L'oasis Enchantée

Marc Grauwels and Franck Masquelier offer us in this album a selection of the most famous arias from Mozart’s operas, arranged for a flute duo. This formation, fashionable since the 18th century, has largely contributed, thanks to a considerable number of arrangements and adaptations, to popularizing the arias of operas which constitute an inexhaustible source for transcribers and arrangers.

D’Indy was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, and a pupil of César Franck. Fauré described him as ‘The Samson of Music’ for his multifarious and generous-minded work as a composer, conductor, educator and propagandist who greatly strengthened French musical culture. Today the music of d’Indy is sadly neglected, which is why Chandos and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra have decided to embark upon a series devoted to his orchestral works with conductor Rumon Gamba. With a style essentially eclectic and strongly influenced above all by Beethoven and Wagner, d’Indy particularly excelled in orchestral composition. He drew particular inspiration from his native region in southern France, and formed a body of post-romantic works richly orchestrated, often inflected with folk-like melodies and employing Franck’s well-known ‘cyclic method’.