Nicolas Medtne

Prompted by the success of Ossian’s poetry during the First Empire, the Opéra-Comique commissioned from Méhul a short and gripping work inspired by James Macpherson’s Celtic reveries. The composer had the brilliant idea of conjuring up the mists of this Scottish fantasy world in his music by using the ‘grisaille’ sonority of an orchestra without violins. The Gothic coloration of wind instruments with divided violas, the melancholy poetry of the harp and solo horn that frequently emerge from the tutti, contrast with the choruses of warriors and the belligerent strains of Larmor and Uthal. The Hymn to Sleep, an eminently Romantic bardic song, came to be seen as one of Méhul’s finest pieces, and was sung over his grave by the Conservatoire students at his funeral in 1817.

The synergy of three sacred monsters of jazz music by Nicolas Folmer After the album "Lights" in which Nicolas Folmer inviting Daniel Humair began to explore a way where we did not expect, trumpeter with this new album consists music forms a more open, more suggestive than fixed, mobile and more flexible … With Michel Portal, Davd Liebman Emil Spanyi and Laurent Vernerey.

In this new recording, Scherzi Musicali explores the fascinating world of Alessandro Scarlatti s Arcadian cantatas: the six mostly unpublished cantatas selected here sublimate the affects of nymphs and shepherds far from their beloved. Both the arias and the recitatives are exceptionally beautiful, varied and colorful: the accomplished theatrical sense of these cantatas has stimulated the soprano Deborah Cachet, the baritone Nicolas Achten and the abundant instrumental forces that provide a setting for their voices to a passionate and captivating realization, in which poetry, rhetoric, inventive ornamentation and opulence of sound reign supreme.