Chansons

On album of songs covering over a hundred years of French mélodie, from Reynaldo Hahn to the present day. It includes classics of the genre (Debussy's Nuit d'étoiles, Poulenc's Les chemins de l'amour), but also very recent compositions, in the form of two song cycles by Frédéric Chaslin. Chansons pour elle (to poems by Jean Cocteau) and Nudités (texts by Alain Duault) are imaginative works, free in their expression. Music of today meets music of yesterday and the result is both subtle and poetic.

It's always great to encounter the recording that can "crack" a composer open, making his or her music accessible to a general listening public. And it's all the better when such a recording comes from beyond the usual quarters, as, for example, with this American recording of Renaissance polyphony. Nicolas Gombert was a Flemish Renaissance composer, a successor (and possibly a student) of Josquin who entered the service of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His music, especially in his masses, tends to present itself as a dense, unbroken flow of polyphony. Gombert is one of the composers music history students tend to slog through in hopes of getting to the good stuff. One noted Renaissance scholar used to refer to him, Adrian Willaert, and Giaches de Wert as "the Ert brothers." All that could change with this disc of Gombert motets and chansons. These works are less dense than his masses, but not by much, and they are considerably less limpid than Josquin's pieces in the same genres. But here it is the performances that clarify them. The Massachusetts ensemble Capella Alamire (the name is a pun on an aspect of an old solmization system) under director Peter Urquhart, recording in a church in Portsmouth, NH, slows the motets down slightly and addresses them with a group of eight singers – the black belt of choral singing.

Extraordinary collection of Mouskouri recordings from many years. She sings in many languages, especially French, German, English, and her native Greek - and she makes all of them sound wonderful. In fact, she sometimes sings a song written in one language in another with intriguing effect: e.g., La Vie en Rose in German as Schau Mich Bitte Nicht So An. Many of the songs are very well known, such as Plaisir d'amour, Les trois cloches, Amapola, the Habanera from Carmen, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Changes Everything, Schubert's Ave Maria, &c. All are at least interesting, most are lovely.

American expatriate Joe Dassin was one of France's most popular singers during the late '60s and '70s, initially building his name with stylized adaptations of folk and country material from his birthplace…

To celebrate the 50th birthday of English conductor Daniel Harding. Although he became one of the leading figures of the Virgin Classics label (whose catalogue is now owned by Warner) in the late 1990s, his first notable recording was made for EMI Classics. Not yet 22 years old, he had the daunting task of accompanying the great tenor Ian Bostridge in a highly original Britten program devoted to relatively early vocal works, including harmonizations of English and French folk songs, and his first (instrumental) opus, the Sinfonietta. Accompanied by the aptly named Britten Sinfonia, he acquits himself perfectly and this album, now available for the first time in its entirety in digital format, is an important milestone in the discography of this little-known aspect of the composer's work.