Juliette And Juliette

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…

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 ).

Juliette Hurel's 2013 album on Naïve explores pieces for flute and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, evoking the period between Classicism and early Romanticism. Perhaps the subtlest work of the program is Beethoven's Flute Sonata in B flat major, WoO A4, written in 1790 and fashioned under the influence of Haydn. Its sunny disposition and light textures are periodically interrupted by unexpected key changes and sudden digressions into the minor, characteristics that anticipate Beethoven's later development and mark it as a transitional work. His Serenade for flute and piano, Op. 41, is an arrangement of the Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25, and it has a similar, if sometimes deceptive, air of Classical simplicity, which is all the more apparent because of the brevity of the movements. Only Schubert's Variations on a Theme from Die schöne Müllerin is unequivocally Romantic, and its sudden changes of mood and key make it the most fascinating piece on the disc.

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.

”What makes Hector Berlioz such a great composer?”, asks conductor John Nelson. “In one word, originality … He broke all existing traditions of orchestration, structure, harmonic language and storytelling. Even today, his music is fresh, surprising us at every turn with inexpressible beauty.” Nelson now adds two more astonishingly original works by Berlioz – the ‘dramatic symphony’ Roméo et Juliette and the ‘lyric scene’ La Mort de Cléopâtre to his Erato discography. He continues the fruitful relationship with the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg, his choice for the recordings of Les Troyens, La Damnation de Faust, Harold en Italie and Nuits d’été. Joyce DiDonato, his unforgettable Didon and Marguerite, returns as the suicidal Cléopâtre and she is joined in Roméo et Juliette by tenor Cyrille Dubois (who was Iopas in Les Troyens), baritone Christopher Maltman, and the choruses of the Lisbon-based Gulbenkian Foundation and Strasbourg’s Opéra du Rhin.

Muse to the Parisian literary scene of the '50s, godmother of songwriter-led '60s French pop, and a self-reinventing torch singer from the '70s until now, Juliette Gréco is one of the great French recording artists of the 20th century. Born in Montpellier in 1929, Gréco was classically trained at the Paris Opera as a youngster. Forced to flee Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, and practically orphaned when her mother was jailed for her resistance to the Nazis in 1943, Gréco then sought refuge with her former French teacher in the St. Germain des Prés quarter of Paris.