Clair Obscur (Alpha 727), dedicated to German lieder with orchestra, explored the antagonism between light and shadow. Reflet conjures up the nuances and transparencies of French melodies. There is in reflection the idea of an echo, the shadow of a disquieting double, of a plural, diffracted sparkle… A clash of deceptive mirages, a kaleidoscope of senses and flashes of light, it interweaves in strange parallels the score of our lives, adorned with gold and illusions", writes Sandrine Piau. Berlioz, Gauthier, Britten, Hugo, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Duparc, Koechlin, Ravel, Mallarmé... the encounters between these composers and poets"create in me a firework display of colours and shimmers", concludes the French soprano, who is making her 14th recording for Alpha Classics.

REVIEW:

Here is a whole album that makes up a single, sublime musical utterance. One feels that every note is almost foreordained as the program opens with classic orchestral songs from Berlioz, Henri Duparc, and the less common Charles Koechlin, proceeding into darker, more mysterious realms with Ravel’s Three Mallarmé Songs, and ending with the youthful ebullience of Britten’s Quatre chansons françaises. Piau’s voice is delicate, soaring, and richly beautiful; one of the miracles of the current scene is its durability and versatility. Her support from conductor Jean-François Verdier, leading the Victor Hugo Orchestra, is confidently smooth, never intruding on the spell Piau weaves.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

“Après un rêve” is an ode to the French Belle Époque repertoire, depicting the beauty of dreams and the night. The album is an opportunity to hear and perhaps discover rarely played / rarely recorded wonderful works (Chaminade Nocturne, Duparc Aux étoiles, Poulenc Les soirées de Nazelles), alongside central pillars of the repertoire, and includes a world premiere of Despax’s arrangement of Après un rêve. The album is attributed to his grandfather, Jacques Charpentreau, a French poet who adored this repertoire and frequently drew inspiration from the night in his works. Despax has curated some of his poetry, as well as works by other poets he admired to complement this music, taking the listener on an immersive poetic and musical journey through this noctur- nal landscape.

REVIEW:

Despax has recorded Bach, Brahms, Chopin, but the works here particularly suit his sensibility. In Maurice Ravel’s haunting masterpiece Gaspard de la Nuit, he masters the ferocious challenges with ease, delicacy, strength.

-- The Guardian (UK)

In her third recital album for Signum Records, celebrated soprano Mary Bevan returns with a selection of French songs, featuring works by composers including Britten, Ravel, Debussy and Faure

“Over the years since the release of my debut album Voyages with Joseph Middleton in 2017, my passion for French mélodie has grown and deepened...The texts that composers of mélodie have set to music contain a depth and a mystery that I find fascinating and a source of repeated inspiration... My idea for the album began sim- ply with a desire to record Britten’s Les Illuminations, a work I feel closely connect- ed to, having performed it many times over the years and each time having found something new in it to interest me”

Malcolm Martineau follows up his acclaimed complete song collections of Poulenc and Faure with an album celebrating the solo songs of Henri Duparc, performed by an acclaimed roster of British singers – Dame Sarah Connolly, Huw Montague Rendall, Nicky Spence & William Thomas. An iconic figure in the world of French music – his songs described as being ‘imperfect...but works of genius’ by Ravel and ‘perfect’ by Debussy – Duparc only composed a handful of works during the first half of his life: following a nervous disorder in 1885 at age 37 he lived for a further 48 years, orchestrating and tinkering with his songs, but publishing nothing new.

Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau is recognized at the highest international level as one of the UK’s leading accompanists, performing worldwide alongside the world’s greatest singers and with a discography of over 100 albums, including a number of award-winning recordings.

REVIEW

With four singers in the line-up, there is plenty of vocal variety. The lion’s share of the songs is allotted to Sarah Connolly who still has her voice in fine fettle. She perhaps displays a wider vibrato than in past, but the tone is beautiful and her expressiveness is undiminished, and her high notes ring out gloriously. She is allotted seven songs, while her three male colleagues have three each. But we shouldn’t forget the fifth participant, Malcolm Martineau at the piano. His role is just as important as the singers’, since these songs are no mere melodies with accompaniments but rather dramatic or narrative scenes, where the piano sets the scene and propels the action forward. In that respect Duparc is Wagnerian in his approach. Obviously we focus on the singer, but the piano part mustn’t be suppressed. Malcolm Martineau shows that he is a born director and keeps the proceedings on a tight rein.

