Axelle Carolyn

À Tâtons is the second album by the Belgian singer Axelle Red. It was released in 1996. Axelle Red (born Fabienne Demal on 15 February 1968) is a Belgian singer-songwriter. She was born at Hasselt, Flanders, Belgium, the daughter of Roland Demal, a solicitor in Hasselt and Councillor for the Flemish liberal party, Open-VLD, in the City Council. Nowadays a committed artist and a militant humanist, back in 1993 Axelle graduated from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as a lawyer, the same year her first album Sans Plus Attendre was released which immediately resulted in her breaking in France, Switzerland, Canada and Belgium, where sales alone amounted to more than 200,000.

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart.