Sophie Robert

This release was originally part of a two-disc album of vocal and instrumental pieces by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre issued in 1986. The music by this gifted contemporary of François Couperin is enjoying a renaissance, and justifiably, for it is inventive and affecting. Sopranos Isabelle Poulenard and Sophie Boulin are fluent in the somewhat rarefied idiom of the 'cantate française' and the result is delicately pleasing. Four of the cantatas on the disc are taken from Jacquet's first collection of Cantates françaises sur des sujets tirés de l'écriture, published in 1708, and dedicated to Louis XIV. The fifth work, Jephté, comes from a second collection issued in 1711 and is distinct from the other cantatas on the disc in being written for two voices rather than one.

In her second Warner Classics album, entitled In Between, German-Italian pianist Sophie Pacini explores a fascinating series of personal and musical relationships: between Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn; between Schumann and his wife Clara, and between Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny. Music by all four of them is complemented by Liszt's transcription of Schumann's glorious love song to Clara, 'Widmung'.