Parfum Rouge

Monsieur B. était persuadé qu’un sosie remplaçait sa femme dès qu’elle avait le dos tourné. Monsieur C. se réveillait incapable de lire le moindre mot et la moindre lettre tout en écrivant parfaitement. Madame L. ne savait plus comment utiliser une paire de ciseaux ou une brosse à dents. Monsieur W. passait ses journées sans s’ennuyer, immobile devant sa télévision éteinte. Madame D. voyait des chevaliers moyenâgeux défiler dans Paris et un troupeau de bœufs sortir des jardins publics. …

Un soir à Paris, une jeune femme se fait voler son sac à main. Laurent le découvre le lendemain, abandonné dans la rue, tout près de sa librairie. S'il ne contient plus de papiers d'identité, il recèle encore une foule d'objets qui livrent autant d'indices sur leur propriétaire : photos, notes, flacon de parfum…

Innovative Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem presents this highly-acclaimed album of typically Middle Eastern music, recorded in 1999 with a trio that had been his first priority for several years. The improvisational exchanges between Brahem, clarinettist Barbaros Erköse and percussionist Lassad Hosni are exceptionally fluid and the atmospheres they create here are by turns mysterious, hypnotic and dramatic.

When he wrote the cycle that was to change the musical course of the twentieth century, Arnold Schönberg wanted the 21 melodramas based on Albert Giraud's famous collection of poems to be 'spoken and sung' in the language of the country in which they were set, in keeping with the fledgling Berlin cabaret tradition… In doing so, he may not have appreciated the problems that the exercise would pose. The fate of Albert Giraud's verses is inextricably linked to Otto Erich Hartleben's free translation of them. It was in this version that they were most frequently set to music. Stripped of their rhymes and original metre, they are in fact another poetic work. When Darius Milhaud presented Schönberg with a French version recited by Marya Freund in 1922, the composer was disappointed and went so far as to say that he did not recognise his own work!