Maurice Andre

An exceptional instrumentalist, Thierry Caens had lived at 25 years enough to fill the life of any normally constituted musician (international awards, prestigious orchestral soloist places, international solo tours). But the young prodigy of the trumpet, gifted student of Maurice André, immediately felt cramped in his first-class clothes and very early on let his ears and his trumpet hang out elsewhere … Peeping towards the universes from jazz, song or film music, he has ventured, without giving up his identity as a classical musician, on less traveled roads, not necessarily the shortest path to recognition by the musical microcosm. But whatever! Thierry Caens always wanted to defend an open vision of music, opened up and uninhibited.

L'heure espagnole is a French one-act opera from 1911, described as a comédie musicale, with music by Maurice Ravel to a French libretto by Franc-Nohain, based on Franc-Nohain's 1904 play ('comédie-bouffe') of the same name. The opera, set in Spain in the 18th century, is about a clockmaker whose unfaithful wife attempts to make love to several different men while he is away, leading to them hiding in, and eventually getting stuck in, her husband's clocks. The title can be translated literally as "The Spanish Hour", but the word "heure" also means "time" – "Spanish Time", with the connotation "How They Keep Time in Spain".

En 1936 paraissait la première édition du "Le bon usage", conçu dans l'esprit de Vaugelas par un jeune professeur de français, Maurice Grevisse (1895-1980). Déjà largement plébiscité dès les premières éditions, "Le bon usage" allait connaître une diffusion fulgurante à la suite d'un retentissant article d'André Gide. En 1947, le célèbre écrivain le recommandait aux lecteurs du supplément littéraire du journal Le Figaro comme la meilleure grammaire française. …

This Sony-made 30CD classical music collection covers almost all classical music, from the early Baroque period represented by Bach to the schools of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms represent romantic, national and even modern musical schools led by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, etc. representative, everything wonderful and vivid.

The impact of Russian and Oriental culture on Ravel’s formative years retained a hold on him throughout his life. His colourfully re-orchestrated selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite ‘Antar’ and opera Mlada, with interpolations of his own music, as the incidental score for a theatre production are heard here in their première recording, revived and reconstructed alongside a new text that symbolizes the romance and chivalric spirit of Antar the warrior-poet and his beloved Abla. Ravel’s fascination with the exotic is brought together with Debussy’s influence in the ravishing and enduringly popular song cycle Shéhérazade

Two titans of the French repertoire, André Cluytens and Samson François, take the listener deep into the spellbinding world of Maurice Ravel. The dualities inherent in the composer’s exquisitely crafted music – and the contrasting, yet complementary characters of the masterly conductor and maverick pianist – are exemplified in their interpretations of the two piano concertos: the Concerto in G, charming, sparkling and gently melancholy, and the Concerto for the Left Hand, angular and defiant, with moments of both brutality and heroism.