Blankass Enfants

The new recording captures the pianists’ special artistic relationship with Philip Glass – a follow-up to the Double Piano Concerto the composer dedicated to the sisters in 2015 Presenting the opera Les Enfants terribles arranged for piano duet, dedicated to Katia & Marielle Labèque, and Etudes No. 17 & 20.

This low-budget Philip Glass opera, Les enfants Terribles, is based on a novel and play by Jean Cocteau, forming the third ring in Glass' trilogy of works devoted to the elaborate personal mythology of the great French visionary. Foregoing the controversial and dualistic 1949 film of Les enfants Terribles made by Jean-Pierre Melville, Glass decided to realize the visual element through a collaboration with choreographer Susan Marshall, re-creating Cocteau's story as a "dance opera." Les enfants Terribles is the most compelling Glass score beheld in many years.

Jane Birkin - Enfants D'Hiver
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 238 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Capitol # 5099923750500 | Country/Year: France 2008
Genre: Pop | Style: French Pop, Chanson

…What might surprise the casual listener is the inclusion of so many Birkin compositions – she has rarely raised her pen in anger in the past (for obvious Serge Gainsbourg-shaped reasons), but here she writes, and writes well.

Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau's novel (written in 1929 and was later made into both a play and a film) forms the basis of the third installment of the trilogy of music/theater works began with Orphée and continued with La Belle et la Bête. In the previous two works (Orphée and La Belle et la Bête), film and opera were combined to create a hybrid form. For Les Enfants Terribles I envisioned something different. I invited the American choreographer Susan Marshall, to help adapt and direct a dance/opera based on the novel in which singers and dancers would share center stage.

2008 French language album from the famed actress/singer best known for her hit duet with Serge Gainsbourg, 'Je t'aime (Moi Non Plus)', in 1969. Enfants D'Hiver has's similar chilled out, ethereal sound to her 2006 album Fictions yet stands on it's own legs and proves to be a welcome release from the darling diva. In 1992, Birkin gave up singing, saying she could not imagine working with anyone other than Gainsbourg who had passed away the year before. Instead she focused on her family and her humanitarian work.