André Cluytens, though born in Belgium, achieved fame as one of the supreme French conductors of his era, renowned for his refinement and the sheer joy of his music-making. In the mid-20th century he built a substantial, varied and distinguished discography and became the first conductor to record the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker. This 64-disc set, uniting all his recordings of orchestral, concerto and choral repertoire, embraces the mainstream and the esoteric, and includes numerous items making their debut on CD or retrieved from the archives and released for the very first time.
L'heure espagnole is a French one-act opera from 1911, described as a comédie musicale, with music by Maurice Ravel to a French libretto by Franc-Nohain, based on Franc-Nohain's 1904 play ('comédie-bouffe') of the same name. The opera, set in Spain in the 18th century, is about a clockmaker whose unfaithful wife attempts to make love to several different men while he is away, leading to them hiding in, and eventually getting stuck in, her husband's clocks. The title can be translated literally as "The Spanish Hour", but the word "heure" also means "time" – "Spanish Time", with the connotation "How They Keep Time in Spain".
Eight days remaining before César Franck’s awaited bicentenary! Here is a throwback to his major pieces, as Aldo Ciccolini teams up with André Cluytens in the two masterpieces for piano and orchestra, Les Djinns and the Variations symphoniques. Both were favorite works for the pianist who performed them intensely and would record again with Paul Strauss. They are coupled with a fiery version of Tchaikovsky’s concerto and feature the National Belgium Orchestra and the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.
Two titans of the French repertoire, André Cluytens and Samson François, take the listener deep into the spellbinding world of Maurice Ravel. The dualities inherent in the composer’s exquisitely crafted music – and the contrasting, yet complementary characters of the masterly conductor and maverick pianist – are exemplified in their interpretations of the two piano concertos: the Concerto in G, charming, sparkling and gently melancholy, and the Concerto for the Left Hand, angular and defiant, with moments of both brutality and heroism.