Michael Chrichton Michel Patterson

Hawaii, avril 2025. Quand une secousse volcanique fait trembler la terre, John Mac Gregor, éminent volcanologue, réunit son équipe. Non seulement le Mauna Loa va entrer en éruption mais des déchets d'armes chimiques enfouis par l'armée dans les années 1970 sont sur le point de se répandre dans le sol, ce qui détruirait l'île et provoquerait une catastrophe planétaire. …

Michael Crichton, auteur de Jurassic Park, et James Patterson, un des auteurs les plus lus dans le monde, forment un duo de choc et créent un page-turner déjà #1 sur la liste des bestsellers du New York Times. …

For several years, decades in fact, a lost gem issued originally not just in the US but in the UK as well (and our vinyl pressings were always much better than their US counterparts), on Chrysalis records who, for a while, had some very good material in this genre, for example the two Auracle albums (and wouldn't lots of us like to get those on CD). But finally it's now reappeared on CD and how very nice it is to be reacquainted with it in that format. Anyway, this album ~ his second, as far as I know ~ features a host of jazz luminaries of the day (Hancock, Erskine, Pastorius, Carlton, Ritenour, Gadd, etc.) and its only failing is its mildly raw upper registers, though thankfully there are no vocals to pollute the proceedings and Jaco Pastorius' electric bass work is of truly sterling calibre. On this album, if anywhere, you can hear why he was held in such very high esteem by his contemporaries.

The three Leçons de Ténèbres pour le mercredy (Tenebrae for Wednesday) are the only ones by François Couperin to have survived: 'recitations' destined to accompany the Office of the Tenebrae during one of the nights of Holy Week. Couperin is one of the uncontested masters in this exercise fusing vocal virtuosity and deep religious feeling.

Michel-Richard de Lalande is regarded as one of the great composers of the French Baroque, and so it is not surprising that our prizewinning Boston Early Music Ensemble has now turned to him. Along with his many sacred works, Lalande also wrote for the various court occasions that required secular music. Les Fontaines de Versailles, the work occupying a central position on this CD, above all contributed to Lalande’s increasing popularity. It was performed on 5 April 1683, some weeks before Lalande was appointed to the coveted post of 'Sous-maître de Chapelle.' After the court had settled in Versailles with King Louis XIV in 1682, its musical microcosm also experienced a renewal.

Rien d'étonnant finalement à ce que cette compilation thématique ait vu le jour. Car s'il est un sujet omniprésent chez Polnareff, c'est bien celui des émotions sentimentales. Par conséquent, on retrouve sur ce double CD la plupart des classiques que ce compositeur hors normes a égrenés sans discontinuité entre 1966 et 1971, dominant de la tête et des épaules une scène française qu'il jugea plus tard trop étroite pour lui. L'incontournable "Poupée qui fait non" ouvre le bal, avec, rappelons-le, un certain Jimmy Page à la guitare.

The name of Charles Tournemire is a minor one, even in the history of French music, and you won’t find much about him in the standard reference books. Nor are you likely to get a great deal of opportunity to hear his music: only two of the works on this disc have been published in printed form, and Sagesse is the only one to have been recorded before. The disc would thus be valuable for that reason alone.