Stephane Varupenne - La Comedie-Francaise - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Accompanied by his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste, the countertenor Damien Guillon places his voice at the service of a programme of vocal pieces by the German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, a large part of whose output was destroyed in a fire at Rudolstadt Castle in 1735. Among the works that have come down to us are the two collections Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde, containing respectively fifty and twenty-five arias for one to four solo voices, instrumental ensemble and basso continuo. Most of the German texts of these pieces depict humankind at the mercy of an unpredictable and volatile destiny. Alongside natural phenomena such as storms, dark clouds and withered leaves, the poet also chooses the expression 'bloody comets' as a metaphor for torment and 'the distress of the heart'. In fact, the biggest comet of the seventeenth century appeared in Europe in 1680 contemporaries feared these celestial bodies, seeing them as bad omens.

Puccini / Tucker - Manon Lescaut Tucker [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/01/2009

This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comédie-Française and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance - hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 - acted and sung by the troupe of the Comédie-Française, who rise to all it's challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, 'Almost a century after it's premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of it's subversive power