Fauré's Requiem, “funeral lullaby” written for enjoyment as the composer put it, has a unique place in history. It's soft, simple and modest poetry conveys moments of gentle contemplation and moving expressiveness which are entrusted to both the choir and the two soloists. With his Ensemble Aedes and the orchestra Les Siècles, Mathieu Romano is committed to render a Requiem faithful to its first performance. We hear thus the score in its original 1893 orchestration, where the organ plays a great role, and where Latin is pronounced in the French way as it used to be. The clearest articulation of the Ensemble Aedes then perfectly fits Éluard’s Figure humaine set to music by Francis Poulenc. We have never heard these sublime poems sung with such intelligibility before! Finally, the three Songs by Debussy elegantly close the album. Here again, the quality and clarity of the voices are stunning. Artistic director and founder of Ensemble Aedes has established himself as a magician of voices in a cappella scores. And voices ideally melt with the strings of Les Siècles under his baton. A 100% French cast in a 100% French music disc for a triple rediscovery. Essential! © Aparté

Bernard Coulais, who is admired for his scores for Winged Migration and Microcosmos, is again showing his resourcefulness in using instruments that are available to him. The soundtrack for the popular European film Les Choristes combines songs, sung by the boys' choir in the story, and regular soundtrack music to accompany the action of the film. Christophe Barratier, the film's director and a classical guitarist, wrote the main theme of the film, "Cerf-Volant," which is woven into the first track "Les Choristes." But Coulais composed and arranged most of Les Choristes' score. Themes from the songs are woven into underscore tracks, which are written along the lines of scores by Rachel Portman or Danny Elfman, and they demonstrate Coulais' facility with instrumental and vocal color. Affecting melodic material is tied to rhythmic accompaniments, primarily using strings and light woodwinds, with brass and percussion providing reinforcement at times. Other tracks add the choir or harp, piano, or celesta to the mix. The opening "Les Choristes" is similar to Fauré's Pavane, with a soloist singing with the accompaniment of the choir and pizzicato strings. "Action Réaction" is an adagio for strings, beginning in unsettling dissonances and ending in dark unison. Songs written for the film have memorable melodies, easy lyrics and generally easy harmonies, perfect for a chorus of schoolboys (not to mention soundtrack sales). These include a very brief, jolly arrangement of a folk song about a legendary highwayman, "Compere Guilleri." "In Memoriam" tests the boys' part-singing skills with its frequent passing dissonances in its harmonies, which remind you of Mozart's choral writing. The boys are not always pitch perfect or together, but then they shouldn't be, as they are portraying a group of boys just beginning music lessons. Nor do they sound like a crystalline English boys' choir, but the unpolished dimension of their voices blends well with the rich orchestral writing. While there are a few tracks that obviously are film music and do not quite stand up by themselves, the soundtrack as a whole is charming and listenable, with an appeal of its own that should attract more than just fans of the film.© TiVo

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With his ensemble Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon has written the listing for this album in the form of a "pastiche" of a Mass for the Dead, a Requiem both sacred and profane. While it is a long way from having all the defining traits, it does possess all the outlines: Introit, Kyrie, Gradual, Sequence, Offertory, In Paradisum... The idea came about after a recent discovery, in the Bibliothèque Nationale of an anonymous requiem mass from the 18th century, in which the writer constructed a "parody" based on musical extracts from Castor and Pollux and the Fêtes de Paphos by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Note that the term "parody" doesn't necessarily imply satire or mockery: it refers to the practice of taking up older music and setting new words to it. This fusion of sacred music (the mass) and profane music (lyrical tragedy), a common practice during the Enlightenment, was a procedure that Pichon wanted to take up. In French society at the time, when Catholicism was the norm, where the political system was monarchical rule by divine right, the representation of ancient pagan Hell on theatrical stages seemed to betray a fascination in the beliefs of the ancients. And so this programme melds together pagan fable with a Christian imaginary, where Hell takes on different faces. It is the place of unjust and eternal torment, a place of privation where a couple is separated, one half kept in Hades. But, in the lyrical tragedy, Hell is also a place of perdition: obscure forces unleashed in Sabbath rites, a Satanic vision which unearths the darkest depths of the human soul... Stéphane Degout is the author of this tragedy, bringing together such varied characters as Phaedra, Pluto, and the Parcae. The composers whose music is put to use are Rameau and Gluck, with a single borrowing from Rebel: it would have been a shame not to mention his singular Chaos (taken from Éléments), which starts with a dissonant chord containing the seven notes of the scale of D minor. © SM/Qobuz

