la Roux Trouble

Grammy-winning and Brit and Mercury-Prize-nominated artist La Roux returns with her first new material in five years. From the cover to the contents, this is unequivocally the album Elly always wanted to make - a claim that with some artists might ring alarm bells, but in this instance simply means that Supervision sounds precisely, unmistakably, gloriously like La Roux.

André Campra's "Tancrède" is something of a "missing link", connecting the 17th century stage works of Jean-Baptiste Lully and his frustrated rival Marc-Antoine Charpentier with the late baroque works of Jean-Philippe Rameau. "Tancrède" was given its premiere in 1702 and was repeated again and again on the Paris stage. Even in the 1760's, when Rameau's "Les Boréades" had to be abandoned because of the death of the composer, it was Campra's "Tancrède" that the directors of the Paris Opéra chose to put back on stage because of its popularity.

A Baroque West Side Story, Tancrède tells of the absolute but impossible love between two young people brought together by their passion but separated by their origins. We are in the time of the Crusades: Tancredi is the champion of the Frankish army, and Clorinda the passionaria of the Saracen troops. In the labyrinth of sentiments, sorcerer Isménor's magic wand confuses the issues, luring the two heroes into the enchanted forest to better prepare their downfall. With Tancrède, André Campra (1660-1744) established himself as one of the great opera composers between Lully and Rameau.