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No doubt a companion piece to 1999's All the Way: A Decade of Song, On Ne Change Pas is a two-disc compendium of the other, mildly overlooked phase of Celine Dion's career: her performances sung entirely in her native tongue of Québecois French. While she soared up charts all over the globe with her hits sung in English, she also amassed quite a back catalog of hits ranging from dance-pop-friendly numbers to her familiar ground of passionate, melodramatic ballads. For those unfamiliar with this portion of her career (or for those who don't speak French), getting past the roadblock of not being able to understand the subject material will lead to a greater, more holistic appreciation of the depth and prolific output of her career in such a short span. At two discs, it's also a bit much Dion for anyone to swallow in one sitting, but on the plus side there are also a few new tracks, including her duet with Il Divo, "I Believe in You."© Rob Theakston /TiVo

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No doubt a companion piece to 1999's All the Way: A Decade of Song, On Ne Change Pas is a two-disc compendium of the other, mildly overlooked phase of Celine Dion's career: her performances sung entirely in her native tongue of Québecois French. While she soared up charts all over the globe with her hits sung in English, she also amassed quite a back catalog of hits ranging from dance-pop-friendly numbers to her familiar ground of passionate, melodramatic ballads. For those unfamiliar with this portion of her career (or for those who don't speak French), getting past the roadblock of not being able to understand the subject material will lead to a greater, more holistic appreciation of the depth and prolific output of her career in such a short span. At two discs, it's also a bit much Dion for anyone to swallow in one sitting, but on the plus side there are also a few new tracks, including her duet with Il Divo, "I Believe in You."© Rob Theakston /TiVo

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To say that André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's 1784 comic opera, Richard Coeur de Lion, has a lot to answer for is something of an understatement, when it was its popular Act I air, “O Richard, O my King”, which in 1789 accidentally brought about one of the defining moments of the French Revolution: the air is sung by the imprisoned King Richard's knights who want to free him, and one night in 1789 it became the song French officers chose to sing to King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette under house arrest at Versailles after the couple turned up to greet the officers at a banquet thrown in the Royal Opera House; which in turn got interpreted by the Paris press as an anti-revolutionary act, leading to the palace being stormed and the royal couple taken away, never to return. Add the fact that Grétry was none other than Marie-Antoinette's favourite composer, and the opera was an obvious choice for the Royal Opera House's 250th anniversary season. Plus, the October 2019 production under the direction of Hervé Niquet was a wonderful one: fizzing with vivacious energy and fun, nailing its grandeur and intimacy in equal measure, all with just the right dose of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, and from a no-exceptions superb cast of young talent - headed up by tenors Rémy Mathieu as Richard and Reinoud Van Mechelen as Blondel - supported by an on-fire Le Concert Spirituel. So, although with this live recording you don't get to enjoy the production's sumptuous late eighteenth century stage sets and concerts, the music making was of a level for it all still to be leaping out of the stereo regardless. What's more, the polished, immediate engineering has done a magnificent job of capturing the theatre's acoustics, meaning you really do feel as if you're sat there in the theatre's best seats. Then, while one might imagine that non-French speakers may get less out of the audio alone, given that the opera's action moves forwards not via sung recitatives but instead spoken texts, the reality is that the vim and melodious tones with which those spoken lines are dispatched actually amounts to a sort of music in itself. In short, thank goodness they snuck this one in before Covid, because it's a life-affirming triumph. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

No doubt a companion piece to 1999's All the Way: A Decade of Song, On Ne Change Pas is a two-disc compendium of the other, mildly overlooked phase of Celine Dion's career: her performances sung entirely in her native tongue of Québecois French. While she soared up charts all over the globe with her hits sung in English, she also amassed quite a back catalog of hits ranging from dance-pop-friendly numbers to her familiar ground of passionate, melodramatic ballads. For those unfamiliar with this portion of her career (or for those who don't speak French), getting past the roadblock of not being able to understand the subject material will lead to a greater, more holistic appreciation of the depth and prolific output of her career in such a short span. At two discs, it's also a bit much Dion for anyone to swallow in one sitting, but on the plus side there are also a few new tracks, including her duet with Il Divo, "I Believe in You."© Rob Theakston /TiVo

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