On his third album as Christine and the Queens—but also using the new moniker Redcar—the artist now known simply as Chris isn't pushing boundaries so much as flying over them. "My journey with gender has always been tumultuous. It's raging right now, as I'm just exploring what is beyond this," he said in a May 2022 interview, around the time he announced his adoption of masculine pronouns. "A way to express it could be switching between they and she. I kind of want to tear down that system that made us label genders in such a strict way … I think the answer is to be flickery, fluid, escaping." That's also a pretty good description of his music, which is equally, and charmingly, hard to pin down. Opener "Ma bien aimée bye bye" finds Chris, as Redcar, adopting a chanteur's pose against the late-night cabaret sounds of slinky guitars and shimmering high-hat. Sung in a seamless mélange of French and English, it's a seductive goodbye but still, it's "my life till I die." (It completely fits Chris's estimation of the Redcar personality, which he has also called a "poetic and philosophical construction"—a very Bowie thing to say—as "suave and sophisticated.") While the last Christine and the Queens album leaned heavily into hard-edged '90s funk, here there are more references to the crisp-heavy bottom beats of Shannon-style '80s dance pop, especially on "la chanson du chevalier"—remarkable for its ethereally circling round-robin vocals, ranging from high and sweet ("the man I love") to a richer lead and sharp back-up—and Grace Jones-esque industrial rhythms. "Tu sais ce qu'il me faut" adopts Jones' unique binary of wild and controlled, while "Les âmes amantes" sounds like it's from another planet: liquid and layered. There's also dancefloor euphoria ("Looking for love"), powerful synth-heavy moments ("Les étoiles," aka the stars), airy sweetness ("rien dire") and an Annie Lennox cool breeze ("la clairefontaine"). A groovy eight-and-a-half-minute epic, "Combien de temps" samples electropop pioneer Gina X. "Je te vois enfin" sets up an intriguing mystery: "Oh-oh, my father I believe they have sinned," the lyrics translate to English. "It's impossible in your books not to sin." But Chris—Redcar—is perhaps most revealing on "Mémoire des ailes." The song is so clean and hymn-like, it sounds sacred, with vocals that completely envelop even as the music edgily stutters and shudders. "I'll teach you a game, I'll teach ya," he sings, at once a promise and a tease. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Parisian composer Jean Boyer’s Recueil d’airs à boire et danser from 1636 belongs to a genuinely French genre of drinking and dance songs, a more light-hearted offspring of the "Air de cour". The latter, a courtly secular strophic song, became one of the most important vocal genres in the first third of the seventeenth century in France. Among the many collections of chansons à boire et à danser of the time, Boyer’s are probably the most compelling, both rhythmically and harmonically, and the texts he chose to set to music are generally more refined than some of his contemporaries’. From the mere number of copies of most of these collections extant in many European libraries, we realize how well diffused and popular this type of repertoire was, while it has been left virtually untouched in the twenty-first century. © Ramée

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Produced by Boulawan and Therapy "2093," Avec le Coeur is the second album from French-Algerian R&B vocalist Kenza Farah. The 2008 double-album follow-up to Authentik includes the singles "Au Cœur de la Rue," "J'Essaie Encore," and "Désillusion du Ghetto" alongside collaborations with French hip-hop collective Psy 4 de la Rime, American duo Nina Sky, and Jamaican dancehall artist Busy Signal.© Jon O'Brien /TiVo

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Everyone thinks that they know Alceste by Lully, and yet this 1674 masterpiece has almost never been recorded in its entirety. Apart from the Malgoire version from 1975 with Bruce Brewer and Felicity Palmer, which is starting to become outdated, the real treat is a second versoin by the same Malgoire twenty years later with Jean-Philippe Lafont and Colette Alliot-Lugaz... And so we can only take our hats off to the new discographical opus from Christophe Rousset's Talens Lyriques, a lively and elegant reading which allows us to rediscover everything that was so innovative about this brilliant, effervescent Florentine, who would become a typical Versaillais, a courtesan and a wheeler-dealer. King Louis XIV - 36 years old, still with all his own teeth and a victorious war leader - could only feel flattered by the piece signed by Quinault: Alcide, who covets the beautiful Alceste (who has been promised to Admetus), is none other than Hercules himself - Louis XIV seeing himself in Hercules saving the beautiful Madame de Montespan from the clutches of her husband. To be sure, in this opera, Admetus/Hercules magnanimously hands Alceste, whom he has saved from hell, to her husband, while the poor Mr Montespan would end his career and his life exiled in Gascony... Honour intact. The Sun King loved the work, to the point that he commanded that rehearsals be held at Versailles. According to Madame de Sévigné, "The King declared that if he found himself in Paris when it was performed, he would go to see it every night." That being said, if Alceste suited the tastes of the court, it didn't do so well in Paris, where Lully's enemies, jealous of the extravagant privileges that he had won (the exclusive right to "have sung any whole piece in France, wither in French verse or in other languages, without the written permission of said Sir Lully, on pain of a ten thousand livre fine, and confiscation of theatres, equipment, decorations, costumes..."), heaped plot upon plot, while the gallant Mercury sang his little couplet: Dieu !  Le bel opéra ! Rien de plus pitoyable ! Cerbère y vient japper d'un aboi lamentable !  Oh ! Quelle musique de chien ! Oh ! Quelle musique du diable ! [Lord!/Fine opera!/There's nothing so pitiable!/Cerberus is yapping, his howls lamentable!/What doggish music!/What devilish music!]. Posterity would decide otherwise, and Rousset proved it triumphantly. © SM/Qobuz

