A serpent woman haunts Cecile McLorin Salvant's dreams on her boldly realized seventh album, 2023's Mélusine. Inspired by the European folktale most famously detailed by 14th century French writer Jean d'Arras, Mélusine tells the tale of a shapeshifting maiden, half-serpent/half-woman, whose righteous anger takes on ever-more dualistic meanings under Salvant's dynamic musical sway. Having been lavished with accolades, including several Grammy Awards for her clarion, swinging jazz and French chanson-infused albums, Salvant has increasingly leaned into the more stylistically experimental and personal aspects of her artistry. It was an approach she took to new levels with 2022's Ghost Song, performing her poetic originals alongside unexpected covers of songs by Kate Bush and Sting. Centered on the title track, which she composed during the Ghost Song sessions, Mélusine is a gorgeously realized production. Although there are some English lyrics here, the album features the most French Salvant has sung on record. Thankfully, she offers translations of each song with a sentence that also highlights how each track illuminates the story.The album also finds Salvant (who produced the album with Tom Korkidis) pulling together all of her disparate influences, from her moody cabaret jazz reading of Charles Trenet's "La Route Enchantee" to her playfully mischievous interpretation of the 14th century composition "Dites Moi Que Je Suis Belle," the latter of which is done in dancerly duet with djembe percussion master Weedie Braimah. Along with Braimah, she's joined throughout by several longtime associates including pianists Sullivan Fortner and Aaron Diehl, bassists Paul Sikivie and Luques Curtis, drummers Kyle Pool and Obed Calvaire, and saxophonist Godwin Louis. Shifting the line-up track to track, Salvant offers inspired forays into '70s sci-fi-inspired Canadian musical theater ("Petite Musique Terrienne" from Starmania), the dramatic French pop of Veronique Sanson ("Le Temps est Assassin"), and an Afro-Latin take on 12th century troubadour Almuc Castelnau's "Dame Iseut" that Salvant sings in both Occitan and Haitian Creole, languages that underline her own rich dual heritage. There's even a synthesizer-accented take on Michel Lambert's haunting 1660 air de coeur "D'un Feu Secret" that sounds like electronic composer Suzanne Ciani, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Modern Jazz Quartet giving a Baroque court performance. Her originals here are just as stylistically wide-ranging as she pulls together jazz and Haitian compas rhythms on "Doudou," accompanies herself on analog synth on "Wedo," and weaves a dreamy overlay of vocals and electric piano on "Aida." It almost goes without saying that Salvant's voice is utterly sublime on Mélusine, rich with an earthy jazz warmth on one song and shimmering with a brightly attenuated operatic resonance on another. There's also a feeling that for her, the story of a half-serpent half-woman is in keeping with her life as a Black woman raised in Miami by a Haitian father and French mother. Whether it's with the themes of romantic heartbreak and bodily autonomy, or the global boundary-pushing musicality at play on Mélusine, Salvant's work is transcendent.© Matt Collar /TiVo

The main attraction of the orchestra Les Siècles and its conductor François-Xavier Roth is its use of period instruments from around 1900, the time period in which the group specializes. One could hardly ask for a better demonstration record (as audiophiles used to call them) than this take on Maurice Ravel's L'Heure espagnole, an edgy, rather tawdry but undeniably funny little opera about the extramarital escapades of a clockmaker's wife, complete with excellent satirical characterizations of her two lovers. The opera receives a pitch-perfect performance here from a quintet of younger singers, who deliver the kind of dry, close-to-spoken singing Ravel wanted. Even better, though, is the orchestral sound, where the opera's large contingent of winds, brass, and percussion displays the sound of Les Siècles at its most vivid. The score calls for trios of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, and these all have a tangier sound than modern instruments provide. The program ends with Boléro, and this, too, stands out from among the hundreds or thousands of other recordings on the market. Ravel had very fixed ideas about how he wanted the work to sound, and he wrangled with Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the premiere in New York, about it: it should be played absolutely straight, with no variation in tempo and little expression. Notwithstanding the connotations that became attached to the work later on, he viewed it as an abstract work, and that is exactly what it becomes in Roth's bracing reading. Listeners who have been wanting to sample Roth's work with this orchestra are enthusiastically encouraged to try this release, which made classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

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After her triumph with the album "Offenbach Colorature", Jodie Devos has chosen to follow in the footsteps of one of her compatriots, the Belgian coloratura soprano Marie Cabel (1827 -1885), who at the age of twenty-six scored a phenomenal success in Adolphe Adam’s opéra-comique Le Bijou perdu, which she premiered in Paris. She then took on a more dramatic role in Halévy’s Jaguarita l’Indienne, whose great Invocation with chorus ("À moi ma cohorte!") again hit the bullseye in a run of 124 performances over just a few months. Cabel enjoyed one hit after another, in Auber’s Manon Lescaut and La Part du diable, Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du Nord and Le Pardon de Ploërmel, Victor Massé’s Galathée, and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été by Ambroise Thomas, who in 1866 gave her the biggest role of her career: Philine in Mignon, based on Goethe. In partnership with the musicologists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, who have resurrected and edited all these unjustly forgotten rarities, and Pierre Bleuse conducting the Brussels Philharmonic and the Flemish Radio Choir, Jodie Devos pays tribute to this star of the nineteenth century, whose audacity and sense of mischief she undoubtedly shares! © Alpha Classics

