Lux – Nº 793 – 13 de Julho 2015

BEBO BEST aka The Alchemist Bebo Baldan, producer, musician, film composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist (bass, percussion, drums, sitar, guitar & keyboards) has worked on over 300 albums, and many soundtracks for films and TV, and has international recognition for the wise and original use of electronics and ethnic music that distinguished his works. His collaborations with such personalities as Gilberto Gil, Moni Ovadia Jon Hassel, Steven Brown, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, Nitin Sawhney, Trilok Gurtu, Sinead O' Connor, David Torn, Ruichy Sakamoto, Frank Zappa, the American violinist Stephen James (Ravi Shankar, Bill Laswell), and guitarist David Torn (David Sylvian, Jan Garbarek, Don Cherry) has allowed him to explore ethnic and non-European types of music, an original Mediterranean formula influenced by jazz, traditional and warm electronic music.

French composer Charles Dieupart spent most of his active life in London, where he became famous as the founder of the Opera Season of the Queen Theatre of Haymarket. He was much sought after as a harpsichord teacher, and no wonder his most famous work was the “Six Suittes de Clavessin” (original spelling), a highly original work which formed the bridge between the flourishing French style and the contrapuntal German style of keyboard writing. Also the great Johann Sebastian Bach was influenced by this work, as traces can be found in his English Suites As a PhD in Historical Musicology Portuguese harpsichordist Fernando Jaloto did extensive research into Dieupart’s work, and the performance practice of its time.

Glossa continues its major contribution to the recording of the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau with a further ballet héroïque, Les Fêtes de Polymnie, directed by György Vashegyi and featuring accomplished ramistes such as Aurélia Legay, Emöke Barath or Mathias Vidal, and led by the incomparable Véronique Gens in the various vocal roles that appear in the Prologue and the three Entrées of this work.

The music of the French Baroque has always been a tougher sell than the flashy Italian or the faith-embodying German, and when French Baroque sacred music is recorded it's almost always in the weighty grand motet genre, redolent of French court splendor. These Leçons de Ténèbres, or Responsories for Holy Week, of Michel-Richard de Lalande are something else again: intimate pieces for soprano and a small ensemble.

Anne Sylvestre, Agnes Bihl, Nathalie Miravette, Dorothee Daniel - Carre de Dames (2015) {Banco Music BAN3269}
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French Pop / French Chanson

If there is one thing that brings together Anne Sylvestre and Agnès Bihl, two singers of different generations, it is the love of the good word and the way to make it live. Supported by pianists Dorothée Daniel and Nathalie Miravette, they reinterpret here, as a duo, a few selected moments from their personal repertoire. The result is spontaneous, often very funny (les Imbéciles, Son mec à mo). But what seduces the most in this album in the form of parenthesis is the pleasure it contains and the good mood that emerges from it. What does it matter if the interpretations are not always perfect, since the result is jubilant?

Though participants in the "authentic performance practice" movement might insist otherwise, the search for the old is really a search for the new. This statement certainly captures the spirit that Dutch keyboardist Gustav Leonhardt brought to his early music performances in the 1950s. His style was characterized not by a rigorous observance of rules, but by the intuitive, almost spiritual connection it tried to establish with the music a kind of authenticity that sought validation not so much from a rigorously academic accuracy (though Leonhardt is by no means historically careless) as from its having an "authentic" effect on the listener.