François Xavier Roth

The dance permeated every layer of Romantic society. From popular dance halls to courtly salons, people showed their public face, enjoyed themselves and met one another in waltz time or to the rhythms of the quadrille or the polka. At the same time, ballet gained unprecedented fame on the stage of the Paris Opéra. The music that accompanied this frantic round in France has long been neglected, whereas the Viennese have never ceased to celebrate their waltzes. Under the expert baton of François-Xavier Roth, the orchestra Les Siècles has set out to rediscover this French repertory using historical instruments. Their album explores the output of both established composers – Camille Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet – and their colleagues who specialised in Terpsichorean entertainment, including Philippe Musard, Isaac Strauss, Émile Waldteufel and Hervé.

Continuing their exploration of Ravel’s output, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles offer us two works linked by his love of Spain. Alongside the famous Bolero, which regains its original flavour here on period instruments, is Ravel’s first opera, which flirted with libertinism: though its outstanding cast consists entirely of native French-speakers, this caustic ‘Hour’ remains quintessentially Spanish!

François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles offer us a double-sided portrait of Saint-Saëns here. On one side, some of the most fascinating symphonic poems of French Romanticism are revealed in all the shimmering timbres of the period. On the other, we rediscover a composer who enjoyed a good laugh (The Carnival of the Animals also returns to it's original colors), when he was not involved in the early days of the cinema, with the very first music ever composed for a film.

Isabelle Faust and François-Xavier Roth explore here extremely contrasting facets of Stravinsky’s output for violin. From the Concerto to the Pastorale, the composer plays with codes and colours, sketching extraordinarily vivid soundscapes. Once again, the musicians of Les Siècles have succeeded in rediscovering the works’ original dynamic by using period instruments – and that changes everything!

Anton Bruckner dedicates his 9th Symphony to "Dear God", knowing full well that his heart disease will kill him.

The evocative music of Claude Debussy has been described as the foundation of modern music. How did the composer come to develop his unique style though? One of today’s most charismatic conductors, with a reputation for enterprising programming, LSO Principal Guest Conductor François-Xavier Roth presents the UK premiere of a previously lost work by the young Debussy, alongside some of his earliest inspirations.

A new aesthetic calls for new forms: such is the challenge the composer set for himself in the two works presented here. In Les Nuits d’été, Berlioz pioneered, well before Mahler and Ravel, a song cycle for voice and orchestra. In Harold in Italy, scored for large orchestra and solo viola, he experimented with the symphonic genre. These period-instrument performances by Les Siècles, led by François-Xavier Roth, with violist Tabea Zimmermann, also feature Stéphane Degout in the vocal cycle, heard here in the composer’s own version for baritone. File under: out of the ordinary.

Pelléas et Mélisande has taken it's place as one of opera's greatest masterpieces. Debussy deployed a unique style in this work, flexible and natural, never forcing the prosody of words and phrases. In this new historically informed interpretation, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have endeavored to do justice to this music that is at once so strong and so delicate, supported by a handpicked cast of today's finest French singers.