Mon Sang

‘Perhaps the best of all my works’, said Gluck of his Armide. But this, the fifth of his seven ‘reform operas’, has never quite captured the public interest as have Orfeo, Alceste, the two Iphigenies and even Paride ed Elena. Unlike those works it is based not on classical mythology but on Tasso’s crusade epic, Gerusalemme liberata. No doubt Gluck turned to this libretto, originally written by Quinault, to challenge Parisian taste by inviting comparison with the much-loved Lully setting. Its plot is thinnish, concerned only with the love of the pagan sorceress Armide, princess of Damascus, for the Christian knight and hero Renaud, and his enchantment and finally his disenchantment and his abandonment of her; the secondary characters have no real life.

Donizetti considered Dom Sébastien, Roi de Portugal (1843), his final completed opera written for the Paris Opéra, to be his masterpiece. In spite of its relative obscurity, on the basis of this recording, one is inclined to agree with him. The opera has several attributes that in the past have proved to be obstacles to its popularity. The first is its length – it's in five substantial acts and lasts three hours, but that's not so onerous for contemporary audiences accustomed to Wagner and Strauss. Besides, the composer created an abbreviated version for Viennese audiences, who at that time wanted to be out of the theater by 10 p.m., and that version could be used if necessary.

10 CD box set celebrating the life and work of the legendary French chanteuse Édith Piaf, who would have been 100 years old in 2015. The set includes sixteen original albums recorded between 1946 and 1962 and many of her most famous chansons. As Piaf's friend Jean Cocteau said of this unique artist who sang with an unreserved intensity about life and love, particularly unhappy love to which she herself was no stranger, "there was never an Édith Piaf before her and there will surely never again be one after her".

The music of French folk troubadour Hugues Aufray existed in stark opposition to the prevailing yé-yé sound that dominated pop charts in the mid-'60s. A disciple of Bob Dylan who regularly adapted his hero's songs into French, Aufray nevertheless proved a popular favorite whose own compositions, most notably "Santiano" and "Celine," quickly entered the mainstream vernacular.