Fauré: Soir Op. 83 No. 2

After the Spanish composer Albéniz settled in Paris, he became part of an inner circle of composers including Chausson, Dukas, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. All of the works on this CD were written between 1895 and 1909, the year Albéniz died. They show a great variety of styles and colours and it is sublime music.

Dame Felicity Lott, revered British soprano, says of this CD:

“ Summertime also has many of my favourite songs in English, French and German. We made the CD at a friend`s house, and the sessions were so relaxed, with no London traffic to cause endless retakes! It`s a real mix of beautiful songs of all kinds, on a summer theme. I chose songs I loved, from Gershwin to Christopher Robin….

Three centuries of song are represented here, and, as BBC Music Magazine's Hilary Finch put it “such is the skill of Johnson's programming that the entire recital seems to be a single, sustained exhalation of rapture and reflection”

She went on to say:

The upper reaches of Lott's still gleaming soprano inhabit Barber's 'Shining Night' and Fauré's Clair de lune'. And her robust English version of Schubert's 'Who is Sylvia?' finds an irresistible companion in Arne's 'Where the Bee Sucks', with its veritable midsummer night's dream of an accompaniment from Johnson. The artists' palpable sense of joy and well-being gathers momentum as they visit Berlioz's 'L'île inconnue' and as they sing on the water with Schubert. . . . And Lott and Johnson know well that the only way to face sentiment is to acknowledge its own integrity, as they do when they listen to Haydn Wood's 'Little Brown Bird' and eavesdrop with Fraser-Simson on Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

This CD features songs from a great variety of composers - Gershwin, Barber, Cole Porter, Bernstein, Brahms, Schubert, Arne, Schumann, Berlioz, and many more. A full 29 tracks of summer-themed songs!

French ‘lightness’ and ‘charm’? Germanic ‘profundity’ and ‘gravity’?

These words sum up in a nutshell what we are offered by the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Rouen conducted by Oswald Sallaberger for their first collaboration with Zig-Zag Territoires.

On the programme: Gabriel Fauré’s symphonic suite Pelléas et Mélisande; then a selection of his songs in their orchestral versions, performed by Karine Deshayes (Victoire de la Musique for opera singer of the year 2011).

Finally the Siegfried Idyll of Richard Wagner, probably the most delicately poetic of his works, far removed from the grandiosity of his music dramas.

“A little more than ten years ago I discovered the late works of Gabriel Fauré, and particularly the sumptuous cycle La Chanson d’Ève. A decade later, I still traverse with the same pleasure the intensely expressive luxuriance of these songs and their exhilarating harmonic density. La Chanson d’Ève, like Le Jardin clos and the other songs we wished to include in this recording, expresses an extreme refinement capable of going straight to the heart of the matter, sometimes with a disarming simplicity, but invariably underpinned by a flawless structure. They are among the works to which I feel very close today, at once nourished by them and inspired by the urge to share the profound enjoyment they give me. After ten years of complicity with the pianist Hélène Lucas, the time has come to invest our pleasure, our enthusiasm and the end result of all our hard work in a disc which is both a challenge and, above all, an immense source of delight for us.” Karine Deshayes