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This may not rate as highly as her best mid-'60s recordings, which are less MOR-oriented. That stated, it's about as good as late-'60s MOR Continental pop gets, with tastefully imaginative orchestration, strong melodies, and sexy vocals. It's perhaps even sadder and more sentimental than was the norm for Francoise--she perpetually seems to be singing as though she's gazing out of a deserted chateau on a rainy afternoon. She largely forsakes original material here (although a couple cuts bear her writing credit), and offers fine, haunting French interpretations of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," and Phil Ochs' "There But for Fortune," and Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town."© Richie Unterberger /TiVo

Chief conductor of Les Siècles symphony orchestra, François-Xavier Roth has been revisiting French music from the beginning of the 20th century for several years now, taking care to honour both the original instruments and to find melodies that favour even greater clarity of timbre and attack. After his incredible recordings of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky’s first work (special mention to the superb complete version of L’Oiseau de feu), everyone naturally expected the conductor to perform Pelléas et Mélisande, the opera he conducted at the very beginning of his career which is particularly close to his heart.This new version of Debussy’s masterpiece was recorded on the 20th and 21st of March 2021 at the Opéra de Lille. As one might expect, the orchestra, which is present throughout the score (it conveys emotion and feeling in the style of Wagner and Mussorgsky) is given pride of place by François-Xavier Roth, who transforms this strange opera into some sort of secular oratorio.As for the singers, it’s a real treat to hear French voices in the two main roles. Vannina Santoni’s portrayal of Mélisande is refreshing, and she makes the character less naïve than previous interpretations have done. She asserts herself in the forest scene at the beginning of the piece and later, in the final scene, she confidently declares to Pelléas "I only lie to your brother!". Pelléas is personified by a tenor voice and not by a light baritone as intended by Debussy (in fact, he sounds much like Eric Tappy in Armin Jordan’s beautiful version of Erato). Thanks to Julien Behr’s stellar performance, the character comes across as fragile and overwhelmed by his ill-fated destiny. Alexandre Duhamel’s touching portrayal of Golaud reveals a gritty character who is undeniably relatable, despite being consumed by an ardent jealousy that ultimately causes him to murder his younger brother and, indirectly, Mélisande. Jean Teitgen is a less dogmatic Arkel than usual. Literally and figuratively blind, it’s as though he has no understanding of what’s happening within the castle and is unable to escape the confines of his own, outdated idealism. Marie-Ange Todorovitch does a good job playing the difficult and often overlooked role of Geneviève, whose appearances, though infrequent, are pivotal.Finally, it should be noted that François-Xavier Roth uses the definitive and complete version of the opera, which includes the few bars that fell victim to censorship in 1902. As such, viewers can rediscover the confronting dialogue between Golaud and his son Yniold, whom he uses to spy on Mélisande when she’s in her bedroom. “What about the bed? Are they close to the bed?” asks Golaud in the height of his jealousy. Thanks to its poetic dimension and fantastic cast, this new version easily rivals those by Désormière, Inghelbrecht, Ansermet, Armin Jordan, Karajan and Abbado. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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Cuban-born American soprano Lisette Oropesa is a newcomer to the world of opera singers, releasing an album devoted to the French operas of Rossini and Donizetti. Unusually, she was thrust into the public eye when a member of the audience sang an excerpt from La Traviata with her during a recital at the Verdi Festival in Parma, Italy, in 2021. The video immediately went viral around the world.The young singer has become a real star since her debut at the MET in New York, where she played Susanna in The marriage of Figaro at the age of 22, and then went on to receive great success at the Paris Opera in Abduction from the Seraglio (Konstanze), Rigoletto (Gilda) and The Barber of Seville (Rosina). She dedicates this brilliant recital with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra (conducted by Corrado Rovaris) to the ‘Grande Boutique’, the nickname given by Verdi to the Paris Opera.There are excerpts from Rossini's Siège de Corinthe, Guillaume Tell and Comte Ory alongside Donizetti’s Les Martyrs, Lucia di Lammermoor and La Fille du regiment. The latter concludes the album with his famous Salut à la France, which was patriotically performed on bank holiday evenings on the 14th of July in many French opera houses. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 28th December 1940 – the start of the German occupation – this aria was sung by Lily Pons and followed by La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) sung by soloists and chorus. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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