Maastricht. The Platinum Tenors sing a world-famous aria from Georges Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and the well-known ‘Amor, vida de mi vida’. Carmen Monarcha shines as Madam Butterfly, Donij Van Doorn sings the Vilja song with great passion and Mirusia Louwerse steals everyone’s heart with a song from ‘The Phantom of the Opera’.

Another excellent Sublime Frequencies collection of Omar Souleyman's work, these very modern electronic Arabic folk songs were recorded live.

Founded and directed by the Franco-Hungarian conductor Bruno Kele-Baujard, the Ensemble Zene has made a specialty of daring and off-the-beaten path programs. Its evocative name - "zene" is the Hungarian word for "music" - inclines it towards the Magyar-speaking repertoire, and it is therefore quite natural that it devotes its second recording to the a cappella works of Bartók, Kodály and Ligeti, whose centenary is being celebrated in 2023.

Only one year and a half after their first meeting in Budapest in early 1905, Bartók and Kodály were eager to jointly publish their first settings of Hungarian folk songs. In their foreword to the volume Magyar népdalok (Hungarian Folk Songs), they declare their goal thus: “…to get the general public to know and appreciate folk songs.”