Michel de Villers made the beautiful evenings of La Rose Rouge before attending the Trois Mailletz with his accomplices Guy Lafitte and André Persiani. Attached to the swing, the saxophonist worked to demonstrate that good music and entertainment were perfectly reconcilable. A point of view shared by Boris Vian, artistic director of Philips discs. His clientele demanding dance records, Boris supervised the recordings. Entrusted to Villers, arranged by Persiani, these big band faces from 1958 and 1959 - we ignore the staff - instrumental adaptations of fashionable themes, still retain all their charm. In 1961, Jean-Christophe Averty produced a Claude Bolling Special Show for television. The show featured the pianist's nonette, a medium formation that sounded like great. In the absence of images, the music testifies to it.
In 1733, Pergolesi created La Serva padrona in Naples, which won over Paris in 1752, becoming the symbol of Italian music. Quickly played in French as La Servante Maitresse, it inspired Rousseau for his Devin du Village, a parody of which was created under the title Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne. Mozart discovered it in 1768 and composed his Bastien und Bastienne in German for the private theatre of the magician Mesmer. These two masterpieces bound through style and history come to life with colourful plots: lightness, falsehoods and what is comic create delightfully bubbly situations for the tyrannical servant and naive shepherds, from which Pergolesi and Mozart derived the best musical effects. Adele Carlier, David Tricou and Marc Scoffoni, with the Opera Royal Orchestra and Gaetan Jarry, carry this torch of emotion and comedy, so emblematic of the 18th century.
Set of Fremeaux’s definitive Integrale Django Reinhardt collection. Mastered by Daniel Nevers, there are 20 volumes of these, and each volume has 2 CDs – 40 CDs total. Each volume also comes with a fairly thick booklet with discography and notes. And the booklets and inserts have very nice B&W pictures of Django. Une réédition d’exception ! Depuis quelques années maintenant, les éditions Frémeaux ont entrepris la publication d’une intégrale des enregistrements de Django Reinhardt.
La version de Véronique Gens de La Voix humaine est très attendue ! Cette « tragédie lyrique en un acte » est faite pour elle, son sens du verbe et son intensité dramatique sont au rendez-vous de ce monologue composé par Poulenc en 1958, sur un texte de Jean Cocteau. On est bien loin ici du Poulenc « léger » des années 1920. Cocteau lui fait d’ailleurs le plus beau des compliments : « Cher Francis, tu as fixé, une fois pour toutes, la façon de dire mon texte. » Véronique Gens confie avoir toujours voulu interpréter et enregistrer cette pièce ; c’est maintenant chose faite avec ses complices de l’Orchestre National de Lille et de son directeur musical, Alexandre Bloch. Également présente sur l’album, la Sinfonietta, qui est en fait une véritable symphonie, mais, comme l’écrit Nicolas Southon, « il est indéniable que l’œuvre – commandée par la BBC à Poulenc en 1947 - possède une fraîcheur et une liberté de ton qui justifient son titre ».
”What makes Hector Berlioz such a great composer?”, asks conductor John Nelson. “In one word, originality … He broke all existing traditions of orchestration, structure, harmonic language and storytelling. Even today, his music is fresh, surprising us at every turn with inexpressible beauty.” Nelson now adds two more astonishingly original works by Berlioz – the ‘dramatic symphony’ Roméo et Juliette and the ‘lyric scene’ La Mort de Cléopâtre to his Erato discography. He continues the fruitful relationship with the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg, his choice for the recordings of Les Troyens, La Damnation de Faust, Harold en Italie and Nuits d’été. Joyce DiDonato, his unforgettable Didon and Marguerite, returns as the suicidal Cléopâtre and she is joined in Roméo et Juliette by tenor Cyrille Dubois (who was Iopas in Les Troyens), baritone Christopher Maltman, and the choruses of the Lisbon-based Gulbenkian Foundation and Strasbourg’s Opéra du Rhin.
This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.
The goal of this recording is to celebrate French music through its past: its antique dances, its pastoral ambiences, its atmospheres of legend… starting with a homage to François Couperin. Often considered as the very quintessence of French musical art, this very great composer and harpsichordist succeeded in charming musicians from all times and places, even far removed from his personal universe. We know, for example, that Brahms held him in high esteem. Nearer to our own time, Hendrik Andriessen (1982-1981) – a major figure in Dutch music – borrowed a lovely melody from our composer (from La Basque, in the Second Book of Harpsichord Pieces), as the theme for a set of variations composed in 1944. Led by a tender and agile flute, accompanied by a harp and strings, the work discreetly evokes the rhythms of the antique dances (the Sicilienne, the Chaconne, the Gavotte…) and also contains a ‘scholastic’ fugato; other more lyrical or meditative moments confer an intensity and even a nobility of expression on these charming ‘concert variations’ that make one regret the little reaction that Andriessen's music has suscitated outside of his own country.