Various Artists - My Playlist for Baking - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Ensemble Perspectives, an a cappella vocal quintet founded and directed by Geoffroy Heurard, creates programmes that blend the mainstream classical repertory with lesser-known composers and folk and pop songs. These pieces are sung in transcriptions 'tailor-made' for Perspectives, which works with world-renowned arrangers and composers of all aesthetic persuasions. The group's new album, entitled Playlist, allows today's ears to grasp the timeless threads that link Purcell to Brahms, a traditional song to an American song crooned by entire generations. A playful and inspired journey through the music of Purcell (Dido's Lament), Brahms, Ravel and Fauré, traditional songs such as Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and Frère Jacques, and songs by Charlie Chaplin (Smile), Michel Legrand (La Chanson de Maxence), Paul Simon (Mrs. Robinson and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover) and Tom Waits (Alice).

Agathe Backer Grondahl is one of the most interesting figures of Norwegian Romanticism. A friend of Edvard Grieg, she was an accomplished concert performer and gave recitals throughout Europe, before deafness, which struck her at the age of thirty, pushed her towards teaching and composition. In this field, her favorites were the voice and the piano, to which she offered miniatures of refined lyricism, in which the nature and landscapes of her native Norway are often the reflection of states of the soul. Her highly personal imagination, imbued with a Scandinavian melancholy that is both harsh and sensitive, permeates all the pieces brought together here by Karen Vourc'h and Anne Le Bozec.

This year sees the centenary of Estonian independence. One of the main figures in the 'national awakening' in the half-century that preceded independence was Karl August Hermann (1851-1909). Hermann was indefatigable he was a linguist, journalist, choir-leader, song-writer, historian, literary philologist, encyclopaedist and more. As a composer he is known only for his choral songs, but French pianist Nicolas Horvath has discovered the scores of his 26 surviving piano pieces. This first recording reveals them to be charming salon miniatures, blending echoes of Chopin and Grieg with the essence of Estonian folksong. Nicolas Horvath began his music studies at the Academie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco. Known for his untrammelled musical explorations, he is an enthusiastic promoter of contemporary music he has commissioned numerous works and collaborated with a number of leading contemporary composers, among them Valentin Silvestrov. He is also a rediscoverer of forgotten or neglected composers.