Marc-Antoine Charpentier's David et Jonathas, setting the action-packed biblical story of Saul, has not often been recorded. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants fired the first shot in the late '90s, and there have been a few other attempts, but the work crosses categories -- not really an oratorio, with a limited role for the chorus, but not an opera in the conventional sense -- and this may have hurt it at the box office. The Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles specializes in music of this period, and Charpentier is certainly right up this outfit's alley. The recording was made at Versailles, but its strength is actually that it reproduces the circumstances of its origin, which occurred elsewhere, at a Jesuit school in Paris. The music was intended to alternate with scenes from a play; here, conductor Olivier Schneebeli opts for declaimed readings from poetry by the 17th century writer Antoine Godeau. The work was written for young singers, not only in the children's choir but also a child in the lead role of Jonathas, and Natacha Boucher has a great deal of flair here, certainly sounding like a future star. All the singers are either children or male adults. The music is continuous, and Charpentier's writing sometimes falls into melody or recitative but is most often somewhere in between, shifting naturally with the text. Some of it is quite vocally spectacular, however; sample "Quelle importune voix vient importune mon repos," Act I, scene 4, with its bass line descending to Russian-liturgical depths. Although the opera has five acts and a prologue, it goes by quickly; no doubt with the original use in mind, Charpentier's concept is compact. What is most attractive about the work is how opposite it is to the splendor and formality of Lully; the role of the chorus is limited, and the focus is squarely on the characters. Baroque opera lovers will find something new and intriguing here.© James Manheim /TiVo

Produced by Giorgio Gomelsky, notable for his work with the Yardbirds, Brian Auger, and Magma, this relatively early Gong project is a great representation of the Daevid Allen-era Gong. Though not as intricate as its follow-up companion piece, Angel's Egg, The Flying Teapot is more of a true prog/space rock outing, where hippie-trippy lyrics and space whispering abound, as evidenced in the opening track, "Radio Gnome Invisible." The following cut, "Flying Teapot," is the sprawling highlight of the album. At times reminiscent of some early Weather Report jams, though not as jazzy, the tune features prominent bass, standout percussion/drums, and space whispering courtesy of Smyth. Improvisational groaning and percussion bring this jam to a close. "Pothead Pixies" is a fun pop (pot?) tune which probably received very little, if any, airplay due to the lyrics, followed by Blake's brief synth interlude, "The Octave Doctors and the Crystal Machine." "Zero the Hero and the Witch's Spell," another lengthy composition, features Malherbe's sax playing, which, at this early point in the Gong evolution, is credited for most of the jazz sounds heard in the music (remember, Pierre Moerlen has yet to join the band). This cut becomes quite heavy near its end before making a clever transition into the final cut, "Witch's Song/I Am Your Pussy." Here you hear Smyth's strange, sexually explicit lyrics, which she embellishes with ethereal voicings and cackling. This, combined with a jazzy sax from Malherbe and some very groovy musical lines near the closing, make for another fun tune.© David Ross Smith /TiVo

Jules Verne was the inspiration for Offenbach’s opéra-féerie, premiered in 1875. The Parisian craze for this type of musical extravaganza stemmed from its impressive stage effects: for Le Voyage dans la Lune, two ballets and some twenty sets took the audience from the Earth to the Moon, successively recreating the Paris Observatory, a working blast furnace and the crater of an erupting volcano. The piece is studded with zany characters and imaginary places: a lunar landscape, a glass palace, mother-of-pearl galleries, etc. The producers even borrowed a dromedary and an ostrich from the zoo at the Jardin d’Acclimatation! To accompany this theatrical display, Offenbach composed a series of colourful, picturesque hit numbers, wittily and energetically performed here by a team of enthusiastic soloists. The Chœur et Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie are placed under the subtle and precise direction of Pierre Dumoussaud. © Bru Zane

Remembering Gounod as just a masterful composer of great French operas, it’s easy to forget that he also wrote, among many various pieces of work, close to one hundred and fifty melodies throughout is long and rich career. Surprisingly, almost one third of these pages were written in English (during his years in London, between 1870 and 1874), about fifteen of them are in Italian, as well as a few in Spanish and German. Most of them of course are in French, among which Tassis Christoyannis and Jeff Cohen selected twenty-four gems, a comprehensive array ranging from his very first published melody – his Où voulez-vous aller from 1839, the year of his Prix de Rome! – to his À une jeune Grecque of the utmost maturity, in 1884. The composer explored all of the styles he held dear, with all the eclecticism he’s famous for: French romanticism, German Lied, orientalism, old-fashioned archaic writing… Gounod was particularly sensitive to the words’ meaning as much as their sound, the back and forth of verses and the variety of periods, and excelled in finding a melodic movement to perfectly fit the inflexions of pronunciation, the expressive flow of speech and setting the perfect phrasing for an eloquent result. With him, unlike his illustrious elder Berlioz, music served the words, carried them and elevated them if possible. Let’s discover this beautiful pearl rosary, made of works we would love to hear in recital more often. © SM/Qobuz

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Michel Sardou is one of France's most popular singers, known both for his songs of love and ballads of social commentary. In 2006, Sardou was nearing 60, had been performing for over 40 years, and was hinting he might retire, but anyone who expected him to put the brakes on his recording career got a big surprise with his album Hors Format. Hors Format is an expansive two-disc set featuring 23 new songs from Sardou, including 17 tunes co-written by the vocalist himself.© Mark Deming /TiVo