Dr. Juliette Engel

Three leading soloists celebrate Nature in the Romantic era. Flautist Juliette Hurel and pianist Hélène Couvert, currently celebrating thirty years of musical partnership, are joined for this recording by cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand, who was voted ‘Instrumental Soloist of the Year’ at the French Music Awards 2022. They present a recital that enables us to meet the miller’s apprentice imagining his impending death surrounded by the flowers given him by his lost love (in transcriptions of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin ) and the water nymph Undine, who seeks to gain a human soul (in Reinecke’s Undine Sonata ).

A brilliant dancer before becoming “famous throughout Europe for his learned and elaborate sonatas, and for the elegance of his performance on the violin”, Jean-Marie Leclair is far more than the sum of his talents. His music is woven with the multiple threads of his life, carrying within it all the facets of his technical and musical explorations, his travels, his impressions, which have moulded man as much as musician.

Juliette Hurel and Hélène Couvert, who have long enjoyed a close rapport on the concert platform and on disc, here celebrate five French women composers at the turn of the twentieth century. Countess Clémence de Grandval was the composer of some sixty songs, of which Saint-Saëns said: ‘They would certainly be famous if their composer did not have what many people regard as the irremediable defect of being a woman.’

Secular cantatas of love and tragedy by a Neapolitan precursor of Pergolesi, in world premiere recordings.

Juliette Nourredine, known to her fans simply as Juliette, is an acclaimed singer/songwriter from France whose albums regularly chart within the national Top Ten. Born on September 25, 1962, in Paris, France, the chanteuse began her performance career in Toulouse, where as a teenager she performed the songs of Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf on piano. In time she began writing songs of her own and singing. One of her early performances, a theater show from 1986, was released independently on cassette as Juliette (1987).

For her first recital, Juliette Journaux evokes the figure of the Wanderer: a wayfarer, a traveller, a man who walks alone, without apparent purpose. He confronts a Nature that is beyond him and his deepest thoughts. The wanderer's drifting is also inseparable from the dream, the acceptance of a dilated time. Musically, one immediately thinks of the worlds of Schubert, Mahler and Wagner… Another aspect of this project is Juliette Journaux's passion for transcription. In tackling the difficult task of transcribing vocal or orchestral works for solo piano, she draws on her knowledge of the orchestra and the operatic voice thanks to her three masters degrees in piano, vocal accompaniment and voice direction from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Paris…