Isabel Lüdi Roth

SOAKED IN COLOUR is a collection of music from different eras and genres, interpreted by the special line-up of four cellists and one singer. Early music meets jazz, art song meets pop song. The collective wanders through different epochs and styles of music history and each piece is specially orchestrated. SOAKED IN COLOUR takes you through a colourful mix of sounds, dives into the depths, surges once more into the air, and refreshes the senses.

Through Romany Songland, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian takes the listener on a journey through lieder by Brahms, Bizet and Dvorak, operetta by Lehar, Kalman and Herbert, and spicy Spanish songs.

Ligeti’s interest in sonorities and instrumental timbres is well known. François-Xavier Roth and the musicians of Les Siècles, themselves true alchemists of sounds and colours, recorded shimmering interpretations of these three works in 2016, displaying unprecedented clarity and naturalness, and also tremendous humour. They have been superbly remastered for this reissue.

After a period-instrument reading of the Symphony no.1 that received unanimous acclaim from the critics, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles return to Mahler. Joined by the luminous voice of Sabine Devieilhe for the famous finale, they offer us their vision of the Fourth Symphony, which in its own way marks the composer’s transition to modernity, and reveal unsuspected colours and instrumental balances. We still have much to learn about the polyphonic transparency possible within Mahler’s big orchestra!

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.

Lead singer of Van Halen. He left the band in 1985, to be replaced (mainly) by Sammy Hagar, but after a 21 year break he rejoined them in 2006. In 2007 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…

At 16 cuts, this Greatest Hits collection from the inimitable David Lee Roth is four short of 1998's Best, but with the exception of fan favorite "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?," all of Diamond Dave's best post-Van Halen hits are accounted for…

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.

Silence is an indispensable condition for the appearance of sound, to make the verb habitable. When language could not express the deepest human abysses, music emerged as a privileged way to put us in contact with the mystical, with the transcendent element of reality. The musical rite then emerged, where word and melody go hand in hand to access a space where spirits and gods are honoured, where the unknown and even the forbidden are invoked. The rite is a sacred and protected ceremonial, a symbolic place where human beings congregate to access the unmanifest, that which likes to hide. Music is the heart of the rite, the beat that gives life and illuminates the rhythms of the ceremony. But if the rite is the map, it is so because it also indicates the limits, everything that is beyond our understanding. The rite is the entrance to the mysterious, and music, the vehicle that leads us to this terra incognita. For this reason, music eventually passes into the empire of silence, and in it its journey culminates. Music is a rite because it is the only language that brings us back to the condition of all that is possible. Music is rite because it is the only language that speaks to us of the impossible.