Saint Charbel

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann ( Concerto Polonois ) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.

Over a remarkably long and illustrious career, Camille Saint-Saëns thrilled audiences around the world as a pianist and organist, shaped the course of musical life in France, and enriched a multitude of genres with some 600 works, all bearing witness to the mastery of his craft. Setting his best-known compositions in their dazzlingly diverse context, this edition invites exploration and discovery. It spans more than a century of recording history, encompassing a host of great instrumentalists, singers, conductors and orchestras, many of them from France. Setting the pace, in performances from as early as 1904, is the composer himself.

Heinrich VIII. als Oper? Da erhofft man sich einen großen Historienschinken - und man bekommt einen großen Historienschinken. Einen der feinsten Güte allerdings. Für seine 1883 uraufgeführte Oper hat der anglophilie Saint-Saëns sogar in der Bibliothek des Buckingham Palace recherchiert - von wo er schließlich die choralartige Leitmelodie für seine schillernde Hauptfigur mitbrachte. Spannend an der mit gediegenstem Handwerk ausgeführten Oper ist, dass sich Komponist und Librettist auch darüber hinaus spürbar für die historischen Hintergründe interessierten.

The infinite cosmos of French organ music is Ben van Oosten's realm, and he now has recordd the complete organ works of Camille Saint-Saëns in a sump-tuous box set. He performs on the Cavaillé Coll organ in Ste. Madeleine in Paris, one of the most beautiful instruments of its kind and an organ with a big orchestral sound on which Saint-Saëns himself left his traces for more than two decades.