Henri Dès Seule Avec Ses Chats

A little-known Franck: Legend has it that César Franck (1822-1890) did not really find himself until the 1870s. This would be to ignore a huge part of his career as a composer! Barely younger than his model and mentor Franz Liszt (1811-1886), whom he met in 1837, he began, like Liszt, to experiment with new musical forms at a very early age, and throughout his life he let his inspiration speak for itself without limit. His chamber music is, in this respect, one of the most fascinating markers of his artistic trajectory, the essence of which has yet to be rediscovered.

This release contains the complete works for organ by François Couperin, composer to the court of Louis XIV. James Johnstone continues his series of recordings on the great baroque organs of Europe on the 1699 organ by Julien Tribuot, Louis XIV’s organ builder, now in the Eglise St Martin in Seurre, Burgundy. This last surviving instrument by a revered builder is close to its original condition. A leading baroque organist, James Johnstone recorded these works as part of 350th anniversary celebrations of Couperin's birth in 2018, and completes Metronome’s survey of Couperin’s complete keyboard works.

A rare project of Vivaldi's Viola d'Amore Concerto performed with viola d'amore, mandolin & guitar orchestra! Vivaldi composed several concertos for solo viola d'amore for his students at the Pietà Conservatory.

Zoot and trumpeter Jon Eardley were in Paris in 1956 as part of the Gerry Mulligan Sextet which performed at the Olympia. They took time off to record on their own in the studios. Tracks 1-4 released on French 10 inch LP were actually a rehearsal with the Henri Renaud trio which was deemed good enough to release. The rest of this Jazz In Paris CD features a Live set by the Henri Renaud ensemble complete with vibes and guitar dwarfing the saxes, and a loud but not unruly audience.

By explicitly titling his new album “An Indian's Life”, double bassist and composer Henri Texier beautifully closes a sort of informal phonographic triptych — begun in 1993 with “An Indian's Week” and continued in 2016 with “Sky Dancers” — making the Native American cause and, beyond that, the quasi-mythological figure of the “Indian”, both the imaginary matrix and the poetic driving force of his artistic gesture. Because if in the end Henri Texier can claim in this new record to have managed once again to resonate with the Native American psyche, it is undoubtedly in this living relationship to memory, to ancestors, to tradition, that his music ( re)comes into play each time in such a sensitive way. Henri Texier will never be an Indian, he knows it, just as he will never be Charles Mingus - but both meet in his music and it is all his genius to make his most intimate voice heard through this imaginary dialogue.

Henri Texier, double bass player, multi-instrumentalist traces his path, record after record since 1967. The more the years pass, the more the importance and the originality of Henri Texier impose themselves on all the musicians, fellow travelers, or not. A wonderful combination of a great tradition of double bass and a modernism that has never been frightened of anything. Time passing seems to have no hold on his game: round, powerful and above all animated by an extraordinary awareness of rhythm. A high-flying cast and a sequence of scenes and landscapes that give the listener the certainty of a global scenario.

With the present disc, Pascal Rophé and his Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire pay tribute to their great countryman, Claude Debussy – but not with the standard orchestral fare. Debussy Orchestrated paints a portrait of a light-hearted composer, seen through the eyes of two of his collaborators, Henri Büsser and André Caplet, who transferred the works recorded here from the keyboard to the orchestra. In Petite Suite, composed for piano four hands in 1899, Debussy makes allusions to Fêtes galantes by Paul Verlaine, the poet who so often inspired him.

The music of Michael Jarrell has been said to ‘examine states of dream and unreality, searching for a moment of truth’ – a truth which is often found in the lowest sonorities and slowest tempi, a place where time stands still. His works are often interrelated, not only by a certain sensitivity or a distinctive tone, but also by the recurrence of particular features that he reworks in different contexts.

Chances are excellent that, unless you remember the sixteenth volume of the old brown-backed set of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians – "Riegel to Schusterfleck" – then you have never encountered composer Henri-Joseph Rigel. The scion of a musical family that also spelled its name "Riegel," Rigel studied with Niccolò Jommelli and Franz Xaver Richter before arriving in Paris in 1767; although his musical language remained essentially Italo-German, Rigel is mainly considered a French composer as the bulk of his work and sphere of influence was centered in Paris. He was a member of the Concert Spirituel, a reasonably prolific and successful composer of opera and oratorio (his La Sortie d'Egypte has been revived in modern times in Europe), and served on the founding faculty of the Paris Conservatoire, beginning in 1795.