François Xavier Roth

After their revelatory recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth give us the exotic Mother Goose suite and Le tombeau de Couperin which sound so new thanks to this period-instrument guise (light on vibrato, and with instruments appropriate to the time of composition). Ma Mére l’Oye, with its unique colours, benefits most from this approach, less sweet than normal and always strikingly original. Le tombeau…, a work tinged with sadness, really does seem to reach back into the depths of French music, evoking a past age to remember the composer’s friends lost to the First World War.

Toscanini regarded this orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition as a genuine treatise on instrumentation, on a par with that of Berlioz: scored for the same instrumental forces as La Valse, Ravel’s version quickly established itself ahead of all the many competing orchestrations of Mussorgsky’s piano suite! In François-Xavier Roth’s view, La Valse and the Pictures together represent the peak of the composer’s output for the symphony orchestra of his time – that is to say, as the musicians of Les Siècles reconstruct it for us today. What a joy to get back to the original colours of this music!

A century after his death on 25 March 1918, many harmonia mundi artists are eager to pay tribute to Claude Debussy, the magician of melody and timbre, the great ‘colourist’ and father of modern music. With the musicians of Les Siècles, we have the opportunity to discover - on period instruments - the original colours of such key works as Jeux and the Nocturnes. After his sumptuous recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, François-Xavier Roth adds a new and splendid achievement to his discography.

Renaud Capuçon expands his wide-ranging concerto discography with Bartók’s two violin concertos. Composed almost three Decades apart, they are highly contrasted, inhabiting very different emotional and musical worlds. Partnering Capuçon is the London Symphony Orchestra under its Principal Guest Conductor, François-Xavier Roth.