Les Hurlements D’leo il en Faudra Des Soleils

Warner Classics & Erato DVD catalogue already contains several characteristically stylish and imaginative productions by the French opera director Laurent Pelly: Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Massenet’s Cendrillon, Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Handel’s Giulio Cesare. The last three all star Natalie Dessay, and now she and Pelly are reunited once again, this time for Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, staged at Barcelona’s Liceu opera house in early 2013.

The popularity of the ''Polovtsian Dances'' would have eclipsed the rest of ''Prince Igor'', this vast historical fresco in which Alexander Borodin, absorbed by his works of chemist, worked from 1869? “We start a hundred different things. Will we be able to finish some of them? […] I harbor the hope of conducting my opera to its last bar, but […] I advance slowly and at long intervals. It was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov who granted this wish, after the sudden death of his comrade from the Group of Five in 1887. To put in order and complete the score, he was helped by his disciple Alexander Glazunov. Thus the great posthumous work could be created in 1890 in Saint Petersburg.

Pene Pati’s glowing tenor voice, described by Le Monde as ‘filled with sunshine’, makes him the ideal interpreter of such roles as Rodolfo in La bohème and the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. Now, with Serenata a Napoli, he brings his distinctive warmth to another quintessentially Italian art form, Neapolitan song. In addition to such ‘greatest hits’ as ‘O sole mio’ and ‘Funiculì funiculà’, the golden age of canzone napoletana (1880-1930) produced abundant lyrical expressions of passion, melancholy and joy.

A creative force that embraces international voices; sweet, strong harmonies that summon the rights of women and girls; a meltdown of heritage and new gen talent… Les Amazones d’Afrique are back with Amazones Power, the sequel to their widely acclaimed 2017 debut album, Republique Amazone.

French composer/conductor Paul Mauriat is a classically trained musician who decided to pursue a career in popular music. His first major success came in 1962, as a co-writer of the European hit "Chariot." In 1963, the song was given English lyrics, renamed "I Will Follow Him," and became a number one American hit for Little Peggy March. Mauriat is best remembered for his 1968 worldwide smash "Love Is Blue."

Around the start of the seventeenth century musical style in Europe underwent a remarkable transformation. During the first decades of the Baroque era, instrumental music underwent a deep transformation, the violin being central in the process. Composers, who were themselves violinists, expanded the technical limits of the instrument, developing a form of virtuosity with the bow that was very swiftly followed by an improvement of left-hand technique. The music for three violins and bass selected for this recording is typical of a XVIIth Century genre which disappeared rather quickly afterwards, although some remarkable works were still to be composed during the XVIIIth century. This selection, which borrows this repertoire to many different European countries, presents some of the most delighful Sonata's, ballets, chaconnes, fantasias, sinfonias and canon written.

Offenbach's masterpiece, based on three stories by the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, is both a three-act opera and a trilogy of taut, individual dramas, all rolled into one.This Geneva production from 2002 features baritone Marc Laho in the tour-de-force triple villain roles, with three different standout sopranos as the tales' three heroines. French producer Olivier Py caused an uproar among Geneva operagoers with a staging of Tales of Hoffmann that features full-frontal male and female nudity and simulated on-stage lesbian and heterosexual sex.Audiences were left "gasping, giggling or reduced to stunned silence" by the production, which interprets the popular opera as an indictment of capitalist society. Py adds several simulated sex acts, including one between the poet Hoffman and the life-sized doll Olympia as she sings her main aria. Soprano Patricia Petitbon is a major tour de force as she sings Olympia wearing only a transparent body stocking in a Venetian bordello.