Poulenc: Fêtes galantes (On voit des marquis sur des bicyclettes)

Another favourite of the Salzburg public was the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who besides her Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro also enjoyed repeated successes in Salzburg with her song recitals. In 1986, accompanied by Martin Katz, she offered a programme that knew no boundaries – ranging from the florid poesy of settings by Fauré and Strauss to Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, the moderate American Modernism of Charles Ives, Copland and Pasatieri, then to Canteloube’s French folk song adaptations. Schoenberg’s early cabaret songs served to round off the evening in ebullient fashion.

The larger-than-life Régine Crespin, made only one song recital record for Decca, of music by Schumann, Wolf, Debussy and Poulenc. This is the first time the entire recital has been made available on CD.

As her career progressed, Crespin became associated with certain roles – Kundry, Sieglinde, Brünnhilde, Tosca, the Marschallin – but she was prodigiously versatile, thanks to her years in the French provinces. An intelligent singer who understood how to make the texts count, Crespin also had tremendous success in non-operatic repertory. Her 1963 Decca recording, with conductor Ernest Ansermet, of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d'été and Ravel’s Shéhérazade, is regarded as among the best available. In its original French, her candid and entertaining autobiography is called La vie et l'amour d'une femme, which is also the French translation of Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben. Indeed, Lieder by Schumann and Wolf were important parts of her recital repertory, and she brought the same depth of meaning to their German texts as she did to her Wagnerian roles. Of course French, being her native language, evoked a most immediate and intimate response from this singer.

This release marks the launch of an Eloquence series of notable recitals of songs and opera arias by some of the great voices of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon.

The award-winning pairing of soprano Sandrine Piau and pianist Susan Manoff received unanimous critical acclaim for their previous recital disc Evocation, (V5063). On their new CD Après un rêve they perform a fascinating collection of songs by some of the greatest composers for the voice of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Richard Strauss, Fauré, Mendelssohn, Chausson, Poulenc, Britten and Vincent Bouchot.

After initially making her reputation in Baroque music alongside the likes of William Christie, Philippe Herreweghe, Christophe Rousset, and René Jacobs, Sandrine Piau now sings a broad repertoire reflected in her large discography. and she has now confirmed her position at the forefront of the new generation of French singers. Her Handel album with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques (E8928), was an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, and in 2007 she released an award-winning recital CD entitled Évocation (V5063), on which she was accompanied by the pianist Susan Manoff. Après un rêve demonstrates once again the strength of her musical relationship with Manoff, with whom she appears regularly at venues like the Carnegie Hall and the Wigmore Hall. Her solo discography for Naïve also includes a programme of Mozart opera arias with the Freiburger Barockorchester (V4932), and two recent bestselling Handel albums, duets with Sara Mingardo directed by Rinaldo Alessandrini (OP30483) and the solo album Between Heaven and Earth with Accademia Bizantina (OP30484).