François Gresle

Deux Présidents des États-Unis ont-ils décidé de couvrir par un secret d'état les preuves matérielles qu'ils détenaient d'une présence non-terrestre sur notre planète ? Des artefacts non-terrestres ont-ils aidé les scientifiques du Manhattan Project à mettre au point les premières bombes atomiques ? …

Au début du mois de juillet 1947, se produisit un événement tout à fait exceptionnel. Un objet volant ne procédant pas d’une technologie humaine connue s’écrasa dans le désert du Nouveau-Mexique à une cinquantaine de kilomètres au nord de la ville de Roswell. Dès le lendemain matin, une caravane de secours de l’armée de l'Air arrivée sur les lieux découvre l’épave d’un engin aérien d’origine indéterminée, dont l’avant était enfoncé à la base d’une falaise. …

Saint-Saëns's first opera, Le Timbre d'argent initially composed in 1864 need not fear comparison with some of the most celebrated works in the nineteenth-century French repertory. It depicts the nightmare of a man whose hallucinations anticipate by twenty years the fantastical apparitions of Offenbach's Les Contes d Hoffmann.

Paris, early Twentieth Century: in the space of three ballets, a previously unknown Russian composer revolutionised the music of his time. With The Firebird and Petrushka, respectively fairytale and folktale, and of course The Rite of Spring, a telluric invocation with its insanely innovative harmonies and rhythms, Stravinsky dynamised the Late Romantic orchestra, taking it to literally unheard-of places.

The most ambitious work by 20th-century French master Olivier Messiaen, Saint Francis is also his most all-embracing. He spent nearly a decade creating the opera, which not only encapsulates the composer's abiding Catholic faith but draws on a lifetime of musical discovery and brings together the elements of Messiaen's far-ranging, rich vocabulary: birdsong and nature as a source for music, Eastern modes, complex rhythms derived from ancient Greek poetry and Hindu talas, plainsong, and percussive gamelan-like sonorities, to list a few of the most salient. Messiaen chose Francis for operatic representation as the saint "most like Christ" and wrote his own libretto, using the gentle poetry of the Fioretti.

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.