du Pree

That globetrotting composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote La Princesse jaune in 1872, exemplifying the current craze for all things Japanese. Kornélis, played by the tenor Mathias Vidal, dreams only of the Land of the Rising Sun. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion, he becomes infatuated with Ming, a fantasy princess.

Considered to be one of the greatest composers of the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) is also the author of a travel account published for the first time in 1590. By creating a dialogue between Guerrero’s incredible pieces and music from the Near East, Le Banquet du Roy has recreated the composer’s itinerary and accompanies us on a trip full of emotion and fervour.

In 1688, the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand staged David et Jonathas, a lyrical tragedy written by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Intended for the school’s students and interspersed with the Latin tragedy Saul, it depicted the fratricidal friendship of David and Jonathas, at the mercy of an implacable fate and a cruel struggle for power.

To mark the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, the Palazzetto Bru Zane offers a chance to discover one of his most performed and admired operas in his lifetime, presented here in a rare version. Completed in 1893 and premiered the same year at the Opéra-Comique, the piece amusingly recounts the love affair between Nicias and Phryné, who dupes the old archon Dicephilus in order to avenge his cruelty.

What is the use of limiting one's imagination to what one already knows? This question, posed by the character incarnated by Robin Mercier, is central to the artistic approach of Valentin Ceccaldi and the Grand Orchester du Tricot. Atomic Sputnik is like a kid's dream put into music, a dreamlike journey in which one follows, in parallel, the odyssey in the space of a child and the spatial fantasy of an adult having visibly refused the constraints of the world. Quite a bit of narration strictly speaking, but the interventions of Robin Mercier and André Robillard suggest this duality within this ambitious fresco where clash the naive melodies and the contemporary bursts.

The Signature Collection is a brand new series from EMI Classics featuring the finest catalog recordings released for the first time ever in high resolution format. The expert engineers at Abbey Road Studios who remastered the original EMI recordings for Hybrid Super Audio CD series have breathed new life into these iconic catalog recordings. Each title in the Signature Collection is beautifully presented in a full-color illustrated hardback book. The liner notes explore mot only the rich music but also the story behind original LP covers. Also included are never before seen photographs of the original master tapes.

The tragedy of du Pré’s brief career is still fresh in the public memory and can be summarised here. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father’s Channel Islands ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set.

Her story is one of the most legendary of all twentieth century musicians' stories, and also, one of the most tragic. Cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, born on January 26, 1945, in Oxford, England, to Derek and Iris Du Pré. (Despite the family name, Derek Du Pré was not French, but rather of British Channel Island ancestry; he could trace his lineage back to the Norman Conquest). She blossomed young and achieved international fame in a few short years during the mid-1960s, during which same time she joined Daniel Barenboim in one of history's most celebrated musical marriages. But her career was shattered in the early 1970s – not even a decade into its maturity – by multiple sclerosis.