L'oasis Enchantée

GRAMOPHONE AWARD 2015 WINNER (RECITAL CATEGORY). A welcome return of Carolyn Sampson and Ex Cathedra to Hyperion, performing the rich, fulsome music of the French Baroque. Their recording of love songs from Rameau’s operas (Hyperion CDA67447) was hugely acclaimed for Sampson’s stylish, fluid, seductive performances, and ten years later her artistry is even more dazzling. This album is of particular interest as rather than concentrating on one composer it showcases the works written for the premiere soprano of the day, Marie Fel. Voltaire called her his ‘adorable nightingale’. For d’Aquin, she was an enchanted being. Marie Fel was the soprano who held an entire generation spellbound at the Paris Opéra and at Louis XV’s court during one of the most glorious periods of French music. With a voice described as ‘pure, charming, silvery’ (La Borde), ‘touching and sublime’ (Grimm) and ‘always lovely, always seductive’ (d’Aquin), she inspired some of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s finest music and introduced a whole new level of virtuosity and expression into the French singing tradition. Her long, triumphant career is traced through this fascinating recording.

Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the 20th century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his seven-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face. Emerging from the spirit of late Russian nationalism and ending his career with a thorny, individual language steeped in 12-tone principles, Stravinsky assumed a number of aesthetic guises throughout the course of his development while always retaining a distinctive, essential identity.

The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

Une nuit, Awa fît un rêve… L’atmosphère y était enchantée, comme mystique, nimbée dans une scénographie convoquant la lune, la Terre et les éléments. Mélange ancestral entre les Indiens d’Amérique et l’Afrique, l’être chamanique était là, s’exprimant dans une langue inconnue, narrant des histoires réelles ou fantasmées. Ces récits, elle les recevait d’autres, se les appropriait, s’en imprégnait, partageait leur joie, soulageait douleur ou tristesse contenue.

I believe that true poetry, worthy of lifelong dedication and utmost attention, of being impatiently awaited and painfully missed is impossible except when it encounters the world of that imagination which was once called spirit, wrote in his essay The Great Poets Are Gone Adam Zagajewski (himself a great poet). The same is true of music, and most certainly of the song genre, which inhabits the world of the imagination and is by nature fragile and evanescent. Each of the composers represented on this album entered that world of true music at least for a moment, and each did so in his own special way. A common ground is not to be sought, since it would be too great a simplification and far removed from the transient nature of songs. All we can do is point to some individual threads that relate those compositions to one another: their exoticism (the fascination with the Orient in Ravel and Szymanowski), oneiric mood (except perhaps for Obradors), unreal and fabulous character, gentleness, but also a nocturnal kind of uncertainty, and, last but not least, a sense of transience, which is an aspect of human life still unfathomed and therefore seemingly absurd…

Composers of every era have drawn on the strengths, sorrows and joys of women for operas and vocal works, inspiring some of their most powerful music. From the heartbreaking tragedy of Samuel Barber’s Andromache’s Farewell to the magical storytelling of Shéhérazade and the Fairy-Tale Princess, acclaimed soprano Seljan Nasibli takes us on a timeless journey through female musical ancestors whose courage is as relevant in today’s society as it has ever been.