D Cinelike

Saint-Saëns's first opera, Le Timbre d'argent initially composed in 1864 need not fear comparison with some of the most celebrated works in the nineteenth-century French repertory. It depicts the nightmare of a man whose hallucinations anticipate by twenty years the fantastical apparitions of Offenbach's Les Contes d Hoffmann.

D’Indy was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, and a pupil of César Franck. Fauré described him as ‘The Samson of Music’ for his multifarious and generous-minded work as a composer, conductor, educator and propagandist who greatly strengthened French musical culture. Today the music of d’Indy is sadly neglected, which is why Chandos and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra have decided to embark upon a series devoted to his orchestral works with conductor Rumon Gamba. With a style essentially eclectic and strongly influenced above all by Beethoven and Wagner, d’Indy particularly excelled in orchestral composition. He drew particular inspiration from his native region in southern France, and formed a body of post-romantic works richly orchestrated, often inflected with folk-like melodies and employing Franck’s well-known ‘cyclic method’.

On their new GENUIN CD, baritone Florian Götz and the musicians of the Grundmann-Quartett dare to present well-known works in new contexts: they perform Franz Schubert's moving „Winterreise” in a version in which the vocal part is accompanied by English horn and string trio. Exciting chromatic worlds open up, and the moods of the individual songs take on new plasticity and tremendous expressive power. The subtle arrangement by Eduard Wesly, the uniquely personal baritone voice of Florian Götz, and the nuanced tonal mixtures of woodwind and strings all contribute equally to this.