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En 1977, Zhida prépare son mariage à la Gallifère, la ferme de ses beaux-parents. Obligé de quitter le Cambodge à 8 ans avec son petit frère pour vivre en pension à Romilly, il se remémore sa vie depuis l'enfance et les événements qui l'ont amené à rencontrer Gabrielle, sa future femme. …

‘The Time of Day’ provided Haydn with an inspiration to compose and his Symphony numbers 6, 7 & 8 collectively became known as The Day Trilogy. Celebrating their 30th anniversary, Sigiswald Kuijken and La Petite Bande are highly respected exponents of this repertoire and this recording is no exception to their consistently high standards. Carrying on with their ‘one instrument to a part’ policy, the recording is presented in a wonderfully light and airy way, allowing the music to shine through.

Meyerbeer composed Il Crociato in just over one year, between September 1822 and the following autumn, at the end of the German composer's so-called "Italian period". Although this is an opera of great dramatic and musical complexity its première was highly successful with both audience and critics, one commentator accurately describing it as "a building of highlyapplauded construction". The plot, so rich in events, skilfully weaves historical-religious elements with private happenings and feelings. Against the background of the interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims, the story of the main characters unfolds in an efficacious alternation of grand choral scenes and solo numbers with arias and cabalettas.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.

Georg Anton Benda (1722-1795), who was attached to the Berlin court initially under Frederick Great, made his mark as an innovative opera composer. However, there’s little if any innovation on display in these harpsichord concertos, which are considerably less developed in style than the contemporaneous work of Mozart or either of the Haydn brothers. Aside from the virtuoso quality of some of the keyboard writing, these concertos display some typical galant mannerisms along with the Baroque tendency to sustain a single mood during a movement, if not throughout the whole piece. But within that constraint there is a lot of variety among these four works.

This disc contains some sonatas for wind instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach from his years in Weimar (1708-17) and Cöthen (1717-23), having in common – as they have come down to us or as several musicologists have proposed – their being intended for the recorder and/or the oboe. The interchangeability of instrumentation, linked to different creative periods, to practical contingencies, and to the inexhaustible desire for perfection that induced the genius of Eisenach, according to the testimony of his earliest biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to continually revise his own works, often makes it difficult to go beyond their sterile catalogue dates in tracing their evolution. For this reason an experimental approach was chosen here, to bring back to their presumably original state what today is a handful of works, which were part of a much larger repertory. Chamber music was becoming the composer’s principal occupation in the time period under consideration, which was decisive in the progress of Bach’s career from organist to Konzertmeister (1714) and then to Kapellmeister of a Calvinist court (1717) essentially devoted to the cultivation of secular music.