Choeur d'Enfants de la Monnaie - La Revanche de l'Arbre - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Produced by Jean-Baptiste Mersiol and Jacques Viret, Emeritus Professor of Musicology at the University of Strasbourg and a Gregorian chant specialist, this 3-album set highlights historic recordings dating from 1930, restored to a sound quality that is almost contemporary and gathered together for the first time in their entirety, and with their original running order. Solesmes Abbey was then the world's great specialist in Gregorian palaeography, and it's chants aroused an admiration that was unanimous and went beyond musicological considerations. A genuine cornerstone of Western music, the universal splendor of this monodic singing with a thousand-year history is invaluable evidence that grace is obtained through beauty.

Music for children plays an important role in Miloslav Kabelac's artistic oeuvre. Especially in the early days after the communist coup in 1948, the composer devoted himself to this genre 'I regard composing for children as a 'touchstone' not only for all creative abilities, but also for the human qualities of the composer. That is why I take this work as seriously and as importantly as any otherInch. In his music, Kabelac creates powerful atmospheric images with a playful sensitivity for language, some of which is highly onomatopoeic. His serious engagement with children's works is once again evident in the fact that Kabelac repeatedly quoted motifs and melodies from children's works in larger symphonic works.

Nothing is as it appears in the old English manor house of Bly. A new governess takes up her post and discovers that the children who are her new charges are under the influence of the ghosts of the previous governess and her depraved lover. As one disturbing event unfolds after another, the questions become more pressing What horrors happened here before her arrival? Are the children innocent? Do we really see what we are seeing? Based on Henry James's strange ghost story, Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw is a psychological thriller in the form of a chamber opera. The Orchestre de la Monnaie, under the British conductor Ben Glassberg, took up this masterpiece in a staging which, despite the Covid crisis, received rave reviews. We now present a version recorded in studio conditions immediately after the performances. The two leading singers, Ed Lyon and Sally Matthews, are utterly convincing together they push the audience's imagination to unbearable levels of tension