Parisian cellist sensation Camille Thomas is back with her first crossover album “Aznavouriana” dedicated to the legendary Charles Aznavour to mark his 100th anniversary (May 22nd). A declaration of love to the work of Aznavour, the great poet who has forever marked the French Pop, accompanied by the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra and Sergey Smbatyan. A prolific artist, Charles Aznavour built up an unrivalled repertoire (51 albums in French, 42 in foreign languages) and sang on stages all over the world. Part of the profits from the album will be donated to the refugees of Nagorno-Karabakh through the Aznavour Foundation.
On this disc, Jean Guillou teams up with Edo DeWaart and the San Francisco Symphony for a lush performance of Camille Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. This is a lush performance of the Organ Symphony with spot-on tempi, great orchestral balance, and unsurpassed balance between organ and orchestra. This symphony has one long melodic line after another, and DeWaart keeps a long view that prevents any sense of meandering. The organ is stunningly recorded. Brass blaze with glory. Strings are lush. Timpani are extremely well-defined. The clarity of the recording provides an excellent window into finer details. It is difficult to imagine how anything could have been improved upon. The disc is filled out with a strong performance of Widor's Allegro from his Symphony No. 6. This account of the Organ Symphony has everything going for it. There are no obvious weaknesses. If you have excellent subwoofers, they will get the workout of their life. Very Highly Recommended!
Brings together themes from popular soundtracks and TV series: Ramin Djawadi Game of Thrones, Max Richter The Leftovers, Downton Abbey main theme, Jeff Beal, House of Cards, Lalo Shiffrin Mission Impossible, Henri Mancini The Pink Panther, Vitamin String Quartet “Girls like you” used in Bridgerton, and many more.
Her last album "Pas de géant" released by Sony two years ago had received a dythirrambic critical reception, Camille Bertault does it again with his new opus entitled "Le Tigre".
Saint-Saens’s Etudes offer an intricate and scintillating panoply of the French school of technique (the basis and prophecy of what Jean-Philippe Collard so mischievously called Marguerite Long’s ‘diggy-diggy-dee’ school of piano playing). Yet as Piers Lane tells us in his alternately wry and delightful accompanying essay (obligatory reading for all lovers of French pianism), they can be as evocative (‘Les cloches de las Palmas’) as they are finger-twisting (‘En forme de valse’, to name but one). The left-hand Etudes, too, given their self-imposed limitation, are a fragile and poetic surprise. In other words Saint-Saens’s Etudes are more comprehensive than their equivalents by, say, Moszkowski or Lazare Levey (superbly recorded by Ilana Vered on Connoisseur Society and Danielle Laval on French EMI, respectively – neither issued in the UK).