Angus & Julia Stone - A Book Like This - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Per Henrik Wallin - Tiveden [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/11/2002

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 it's glittering salons. For the composers of the time these provided a perfect 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.

The first notes of Snow are instantly transporting. The guitar is a scratchy, wooden memory laid over a moment of silence. The gently driving organ beat emerges and takes you with it, beginning the next enchanting journey from brother-sister duo, Angus and Julia Stone. InchRunning from the start, here we are again,Inch Julia sings. InchRunning from the start, here we go again,Inch comes her brother's reply. Plot-wise, Snow is yet another confident advance on a story which now accounts for over half a million album sales in Angus & Julia's homeland of Australia alone. The Sydney-born siblings produced and largely engineered it themselves, in Angus's cottage studio, Belafonté, in the Byron Bay hinterland.