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This budget-priced three disc set focuses on French vocalist and songwriter Alain Souchon's earliest recordings for RCA. Souchon was with RCA from 1974 through 1984, when he signed with Virgin International. While it's true Souchon is now recognized more for his later material, the genius of his collaboration with producer and co-writer Laurent Voulzy, was on full display in these earlier sides. This set contains 42 tracks compiled from seven albums. Scattered among the hits are rarities, live cuts, and songs from film soundtracks.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

French singer/songwriter and icon Alain Souchon returns with Ecoutez d'Ou Ma Peine Vient, his first album in four years. While hardly prolific, Souchon -- who is revered in France -- makes up for it with his usual consistency. There is nothing in this album that Souchon fans have not heard before, but plenty that they will love to hear again. First and foremost is, of course, Souchon's trademark lightness of touch which dominates every lyric and music. Hints of folk music, music hall, or some faux ethnic touches serve as a discreet background for a new batch of musings on life as it is and as it was. Nostalgia is a key element of Souchon's work, here saluting wagon-lit trains, the Morocco of his childhood (a duet in French and Arabic with "Hindi Zahra"), or simply the sense of life passing through the character of a sentient 64-year-old man. Souchon is equally seen on pointing out that he is also in synch with the times, both with his choice of vocabulary and with a series of sympathetic portraits of the exclus, those living on the margins of contemporary French society, mostly of immigrant origins. His lyrics on the subject, however, sound a bit naive, compared with either his ironic take on the French new bourgeoisie, or his bittersweet melancholy when dealing with more personal issues, as in the tender title track. A true French intellectual (songs include a poem by Louis Aragon set to music, and a tribute to the novels of Françoise Sagan), Souchon's songs always reveal his effort to be, above all, intelligent rather than passionate, and his penchant for witty wordplay. To balance things out, his fragile voice adds a delicate, emotional edge to lyrics that on their own may come off as a bit strained. Longtime collaborator Laurent Voulzy joins only for one track, the rather disappointing "Popopo," while David McNeil and the singer's son, Pierre Souchon, co-wrote a few of the songs. Other than that, Ecoutez d'Ou Ma Peine Vient is, in every sense, 100-percent an Alain Souchon album. The standout here: the prescient "Parachute Doré," a satirical calypso about a financial executive who flees to the Caribbean to live in luxury after the national economy collapsed -- written about a year before such stuff became reality.© Mariano Prunes /TiVo

For his last season at the helm of the Opéra de Bordeaux, Marc Minkowski—always keen to conduct forgotten works which have, in some way, marked the history of music—sets his sights on Robert le Diable, Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera which was a true social phenomenon in 19th century France. The Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique française has followed suit by officially publishing this concert version, which also features some excellent vocal soloists. Admired by Balzac, Sand and Dumas, this ‘grand opéra à la française’ (great French opera) faded into obscurity after the First World War. Its creator became a sort of pariah – one met with both condescension and mockery. With its ‘seductive and haunting melodies’ (Alexandre Dratwicki), it’s nevertheless a flamboyant work that greatly inspired his contemporaries, such as Verdi, who referred to it in La Traviata. The extraordinary impact of Robert le Diable was such that it was performed a great many times on every continent. A true one-man band, Marc Minkowski has invested himself entirely in this undertaking, learning this vast score practically by heart and conducting it with his usual power and conviction. The international cast is full of surprises thanks to their deep understanding of the work and the protagonists’ fantastic pronunciation. This new release, to the credit of the Bru Zane label, revitalises our knowledge of this work that’s scarcely mentioned in specialised dictionaries. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus & Hermione of 1673 was arguably the first true French opera, telling a tragic story (Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault called it a tragédie en lyrique), employing Italian-style recitatives, and collecting the varied music and dance forms of Louis XIV's opulent court into a coherent narrative that at once celebrated Louis (he is conflated with Cadmus of Thebes) and moved beyond the ceremonial nature of earlier French dramatic music. It's a sprawling work, with five acts, an overture, and a sizable Prologue with its own overture; highlights include a dragon that eats Africans, a monster snake, and a full complement of Greek gods and goddesses. Realization of the work has, until now, been beyond the means of early music performance groups, and this is the world premiere recording of the opera, made in 2019 and based on a 2008 performance at Versailles Palace by some of the same performers. The leader is Vincent Dumestre, conducting the Le Poème Harmonique orchestra and the vocal ensembles Aedes. The forces are large enough to capture the splendor of the music (thankfully, no one-voice-per-part techniques here), and Dumestre is alert to the huge variety of musical devices Lully brings to bear on his story; there are dances, big choruses, bagpipes, and much more. Cadmus & Hermione may be a difficult work to bring to life for modern audiences, but Dumestre keeps things moving along and probably comes as close as anyone could. Of course, anyone interested in the life of the French court in the 17th century will find this an essential acquisition that will keep giving and giving. © TiVo

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

Verdi considered Shakespeare’s Macbeth to be "one of the greatest creations of man". The opera’s unbroken dramatic line, incisive libretto and range of expression from the comic to the sublime, made it a work that was way ahead of its time. Verdi explores unusual theatrical characters with Macbeth, the darkness of which resonated with his desire to convey Shakespeare’s brutal realism in a visionary masterpiece that would only be fully appreciated by the mid-1900s. Macbeth is performed here in its rarely heard 1865 French language version. © Dynamic

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The term "brunette" refers not only to a young woman with brown hair, but also to a musical form that was highly fashionable from the late seventeenth century to the early eighteenth. The genre evolved from the air de cour, extremely popular in France since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The compositional process, however, remained very similar: to write a short, tender song, dealing with themes of love or nature, which could be sung alone or accompanied by a harmonic instrument. The late seventeenth century also saw the appearance of an instrument that soon became a favourite of composers and amateur musicians: the German flute, now called the traverso or Baroque flute. In this new programme, tenor Reinoud van Mechelen, flautist Anna Besson and A nocte temporis present an anthology of airs and brunettes ranging from the most touching song to the heartiest drinking song (air à boire). © Alpha Classics