Julie Fuchs

Les Pêcheurs de Perles is best known for its glorious duet, but Georges Bizet’s opera has much more to offer. This live recording more than ever brings out the brilliance of this oriental story about love, duty and friendship. In the last 150 years, Bizet’s piece has mainly been heard in editions that stray from the composer’s original composition. This album – on the contrary - offers the first recording in history of the 1863 premiere version, reconstructed and published by Bärenreiter in 2015. Les Pêcheurs de perles contains a quintessentially French blend of lyricism, exoticism and drama, and the four soloists (Julie Fuchs as Leïla, Cyrille Dubois as Nadir, Florian Sempey as Zurga and Luc Bertin-Hugault as Nourabad) belong to today’s best performers for this specialist repertoire.

Camille Saint-Saëns and the Prix de Rome… surely a strange bringing together of ideas, given that the composer never gained that coveted award and consequently never took up residence in the famous Villa Medici? All the same, Saint-Saëns entered the competition on two separate occasions and, peculiarly in the history of the competition, twelve years apart: firstly in 1852 and then in 1864. On the first occasion he was still an adolescent, devoted to worshipping the memory of the great Mendelssohn; behind him, by the time of the second occasion, were already a number of his masterpieces later to be confirmed by posterity – and he had become acquainted with Verdi and had also discovered Wagner.

The Song of the Earth is Gustav Mahler's most personal composition, as the composer himself revealed. It takes on all it's twilight hues with Stéphane Degout's vocal performance. Ardently conducted by Maxime Pascal, Le Balcon delivers a performance which sets the standard, using Arnold Schönberg's pared-down transcription in the royal acoustic setting of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Le Balcon and the Saint-Denis Festival have a long history, which began in 2014 with a recital by the soprano Julie Fuchs in the Music Pavilion of the Maison Education de la Légion d'honneur. Since then, all Le Balcon's concerts given in the Basilica of Saint-Denis have left their mark on our respective histories: whether it be Monteverdi's Vespers in 2015 (with a sound system and an electric guitar in the orchestra, a historic first for this repertoire), the final scene of Stockhausen's Samstag aus Licht in 2016 (impressively rigorous, it literally transfixed the audience) or Mahler's seventh symphony in 2017. Freedom, innovation, creativity but total respect for the works and composers are the words that immediately come to mind when thinking of Le Balcon, whose collective ad-venture is the basis of a faultless career.

Following on the international success of their recording of Lully's Bellerophon, Christophe Rousset and his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques present Hercule mourant (Hercules Dying) - an undiscovered operatic treasure by Antoine Dauvergne. When Francoeur and Rebel took over as directors of the Academie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) in 1757, they decided to promote some of the new generation of composers. Among them was Dauvergne, who appears to have enjoyed great favor at that time. Premiered in 1762, Hercule mourant was a success, receiving eighteen performances.

Following the release of the original soundtrack by just a matter of a month (thereby ensuring the irritation of some fans), the deluxe version of Across the Universe is a double-disc, 29-track set containing almost all of the songs featured in Julie Taymor's film, all presented in the order they are in the film…