Etienne Augris

Saint Etienne return with their 10th album and prove they are still utterly essential. Saint Etienne have always understood that pop music is the nearest thing we have to time travel, the closest we can get to breathing the air of a different time. On this album, they take that theory to its logical conclusion. I’ve Been Trying To Tell You uses sounds and samples from 1997 to 2001, evoking the folk memory of the period by using and twisting recordings from the time, re-working them into new songs. “They're all by people you'd have heard on daytime Radio 1 or 2 at the time,” Bob clarifies, “not Boards of Canada or anything.” Opening track “Music Again”, for example, begins with some gorgeously poignant electric harpsichord from a long-forgotten R&B hit.

Mehul was the most famous French composer in the time of the Revolution, Consulate and Empire, praised by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber and Berlioz, and lauded to the skies by Cherubini, who called Stratonice (the fifth of his 35 operas) “a work of genius, Mehul’s masterpiece”. Nor was he alone in this opinion, since in Paris alone it was performed over 200 times during the next quarter of a century, though withdrawn during the Reign of Terror because of the finale praising royal compassion. The opera – comique only in the sense of including spoken dialogue – is serious in tone (as the grave and dramatic overture presages): based on a classical subject, it tells how Seleucus, King of Syria, engages a doctor (Erasistrate) to cure his son Antiochus’s suicidal depression, which is in fact caused by his love for his father’s fiancee, the Princess Stratonice.

With "Il trionfo della morte" by Bonaventuro Aliotti from 1677, the French ensemble Les Traversées Baroque presents an important example of an early oratorio. The form of the oratorio developed after the Catholic Church in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) severely restricted the use of music in church services. Some religious congregations then began to perform new forms of music in their prayer and assembly rooms, the "oratorios". An important center for the development of the oratorio or "Dialoghi sacri", as this musical form of theological approach was called, was Sicily.

Les nanotechnologies recouvrent désormais un spectre très large d'activités fort différentes qui vont de l'électronique dernier cri aux nouvelles biotechnologies en passant par la conception de matériaux dits "intelligents".Elles bénéficient depuis quelques années de crédits massifs et, comme elles concerneront sans doute tous les secteurs industriels, les plus classiques comme les plus high-tech, on les associe même à une véritable "révolution de civilisation" qui pourrait modifier spectaculairement nos façons de vivre, de travailler, de communiquer, de produire, de consommer, …

It is well known that in Venice a "Golden Age" of compositional, vocal, and instrumental musical creativity and virtuosity emerged, and then flourished during the mid-1500s to the mid-1700s. The 16th century experienced a substantial development in the cappella ducale of Saint Mark's, which, until the end of the 17th century, remained the leading center of musical activity in the city. Evidence of this comes from the profusion of significant musicians that it received in that "Golden Age": either as maestri di cappella, or as organists (Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli), or as virtuoso instrumentalists (the cornet player Giovanni Bassano). Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli played a decisive role in the simultaneous emergence of Venetian keyboard and stile concertato music.