Le Bridgeur

Stereo Deluxe present Le Café Abstrait Vol. 9. 30 excellent Chillout and Downtempo tracks: Electrix, Eskadet, Tripswitch, Bob Holroyd, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Solar Fields, Lemongrass and many more.

Miniaturas lunares est une expérience acoustique qui établit des ponts entre les musiques populaires, classiques et contemporaines. Miniaturas lunares est une succession de fragments sonores très courts, des histoires minimales qui s’enchaînent. Ces miniatures alternent des poèmes, des chansons et des morceaux de musique instrumentale. J’ai imaginé une série de musiques extrêmement légères et éphémères. Des moments de vie très intimes où l’on s’attache au présent pour que le temps s’allonge et devienne élastique. Des instants de joie, de mélancolie, de surprises, détonants, d’humeur mais aussi des instants nostalgiques qui se succèdent vertigineusement.

This recording provides an opportunity to discover a forgotten Baroque operatic treasure, a zarzuela, the key dramatic and musical genre of the Spanish Golden Age. Sumptuous choruses, poignant arias and folksongs blend in a rich and spectacular narrative, whose music was falsely attributed to Antonio Literes before Sebastián Durón (1660-1716) was acknowledged as its composer in 2009! Another peculiarity of the work is that it is sung by seven sopranos, who are even given the roles of Apollo, Neptune and the monster Triton. Only the part of an old man, the seer Proteus, is assigned to a tenor. Ana Quintans in the title role, Isabelle Druet, Anthea Pichanick, Caroline Meng and Cyril Auvity are among the cast of this colourful zarzuela, whose modern stage premiere in 2019 enjoyed great success.

In the seventeenth century, the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice took in young orphan girls who received advanced musical instruction. The concerts given there attracted visitors from all over the world, curious to hear these divine voices which remained invisible, since the girls performed hidden behind the grilles of the chapel gallery. Vivaldi became Maestro de’ Concerti of the Pietà in 1714, and it was his pupils who performed his famous Nisi Dominus. Today they are succeeded by the mezzo-soprano Eva Zaïcik, who brings out the full poignancy of the aria ‘Cum dederit’. Another motet by Vivaldi, Invicti bellate, also composed for the Pietà, features in this programme planned and conducted by Vincent Dumestre. He invites us on a musical journey centred on the figure of woman and on divine praise, with composers awaiting discovery such as Serafino Razzi (1534-1619) and Soto de Langa (1531-1611).

As early as 1761, a year before his masterpiece Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck largely renewed another musical genre, the ballet, with his adaptation of a work by Molière for Viennese audiences: Don Juan. Another work, Sémiramis, followed a year later. These two works are innovative in that they offer, for the first time, a coherent narrative in which all the resources of the orchestra are put at the service of expressiveness. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations bring out all the nuances of these scores, reminding us that a quarter of a century before Mozart, the stages of Europe were treated to all the evocative power of music by another outstanding figure: Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Following the success of his solo recordings, Paolo Zanzu returns at the head of his ensemble Le Stagioni with ‘Officina Romana’, featuring the countertenor Carlo Vistoli. In the early eighteenth century, Rome was one of the great music capitals of Europe. In the space of a few years, Corelli, Handel, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Caldara, Cesarini and many others crossed paths there, surrounded by painters, sculptors, poets and philosophers who were among the great names of the age. The fruit of long reflection and research, ‘Officina Romana’ crystallises this unique moment in the history of music by recreating an idealised musical evening, a conversazione, a sort of liberal meeting of lofty minds in the palace of a Roman cardinal, with a programme mingling vocal and instrumental music in both orchestral and chamber formation.

The five Canticles constitute a series of five musical works by composer Benjamin Britten. The pieces were written at various points in his career, with three of them written as memorials. Instrumentation differs on each piece, and several are based on non-sacred texts. A review in Opera Today notes, "Britten didn't draw upon the Scriptures for the texts of his canticles, which resemble cantatas more than church hymns in scale and structure, but an intense religious spirit pervades them all." Critic Peter Evans notes the works contain a "mood of spiritual elevation intense enough to demand realization in an ambitious musical structure."