Trois ans après Corps et Armes, Étienne Daho fait sa Réévolution. Après avoir réécouté Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen ou les Stones, le jeune médaillé des Arts et des Lettres décide de retrouver la sobriété de Mythomane, son premier essai discographique daté de 1981. Abandonnant les artifices électroniques, les collaborations tout azimut et les fidèles Valentins (partis zoner avec Tété), Daho la joue intime et acoustique.
Willi Apel, one of the great twentieth-century experts on harpsichord music, declared: ‘With d’Anglebert, French keyboard music reaches its highest point of Baroque magnificence and fulness. His skill in continuing a melody, contrapuntally interweaving voices, concatenating harmonies by way of suspensions, and always using meaningful figures as ornaments brings to a final culmination and maturity what his teacher, Chambonnières, began . . .’
What makes Hantaï so thrilling is his insatiable curiosity for ever newer and bolder effects, a ringmaster's sense for giving an audience more than one show at a time. Topping it all is a bubbling youthful zeal, though zeal doesn't do Hantaï's energy level justice - his variety and his recklessness are amazing, he takes tremendous chances, and hits some unbelieveable speeds. Every possible color of the instrument he uses is toyed with and brought out, sometimes tenderly, but more often with elan, panache, brio, gusto - whatever, Hantaï's loaded with the stuff!
This set includes two of the rarest and hardest to find of all recordings: the 1958-59 version of the Bach Cello Suites by Janos Starker – the one everyone says his later recordings cannot match – and the extremely beautiful performance of Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas – the one that Japanese collectors pay 3-digit dollar prices for – in outstanding EMI Digital Re-Masterings.
Today almost ignored by musicologists and performers, and totally unknown to music-lovers, Johann Paul von Westhoff [1656-1705] was nonetheless an outstanding figure in late seventeenth-century musical life. He is one of those composers with an endearing personality who achieved a synthesis of the multiple trends in European music. He was held in high esteem by his contemporaries, including the Sun King himself, before whom he appeared in 1682.