Renard Tortue du Nouveau

From the notes: Rosita Renard was born in Santiago, Chile, on February 8, 1894, the daughter of a building contractor; she showed extraordinary gifts as a child, and made her pianistic debut at the age of fourteen playing the Grieg Concerto with the Chilean Symphony Orchestra. A year later the government awarded her a scholarship to study in Berlin at the Stern Conservatory. Arriving there in 1910, Rosita was put in the master class of Martin Krause, a Liszt pupil today remembered as the teacher of Edwin Fischer, who was Renard's classmate and friend, and Claudio Arrau, her countryman, who was seven years Renard's junior. The two families were friendly and when it came time for the nine-year-old Arrau to audition fro Krause in 1912, it was Rosita Renard who actually took the young boy by the hand to the audition" Notes by Edward Blickstein

En 2019, les organisateurs – depuis toujours placés sous la direction artistique de René Martin, le fondateur de ce festival – ont choisi la continuité thématique. Après s’être tournés « Vers un monde nouveau » en 2018, ce sont en effet les « Carnets de voyage » qu’ils ont choisi de proposer au public de cette nouvelle édition.

The program for this release by French soprano Patricia Petibon is insanely ambitious, but she pulls it off brilliantly. The "nouveau monde" of the title refers not only to the Americas but to other overseas (from Europe) lands and even, Petibon says in the interview-style booklet, to the new world '"revealed to me by [early music pioneers] William Christie, Jordi Savall, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt when they revolutionized the approach to style and sound." But, Petibon goes on, this new world "is one that always has to be expanded with new explorations and new conquests."