Cathy Jean Little Sick Twist

“Suave and sparkling music, sprinkled with dream”. This is how, with this beautiful sentence, a music festival had defined our recital. Those words fully suit the idea we had while we were imagining our program, both entertaining and rich in music, emotions and delights. Véronique Poltz has put together some arrangements in harmony with this rare duo.

With "Seigneur", Roberto Alagna delivers an album imbued with spirituality. Between faith, love and hope, the tenor pays a highly personal tribute to the immense cathedral of lyric art to which he regularly adds his stone.

The present album is the second of two recorded by the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège and Jean-Jacques Kantorow to commemorate the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns. On the first instalment the team offered us ‘deeply impressive performances in stunning sound’ (theclassicreview.com) of the composer’s first and second symphonies and the unnumbered Symphony in A major, but now the time has come for Saint-Saëns’ crowning glory in the symphonic genre: his Symphony No. 3 in C minor, generally known as the ‘Organ Symphony’. The work was composed in 1886, and Saint-Saëns had planned to dedicate it to Liszt but the latter’s death the same year caused the dedication in the published score to be modified to ‘in memory of Franz Liszt’.

The music in this album spans a forty-year period from 1948 to 1988 and reflects DUTILLEUX’s stylistic development as a composer. He considered the Sonata to be the first main work in his catalogue and it represents a turning away from tradition and embraces the transformative musical explorations of the day. The Three Préludes are pieces of concentrated atmospheres, ‘a kind of study of timbres’, in the composer’s words, and each are dedicated to a renowned pianist: No. 1 to Arthur Rubinstein, No. 2 to Claude Helffer, and No. 3 to Eugene Istomin. Dutilleux’s lively music for the ballet Le Loup (‘The Wolf’) is heard here in a première recording of the original piano solo version.