Leconte de Lisle

Henri de Régnier (1864-1936) serait un écrivain presque oublié aujourd'hui si Bernard Quiriny ne lui avait, en 2013, consacré un essai qui donne envie de retourner vers son œuvre. En particulier vers ce singulier recueil de trois nouvelles dont deux se déroulent à Venise. Elles sont pleines d’une rêverie dont l’objet est presque indéterminé. Elles mettent en scène des collectionneurs, des antiquaires, des érudits dans le décor de maisons anciennes chargées d’un passé mystérieux.

The French instrument maker Sébastien Érard was significantly involved in the modern harp’s development. In 1810, he patented the fully chromatic double-action harp. Thanks to the instrument’s seven pedals and a sophisticated mechanism, it was now possible to change the string lengths and raise each note up to two semitones. This enabled the harpist to play in all keys without retuning the instrument. Composers such as Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy took advantage of these new possibilities and established the harp as an orchestra instrument. In his “Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration” (published in 1844), Hector Berlioz claimed that the harp should never be placed behind the orchestra.

The poetic renewal embodied by Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine and so many others after them radically changed the musical landscape and propelled French art song into a true golden age. This tribute to Fauré, the supreme master of the mélodie, gains its radiance from Marc Mauillon’s ideally clear voice and Anne Le Bozec’s delicate pianism. The singer’s second ‘solo’ recording on harmonia mundi shows him just as much at home in Faurean word setting as in the text of Lambert’s Leçons de Ténèbres.

In his program notes for this CD, Philippe Jaroussky persuasively argues that, particularly because the traditional repertoire for counter tenors is so small (and much of the Baroque material was in fact written for castrati, an entirely different voice type), there is no reason counter tenors should not explore a broader variety of vocal material. His performance of French mélodies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes an even more compelling case for his argument.

Pierce Brown est un auteur de science-fiction.
Diplômé de l'université en 2010, il a travaillé comme gestionnaire des médias sociaux dans une startup.
Red Rising (2014), son premier roman, a été acclamé par la critique et cité dans le New York Times Best Seller list.
En 2014, le studio Universal Pictures a acquis les droits de l'adaptation cinématographique du roman. …

The 150th anniversary of Charles Koechlin's birth in November 2017 is marked by the reissue of all the Koechlin recordings made by the Sudwestrundfunk. This release of Koechlin's orchestral works includes many world premiere recordings and gives a comprehensive overview of Koechlin's output- from the early orchestral songs to his orchestrations of works by other composers and to his huge later works. Koechlin's compositional style was very subtle, full of delicate, colorful combinations of instrumental sounds. Many of his colleagues allowed him to orchestrate their works, simply because Koechlin was a master of the art.