Mon Sang

C'mon America 2003 features 13 live performances from eight-time Grammy winner Sheryl Crow. The set includes more than two hours of footage, including the No. 1 hit "All I Wanna Do" and the Top 10 hits "Everyday Is a Winding Road," "Leaving Las Vegas," and "If It Makes You Happy."
Sheryl Crow's fresh, updated spin on classic roots rock made her one of the most popular mainstream rockers of the '90s. Her albums were loose and eclectic on the surface, yet were generally tied together by polished, professional songcraft.

Coming in at a tidy three hours and eight minutes, Donizetti’s huge Les Martyrs, composed (or adapted) for Paris in 1840, is here presented in its fullest conceivable form, including ballet and many passages cut right after the first performances. The opera was a reworking of his 1838 Poliuto, composed for the San Carlo in Naples, which had been banned by the king himself, since Christian martyrdom under the Romans was found unpleasant by the censors and the king was devoutly religious.

Fascinated by the interplay of echoes from one past to another, Vincent Dumestre and Stéphanie d’Oustrac found an affinity in the project Mon Amant de Saint-Jean , their very first collaboration, and aimed to make it a unique musical adventure: a recital in which the atmosphere of the chansons of the Années Folles infuses early music with its sweet madness. In 1904, the great cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert was invited to the home of the Casadesus family, the founders of the Société des Instruments Anciens (Early instrument society): the Baroque fraternised with the café-concert. Around the same time, in the revue Paris qui chante, an aria by Scarlatti rubbed shoulders with the coarse language of Aristide Bruant and Paulin, while Gaston Dumestre, a singer at the cabaret Le Chat Noir (and one of Vincent’s ancestors!), sang chansons réalistes while accompanying himself on the theorbo presented to him by Oscar II of Sweden: ‘It is in language that we must seek the common driving force. These cabaret singers relished a very special flavour, a vigour, a raciness in the words of the Baroque era’, concludes Vincent Dumestre.

Hearing or performing music comes closest in the range of human activity to a visceral connection to the past. As long as we have notation and knowledge of how to interpret it, we can effectively experience something like our ancestors did when they sang the same music. Of course, our 20th-century sensibilities and knowledge–or lack thereof–prevent us from sharing identical responses, but as with the music on this disc, when we hear it we are in some way transported to another place. We know a completely different sound world from our own; we know that the accepted order of certain things was different. And we also know that in many ways people haven't changed. Machaut's music conveys a spirituality–both joyful and contemplative–that's as true in its impact as it must have been 600 years ago, a point made ever so clearly by these especially vibrant and vital performances.

Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.