Ridsa Pas le Bon Moment

Le Poème Harmonique, one of the most important early music ensembles in France, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. For this occasion ALPHA CLASSICS has compiled twenty CDs from the catalogue in an attractively designed box. Award-winning recordings can be heard, some of them with an unusual repertoire from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. For loyal fans and those who want to become fans!

Among the most adaptive and flexible – some might say eclectic and facile – of composers, Darius Milhaud was well-equipped to provide stage and ballet music that could set any scene and change moods at a moment's notice. His vivid scores, however, are most often heard today in concert, and without scenarios in hand, some imagination is required to understand how effective these works may have been for the stage. Taken at face value, Le carnaval d'Aix seems like an episodic piano concerto, L'apothéose de Molière a mediocre neo-Baroque pastiche, and Le carnaval de Londres a modern music hall rehash of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

Joseph Kosma was a Hungarian Jew who studied in Germany and, on the run from the Nazis, ended up in France, fighting with the Resistance and composing scores for classic French films like La Grande Illusion and Les Enfants du Paradis. Even more famous than his film scores, however, were his cabaret songs, which intelligently synthesize the French chanson with German cabaret, gypsy violin music, the feverish passion of klezmer, and a pizzazz that is all Hungarian. A list of his lyricists and collaborators is a roll call of mid-century France –Prévert, Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Juliet Greco.

Bonjour à tous ! Aujourd'hui, on se retrouve pour une critique du nouveau coffret de la collection "Écoutez le cinéma !" de Stéphane Lerouge, consacré à l’œuvre musico-cinématographique du (plus) grand artiste français : Serge Gainsbourg.

André Grétry's Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lionhearted, lay neglected until 2019 when a production by the Opéra Royal de Versailles was mounted. This album is taken from that performance, and it's very well recorded indeed. The opera was quite well known in its time and was even performed in the young U.S. (in Boston, in 1796), and it's a great find, a real crowd-pleaser as much today as at the end of the 18th century. The story is based on a probably imaginary tale of an episode during Richard's return from the Crusades, when he was imprisoned in Linz, Austria. A trouvère singer named Blondel who serves the king realizes his predicament, sneaks into the prison disguised as a blind fiddler, and touches off an action-packed sequence of events with a romance involving the prison governor, a grand party, and a visiting Flemish countess whose troops rescue Richard in the end.

Miniaturas lunares est une expérience acoustique qui établit des ponts entre les musiques populaires, classiques et contemporaines. Miniaturas lunares est une succession de fragments sonores très courts, des histoires minimales qui s’enchaînent. Ces miniatures alternent des poèmes, des chansons et des morceaux de musique instrumentale. J’ai imaginé une série de musiques extrêmement légères et éphémères. Des moments de vie très intimes où l’on s’attache au présent pour que le temps s’allonge et devienne élastique. Des instants de joie, de mélancolie, de surprises, détonants, d’humeur mais aussi des instants nostalgiques qui se succèdent vertigineusement.

Hans, le joueur de flûte is a ravishing opera, loosely based on the legend of Hamelin’s pied piper popularized notably by the Grimm Brothers, composed by Louis Ganne and premiered in Monte-Carlo in 1906. Rarely recorded, its best rendition is undoubtedly this beautiful 1967 performance with the best French singers of their time, including Liliane Berton and the amazing baritone Michel Dens in the title-role.