Peter Doherty and Frédéric Lo release their new album The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime through Strap Originals. The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime is another piece de resistance from this constantly evolving and challenging artist, showcasing Peter’s proudly European poetry and comment on la bete humaine married to Frederick’s delicious francophone musical arrangements.
Passion rather than insouciance is Pires’s keynote. Here is no soft, moonlit option but an intensity and drama that scorn all complacent salon or drawing-room expectations. How she relishes Chopin’s central storms, creating a vivid and spectacular yet unhistrionic contrast with all surrounding serenity or ‘embalmed darkness’. The con fuoco of Op. 15 No. 1 erupts in a fine fury and in the first Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 1, Pires’s sharp observance of Chopin’s appassionato marking comes like a prophecy of the coda’s sudden blaze. Such resolution and psychological awareness make you realize that Chopin, like D. H. Lawrence, may well have thought that “there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life”. Chopin, Pires informs us in no uncertain terms, was no sentimentalist.
This is virtuoso playing in the best sense, and only the most churlish listener could fail to respond to it. From the fin-de-siècle decadence of Schulz-Evler’s Arabesque on the Blue Danube, to the more restrained treatments of Bach by Rachmaninoff and Busoni, Chiu finds exactly the right range of sound and approach.
From well-loved arias to new discoveries, this recording journeys through over a century of opera, with transcriptions for cello and orchestra stretching from Mozart to Puccini and including Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Offenbach. The curtain goes up on some of Ophélie Gaillard’s favourite pieces, which explore human passions through the voice of the cello, that most human of instruments.
A descendent of the great literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, grandson of the famous classical pianist Valia Belinsky and the gypsy violinist Stephan Brotescou, Frederic Belinsky was born on August 25th, 1974. He began to study guitar at the age of 9 in the Russian Conservatory of Paris, then that of Boulogne, and graduated with a silver prize in 1997 from the National Conservatory of Paris. During his 15 years of classical guitar, he has not limited himself to this style of music, but also turns to jazz under the influence of the greatest jazz musicians including Django Reinhardt, Barney Kessel, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow. But his music preferences are not limited by the style of Django Reinhardt. Frederic, captivated by the musicality and infinite possibilities of improvisation, also interprets American standards, and his own variations of Russian Songs creating a new musical style - the Swing Slave.
Three 20th-century orchestral scores, Bartók’s Two Pictures, Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, all dating from 1910-13 and all linked (as the detailed CD booklet explains), are brought to life in the hands of two exceptional French pianists. The central interest is the ballet Jeux. One of the world’s outstanding Debussy interpreters, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has added to his complete Chandos recordings with his own transcription for two pianos. Written late in Debussy’s life for Nijinsky, Jeux involves an emotionally erotic and harmonically daring game of tennis. Bavouzet and his well-matched partner, François-Fréderic Guy, play with nimble grace, capturing the works wit and mystery. This gripping album is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, guru and enabler, for his 90th birthday.
The aim of Paris-Europe is certainly to pay tribute to Paris, the "city of light", to its cultural attractiveness, but also and above all to its permeability to the cultures of Europe and to the mutual influences with the composers present on its soil during the two centuries explored in this disc. Frédéric Chatoux and Lutxi Nesprias present here transcriptions and original pieces that reflect their curiosity and their desire to illustrate these European cultural interminglings.