Swimming Philippe Rombi

From the overt Romanticism of Saint-Saëns to the nostalgia-laden modernity of Poulenc, Bruno Philippe takes us on a journey through (almost) a century of French cello music. Alongside Tanguy de Williencourt, he also performs the cello version of Franck's famous Violin Sonata, one of the absolute peaks of nineteenth-century chamber music.

After a first album as part of the harmonia nova collection, which resulted in a well-deserved Victoire de la Musique Classique (category New Instrumental Soloist), Bruno Philippe continues his path on the harmonia mundi label. This programme devoted to Rachmaninoff and the unfairly neglected Myaskovsky is a genuine technical and artistic challenge, which the young cellist has taken up in total harmony with his long term musical partner Jérôme Ducros. Be swept away by the swirling passions of these works, among the most romantic in Russian musical literature.

From the beginning of time songs of mourning, sorrow and lamentation have been a part of Western music. Aristotle had written that nothing was more powerful than rhythm and song for imitating all the turmoil of the soul. Composers of the Baroque Period strove to deal with nothingness and eternity by exploring the utter depths of the heart. And this is what these songs are all about.

This is a collection of absolute gems. The one-movement Concerto by Fauré is the only movement to have survived from an original three-movement violin concerto, and Saint-Saëns’s Morceau de concert was originally intended as the first movement of his third violin concerto. Lalo’s Fantaisie norvégienne, with its utterly gorgeous slow movement, was to become the inspiration behind Bruch’s Scottish Fantaisie, and Guitare is an early encore piece for violin and piano (later orchestrated by Gabriel Pierné) that Lalo (himself a violinist) wrote for his own use.

Is it possible that a recorded performance could be too much of a good thing? Well, such an assessment probably would be unfair to a singer as gifted and in command of such astonishing technical skills as countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, so impressively exhibited on this surprising and thoroughly mesmerizing CD. While you may not have heard of this French singer, he's part of a relatively new group of performers–calling themselves Ensemble Artaserse–who have recently joined to explore their mutual interests in "early 17th-century Italian music". These songs by Benedetto Ferrari provide the perfect medium for Jaroussky's art–and it's quite formidable in both purity of tone and subtlety of expression as well as the near-inhuman technical feats he brandishes as naturally as breathing.

Philippe Herreweghe uses the second of Bach's four versions of the St. John Passion, the one from 1725, which substitutes some of the arias and the opening chorus, along with lesser changes. The result is somewhat more dramatic than the standard version, which Herreweghe recorded previously. Those familiar with the conductor's work will find his usual warmth, making the most of the lyric moments, but they'll also find greater sensitivity to rhythmic and dramatic thrust and a generally livelier approach. The singers are uniformly fine. Padmore is an unusually effective Evangelist, projecting the drama without undue overacting.

In his program notes for this CD, Philippe Jaroussky persuasively argues that, particularly because the traditional repertoire for counter tenors is so small (and much of the Baroque material was in fact written for castrati, an entirely different voice type), there is no reason counter tenors should not explore a broader variety of vocal material. His performance of French mélodies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes an even more compelling case for his argument.

As you might expect, Herreweghe's account of the Christmas Oratorio is as authoritative as any. His orchestra and choir are lively but always precise and his soloists all excel. Most impressively, Herreweghe is able to marshal his impressive forces to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The Christmas Oratorio isn't the most coherent of Bach's works, but Herreweghe brings it all together, not so much by imposing architecture as by maintaining the flow of the music and not letting any single movement stand out too much from its surroundings.

With Philippe Jaroussky’s new album, Storia di Orfeo, the French countertenor realises a long-held dream: to portray the mythic Orpheus – divine musician who ventures into the underworld to retrieve his beloved wife Eurydice from the clutches of death – in his many guises, an inspiration for the very first opera and beyond.