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The music on this album by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, keyboardist Christina Pluhar, and Pluhar's ensemble L'Arpeggiata might qualify as obscure, with composers ranging from the barely moderately known (Robert de Visée, Marin Marais) to all but unheard-of, except by specialists. Pluhar's aim might indeed be called specialized; she seeks to illustrate the role of the passacaglia in the French air de cour ("court air") of the 17th century. The air de cour is not a common subject for recordings in itself beyond French Baroque circles, but surprise, surprise; this is an album of great general appeal that landed on classical best-seller lists in early 2023. The key to its appeal is that Pluhar and Jaroussky cast an entirely new light on the music of the French court, which has the reputation of having the mood of a closed-in hothouse. The perception of the instrumental music of the era comes from the gloomy rooms of the film Tous les matins du monde: that of the vocal pieces from the recollections of anyone who has visited Versailles. The perceptions are not incorrect, but what Pluhar and Jaroussky show is that the French tradition was bending under breezes coming from the south in the form of the passacaglia, here given its original Spanish name of passacalle. This dance, as it did elsewhere, introduced virtuosity into the French instrumental tradition, and there are several impressive works by de Visée here, handled confidently by members of L'Arpeggiata. Even a vocal piece like Michel Lambert's Ma bergère est tendre et fidèle, with its conventional shepherdess text, takes on a new sensuousness. All the pieces are passacaglias or closely related to them, yet the variety of treatments ensures that the program never drags. Jaroussky is the star draw here, though in truth, it is Pluhar's show, and she lives up to her reputation for delivering compelling programs.© James Manheim /TiVo

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

After the very recent publication by tenor Nicolas Phan and pianist Myra Huang, this is another album dedicated to sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger that sheds more light on their talent. If Lili Boulanger’s work has been starting to emerge from obscurity in recent years, that of her sister Nadia’s has remained largely unknown, partly her own fault as she stopped writing after the premature passing of her sister, whose talent for writing she thought was superior. Nadia Boulanger instead forged a name for herself through education and the discovery of new works. This new recording produced in 2018 by the Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës duo in the enchanting Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice presents an altogether different programme and is opposite to the previous publication: with an emphasis on Nadia. There are nine of her melodies on offer here, as well as the Heures claires cycle that she wrote for four hands with pianist-composer Raoul Pugno to whom she was very close. The Quatre chants by Lili Boulanger reflect the infinite sadness which permeates the entire catalogue, small though it may be but intensely expressive nonetheless. Two new figures of French music in the wake of Gabriel Fauré that are rising in prominence. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Regular duet and two-piano partners, Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie have returned to the studio for this all-Debussy programme. The present album features duets written by the composer himself – such as the Petite suite, the Six épigraphes antiques, and the Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire, as well as a number of arrangements of his solo piano pieces (Première Arabesque, La Fille aux cheveux de lin, Ballade slave). The album ends with André Caplet’s monumental arrangement of Debussy’s best-known orchestral work, La Mer. Stripping the work of its orchestral colours, this two-piano version allows the listener to appreciate more easily Debussy’s ground-breaking harmonic innovation. The album was recorded in the concert hall at Snape Maltings, in Suffolk, using a pair of Bösendorfer 280 VC grand pianos. © Chandos