$39.99

‘To have written that, you must be a poet’, Massenet told Reynaldo Hahn when he read through the score of L’Île du rêve. Composed when the young man was not yet eighteen years old, this...

Format: CD

Release Date: October 23, 2020

$44.99

Gifted with a strong temperament and a curious nature, Fernand de La Tombelle is a highly appealing and interesting figure among French Romantic composers. He left a substantial �uvre, protean, stylistically eclectic, even atypical, that...

Format: CD

Release Date: November 22, 2019

$42.99

'The rehearsals for La Vie parisienne are almost driving me insane', wrote librettist Ludovic Halevy a few days before the work's first performance. The artists of the Palais-Royal company were struggling with some of the...

Format: CD

Release Date: October 04, 2024

$42.99

According to Berlioz, Spontini was – after Gluck – the greatest genius of French music to pave the way for the Romantic era. And it may well be that the little-known Olympie, premiered in 1819...

Format: CD

Release Date: March 22, 2019

$42.99

After Polyeucte (1878), Gounod tackled the operatic genre for the last time in 1881 with what is probably his most ambitious work, Le Tribut de Zamora. The action takes place in ninth-century Spain – from...

Format: CD

Release Date: March 22, 2019

$42.99

Saint-Saëns’s first opera, Le Timbre d’argent – initially composed in 1864 – need not fear comparison with some of the most celebrated works in the nineteenth-century French repertory. It depicts the nightmare of a man...

Format: CD

Release Date: August 28, 2020

$42.99

‘There is more Spain in Offenbach’s brain than in Spain itself’, said a journalist entranced by Maître Péronilla. Understandably so, given the charm and humor of this operetta in which no fewer than twenty-two characters...

Format: CD

Release Date: March 13, 2020

$42.99

Massenet's Werther is one of those masterpieces that were rejected or shunned at the time of their creation. Sketched in the 1880s, the score was turned down by the director of the Opera-Comique and had...

Format: CD

Release Date: May 24, 2024

$42.99

‘It will be a strange score: people will either not like it at all, or will like it enormously,’ prophesied Camille Saint-Saëns a few days before the premiere of Déjanire. The opera, first performed in...

Format: CD

Release Date: April 26, 2024

$42.99

It was around 1825 that Louise Bertin, pupil of Reicha and friend of Berlioz, tackled the subject of Faust with all the energy and confidence of a young woman of twenty. She entirely exceeded the...

Format: CD

Release Date: January 26, 2024

$29.99

Many Romantic composers owe their fame to one of their symphonic poems. Alongside acknowledged French masterpieces in the genre, the fifteen tracks presented here include four previously unrecorded works and several rarities by women composers....

Format: CD

Release Date: October 20, 2023

$44.99

‘It would be difficult to find a simpler and more poignant subject’, Massenet remarked during the composition of Ariane, a vast score in five acts premiered at the Paris Opéra in October 1906. The libretto...

Format: CD

Release Date: September 08, 2023

$44.99

The injustices of history are made to be redressed. Here a cast of international singers, under the dynamic direction of Gergely Madaras, devotes itself with conviction to the task of reviving one of the forgotten...

Format: CD

Release Date: June 23, 2023

$42.99

Guilty of allowing the sacred fire to go out while declaring her love to the general Licinius, the Vestal Virgin Julia is sentenced to be buried alive. But her execution is averted by a divine...

Format: CD

Release Date: May 12, 2023

$53.99

Women composers had great difficulty in making their voices heard and gaining recognition during their lifetimes. Even today, they are all too rarely heard in the concert hall or the opera house. That situation obviously...

Format: CD

Release Date: March 10, 2023