Cyrille Dubois

The French tenor, Cyrille Dubois, returns to his favourite period in music: Baroque. Pursuing his mission as a trailblazer, he has teamed up with the Hungarian conductor György Vashegyi and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles to create a recital aimed at reviving little-known treasures of the Eighteenth Century French operatic repertoire - several of the pieces are recorded here for the first time.

The five Canticles constitute a series of five musical works by composer Benjamin Britten. The pieces were written at various points in his career, with three of them written as memorials. Instrumentation differs on each piece, and several are based on non-sacred texts. A review in Opera Today notes, "Britten didn't draw upon the Scriptures for the texts of his canticles, which resemble cantatas more than church hymns in scale and structure, but an intense religious spirit pervades them all." Critic Peter Evans notes the works contain a "mood of spiritual elevation intense enough to demand realization in an ambitious musical structure."

Little can be as momentous for a work as it's encounter with an extraordinary interpreter. And today - there's no doubt about it - Fauré has found his voice in that of Cyrille Dubois. A bright, clear timbre and impeccable diction undoubtedly contribute to the remarkable complicity that we witness, but it's secret lies above all perhaps in the French tenor's singular ability to convey an atmosphere, evoke an emotion, a feeling, a mood - in short, bring out all the poetic qualities of the music.

‘So Romantique !’ illustrates the ‘profoundly sentimental’ side of French opera from the 1830s to the 1900s, which gradually came to be judged overwrought and was condemned to partial oblivion. ‘I am convinced that this is because the principals of interpretation were lost’, says the tenor Cyrille Dubois. ‘I have therefore put together this programme, which gives pride of place to rarities while highlighting the theatrical character and the use of registers so emblematic of the French ténor de grâce , in the hope of restoring this precious French heritage to its former glory.’ The sleuthing skills of the Palazzetto Bru Zane have assembled these treasures by Bizet, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Auber, Halévy, Donizetti, Thomas and Delibes, the less well-known Godard, Dubois and Silver, and the virtually unknown Luce-Varlet and Clapisson. With the Orchestre National de Lille conducted by Pierre Dumoussaud, the French tenor deploys the full range of his artistry, the impressive high notes, the luminous tone and the graceful phrasing that is ‘so Cyrille’!

Tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës bring together Nadia and Lili Boulanger's finest works as they release their new record. The precocious early talent that is reflected in these mélodies echoes to their singular path. Nourished from Debussy and Fauré, these pieces also show a remarkable boldness and unusual nature that would probably have given birth to the most striking works of the twentieth century, if Lili's life hadn't been taken away aged 24, leading her sister Nadia to stop composing.

A mysterious opera, an historical piano, two singers, and four instrumentalists. Ensemble Hexameron presents a rich variety of instrumental and vocal music, thus painting a musical portrait of Paris at the dawn of the nineteenth century; a time when different cultures and genres were at crossroads, and when Mozart was yet to be truly discovered as a composer in France.