Hélène Sio Les Ratures

Following his beloved and best-selling 2018 album of music from popular films, Renaud Capuçon returns to the magical world of cinema in Les Choses de la Vie – Cinema II. The violinist has dedicated this sequel to 19 titles written by French film composers or for iconic French films. This includes, among others, Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” featured on the 1968 soundtrack to The Thomas Crown Affair; Joseph Kosma’s “Les Feuilles mortes”, or “Autumn Leaves”, heard in the 1946 film Les Portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night); and themes from the scores to The Shape of Water (2017) by Alexandre Desplat, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) by Maurice Jarre, Memories of Me (1988) by Georges Delerue, and Les Choses de la vie (1970) by Philippe Sarde, which inspired the project’s name.

As a one-of-a kind company, standing at the crossroads between musical, lyrical and theatrical worlds, Les Monts du Reuil specialises in the forgotten treasures of French opera. Here, it offers a distinctively rare program centred around the fables of La Fontaine, which unearthes two comic operas based on the works of the fabulist: Le Magnifique [The Magnificent] by André Grétry and L'Éclipse totale [The Total Eclipse] by Nicolas Dalayrac, which was reconstructed for the occasion, and recorded here for the first time. In their selection of the tastiest excerpts alternating from a small aria to a duet or a horse-racing brass fanfare, the musicians highlight the refinement, lightness and humor typically found in French lyrical art from this era.

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.

Staged and costumed by Laurent Pelly, with sets by Chantal Thomas and choreography by Laura Scozzi, this production of La Belle Hélène never forgets for one moment that Offenbach’s parody of the origins of the Trojan war -clearly recognisable in his day as a satire on the moral laxity of Second Empire high society- is, above all, a supreme manifestion of his comic genius. From start to finish it combines a musically superb performance with a stream of visual humour that flows from Pelly’s core idea that the action all takes place in the imagination of a sleeping, sex-starved, suburban housewife. Dame Felicity Lott is magnificent as the woman who gets into bed beside her somnolent old husband and dreams of being the most beautiful woman in the world, entangled in amorous adventures with the virile young Paris, tastily portrayed by Yann Beuron. And just as dreams do not respect the normal limitations of logic, time and place, so her nighttime fantasies combine the everyday with the mythical, and muddle up Greece, ancient and modern.

Louis Lortie is well-known for his Ravel. His recording of the two piano concertos is one of my favorites. This set pairs him with a childhood friend, a fellow pianist from Montréal, Hélène Mercier now long resident in Paris. They play a couple of Ravel's own one-piano, four-hands arrangements (Mother Goose & Rapsodie Espagnole) and three two-piano, four-hands arrangements (Introduction and Allegro, La Valse, Boléro). Actually, Mother Goose was originally written for four-hands at one piano, for a couple of talented children of friends of Ravel's; he later orchestrated it and that is now probably the more familiar version.