-- MusicWeb International

Anita Rachvelishvili’s second album Élégie showcases her in the song repertoire to which she has a special connection despite being best known as a star of the world's greatest opera houses. Riccardo Muti has called the Georgian singer “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet”, but here she reveals another side to her art. The repertoire is notable for its variety featuring five languages (Russian, Georgian, Italian, French and Spanish) and, correspondingly, five very different repertoire traditions. "I really love this repertoire. It gives one more colours and more possibilities for expressing emotions with the voice", says Anita Rachvelishvili. Echoing her debut album of operatic arias on Sony, she introduces listeners to a great if internationally neglected Georgian composer, in this case Otar Taktakisvili, heard in The Sun of October, a setting of the distinguished Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze. As well as Rachmaninov's setting of the Pushkin poem Oh never sing to me again and Tchaikovsky's None but the lonely heart.

With this programme of music for cello and piano, Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih transport us to the world immortalized in Marcel Proust’s a la recherche du temps perdu – the Parisian high society and its glittering salons. For the composers of the time these provided a perfect platform for the introduction of new works, performed by the finest musicians in France for a sympathetic, educated and rich (!) audience. And for the music-loving Proust they offered countless opportunities to meet the composers that he so admired (and others that he may have admired a bit less…) The first of these to make his appearance in the programme is no one less than Proust’s one-time lover and lifelong friend, Reynaldo Hahn, with a brief set of Variations chantantes on a theme from a baroque opera. He is followed by Gabriel Faure, whose music Proust gushed about in a letter to the composer: ‘I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it.’

Proust was less expansive about Saint-Saëns’ music even if he admired him as a pianist, but the composer’s First Cello Sonata is nevertheless the centrepiece of the programme, before Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmes make their appearance. These were both students of Cesar Franck, whose iconic Violin Sonata in A major (here in the version for cello) closes this programme of ‘salon music’ – in the best possible sense of the term.

REVIEW:

The writings of Marcel Proust are suffused with music. Proust depicted the world of the Parisian salons of the late 19th century, where both music and literature flourished. This release by cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih does not depict a specific event, but it does plunge the listener into Proust's world. Isserlis brings the necessary heat to the Franck sonata, an arrangement of the composer's cello sonata that the composer himself sanctioned. Another draw is Shih's accompaniment work, distinctive and appropriately intense. For lovers of French music, this is a standout release.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Throughout history men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new release, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’ Brahms’ Ophelia Songs, composed for a stage production of Hamlet, appear next to those by Richard Strauss and Chausson, while Ophelia's death is described by both Schumann (in Herzeleid) and Saint-Saëns. Goethe’s mysterious and traumatized Mignon appears in settings by Hugo Wolf as well as Duparc, while his ill-used Gretchen grieves by her spinning-wheel in Schubert's matchless setting. Sadness and madness tip into witchery and unbridled eroticism with Pierre Louÿs's poems about Bilitis, set by Kœchlin and Debussy. Sampson and Middleton end their recital as it began, with a suicide by drowning: in Poulenc’s monologue La Dame de Monte-Carlo, the elderly female protagonist has been unlucky at the gambling tables and decides to throw herself into the sea.

The interpretation of the complete melodic works of Duparc, this absolute summit in the art of the Lied in the 19th century, calls for a rare mix of youth, experience, interiority and expressivity, in addition to a rare tessitura: a middle range voice in which the extremes are as pleasing as the middle register. Coming from Quebec, Michèle Losier, hitherto applauded on numerous North-American opera stages, impressed the 2008 edition of the Reine Elisabeth Singing Competition by her bewitching art of the recital. This enabled her to meet Daniel Blumenthal, a dream accompanist, and to risk this thrilling adventure in the beautiful hall of the Concertgebouw in Bruges. The result has disconcerting beauty and the added merit of enabling us to admire the lesser known melodies of this great genius, next to his universally celebrated masterpieces. Duparc, who stopped writing at thirty-nine (1884) and painfully survived himself for half a century, offers us the heart and soul of French Romanticism in this interpretation.